ABSTRACT
In the first three chapters I made it pretty clear that I view "reality" in analytic treatment more as an aesthetic concept than as a philosophic one. I commented in chapter 1 that I believe a therapist will enjoy the work most if he has a feel for the "aesthetics of incompletion." Here I follow Levenson (1972), who used the concept of aesthetics "not in the vulgate sense of beauty and light but more precisely, meaning sensitivity and perception, that is, concerned with the forms and organization of sensory experience, rather than content and meaning" (p. 211). This perspective is deeply related to my sensibility about the nature of reality, so much so that, were I a painter rather than a therapist, I suspect I would be an impressionist. So, at the risk of being dogmatic about reality, what I essentially discuss in this chapter is the idea that reality comes in shades of felt intensity. Reality has a gradient of intensity. Sometimes what is real to the patient so excludes the analyst's intersubjective participation that it borders on what I called in chapter 2 objectification of the self and other. At other times, when analyst and patient are able to come to a new, vital, and shared understanding of some hitherto sequestered part of the patient, they also share a feeling that the newly arrived part of the patient is "really real."
