The Sublime in Everyday Life Psychoanalytic and Aesthetic Perspectives

Notions of the sublime are most often associated with the extraordinary, and include the intra-psychic, high-cultural and exceptional occurrences of elation and exaltation as part of the experience. Using psychoanalytic and aesthetic theories, this book aims to revitalise the sublime by re-evaluating its significance for contemporary life and, in a unique and fascinating endeavour, opens up a space that explores the sublime in the ordinary, everyday and quotidian.

Through the exploration of familiar (i.e. love, death, art and nature) and unfamiliar (pornography, education and politics) threads of the sublime experience, this book posits the sublime as invoking an ordinary human response which contains minute, inter-psychic, inclusive and even mass-media cultural elements, and carries within it therapeutic and political potential. It explores loving and caring, as well as hateful, traumatic and destructive encounters with the sublime, demonstrating how it can overflow and destabilise our psychological and social symbolic structures and expose their fictional and constructed nature, but also shows it as something we can engage with in order to re-create and heal ourselves, above and beyond what any 'given' form of reality can offer us.

Demonstrating the urgent need to understand the sublime as something that is immanent in our everyday life, a source of energy and inspiration that can be invoked to support our mental health and well-being, this book will be of great interest to psychoanalysts, psychotherapists and art therapists, as well as scholars and students of philosophy and popular culture.

Introduction

Anastasios Gaitanidis and Polona Curk

1 Psychoanalytic Fictions of the Creative Sublime

Tessa Adams and Anastasios Gaitanidis

2 The Silence of Ajax: Reading Longinus Against Himself

Justin Murray

3 The Sublime in the Everyday: How Theatre Crafts Art out of the Ordinary

Anna Seymour

4 Ordinary Idolatrous Pleasure and the Fateful Fashioning of an Adolescent Boy

Onel Brooks

5 Experiencing the Sublime through Encounters with the Real

Joseph Newirth

6 Wisdom through Desire: When Truth Meets Love as a Sublime Event

Anastasios Gaitanidis

7 ‘How Extraordinary That You Should Exist’: On Playing and Experience of Truth

Polona Curk

8 The Sublime and the Feminine Jouissance: A Fantastic Woman, The Untamed and St Teresa

Agnieszka Piotrowska

9 The Lure of Humiliation: Sublime Aspects to Success in the School Mathematics Classroom

Girish Jivaji

10 The Sublime in Catch-22 as Bridge between Post-Modern Literature and Psychoanalysis

Chris Vlachopoulos

11 The Diogenes Complex: Sublime Living in Irrational Times

Daniel Rubinstein

Anastasios Gaitanidis is a Senior Lecturer in Counselling Psychology at Regent’s University London. He is also a Psychoanalytic Psychotherapist in private practice and has published several articles and books on psychoanalysis, sociology and culture.

Polona Curk works on intersubjective affective influence and mental health. She has published on autonomy, destructiveness and affective equality in intimate relationships, on the psychoanalytic concept of narcissism, and the notion of insight in mental health.