Main description:

"Why are we so fascinated by beauty?" is a question many of us have asked ourselves, as have many who came before us. This book investigates the moment of ecstatic solitude in which everyone can experience emotions through films, works of art or natural phenomenon, when, even if for a "magic" instant, we feel "alive" and masters of our own Self.

Expanding from the author's personal experience, this book is a series of applied psychoanalytic essays on film, literature, and aesthetic pleasure. It explores the complexity of loss and mourning, destructivity, perversion, and revenge, as well as an exploration of what can facilitate transformation and how to lead a blocked healing process back to motion.

This fascinating and insightful book will be of interest to psychoanalysts, psychologists, teachers and students, and all those with an interest in psychoanalysis and the arts.

Contents:

Series Editor's Foreword Preface Acknowledgments Introduction: Why Facing Beauty and Loss by Paola Golinelli 01. Why Do We Write? Psychoanalytic Writing and Fiction 02. On the Idea of Beauty: Standing Before the Venus de Milo 03. Traumatic States of the Self 04. In Search of the Lost Father 05. Feminine Representations on the Screen 06. Love and the Internet: Her by Spike Jonze 07. A Brief Incursion in the Theatre: Freud or the Interpreter of Dreams 08. A Tribute to Bernardo Bertolucci