The Aesthetics of Experience

James Tobin, Ph.D.

Key Points

• Psychotherapy may help patients develop an aesthetic relationship with experience: the capacity to notice, imagine, associate, and discover significance in their psychological lives.
• Many patients approach unwanted feelings as problems requiring explanation, correction, or elimination, rather than as experiences with which they might develop a personal relationship.
• Psychological understanding is not necessarily the same as psychological experience. A person may explain a feeling accurately without encountering its particular significance.
• The therapist’s attention and subjectivity may help patients discover aspects of their experience that remain inaccessible within familiar explanations.
• An important therapeutic achievement may be the development of a personal sensibility—a distinctive way of experiencing one’s life that does not depend upon resolution, coherence, or emotional comfort.

The Unwelcome Feeling

A woman in her early forties tells me that she has become increasingly resentful of her husband. She describes him as a decent man, a devoted father, and someone who has generally treated her well. Yet she finds herself irritated by his ordinary habits, his expectations of her, and even his expressions of affection. She knows that some of her resentment is disproportionate to anything he has done. She has read about emotional labor, attachment styles, and the importance of communicating needs. She has attempted to establish better boundaries and has become more direct about her frustrations. Nevertheless, the resentment persists.

“I don’t want to be this kind of person,” she tells me. “I don’t want to spend my life being angry at someone who doesn’t deserve it.”

She wants to understand why she feels this way so that she can stop feeling it.

I ask what she means by this kind of person.

She says she has become critical, ungrateful, and difficult to please. She has begun to treat the feeling as a verdict on her character, as though the existence of resentment settled the question of what sort of wife she is.

I ask whether she has considered that her resentment might be interesting.

She looks at me with disbelief. “Interesting? It’s ruining my marriage.”

I understand her objection. There is nothing inherently appealing about resentment, and I have no particular wish to persuade her to appreciate it. But I am struck by how quickly she has transformed the feeling into evidence of a personal failing. She has scarcely begun to describe her experience before announcing what it means about her character and why it must disappear.

As we continue talking, she tells me that she feels most resentful on Sunday afternoons. Her husband often takes their children somewhere, leaving her alone for several hours. She had initially welcomed these afternoons, imagining that she would read, see friends, or simply enjoy the quiet. Instead, she finds herself cleaning the house, organizing for the coming week, and becoming increasingly irritated that her husband is enjoying himself.

I ask what she might like to do with those afternoons.

She says she doesn’t know.

I ask what she used to enjoy before she married.

She begins describing her twenties, when she lived alone in a small apartment and spent much of her free time wandering through bookstores, visiting museums, and taking photographs. She had once considered studying photography but decided that it was impractical. She speaks with an animation I have not previously seen.

Then she becomes quiet.

“I don’t know what happened to that person,” she says.

I am tempted to suggest that she has lost contact with an earlier, more spontaneous version of herself. But the formulation seems too easy, and perhaps too reassuring. I am not sure that the woman she remembers was necessarily more authentic than the person she has become. Nor do I know whether her resentment is principally about the sacrifices of marriage and motherhood.

What interests me is that the conversation has acquired a texture absent from her efforts to diagnose and eliminate resentment. She has begun remembering a life that was organized around interests, pleasures, and possibilities that belonged to her. Her resentment may have something to do with the disappearance of that life, but I am reluctant to settle the question.

For the moment, she seems less interested in getting rid of her resentment than in remembering what it was like to be someone who wandered through museums simply because she wanted to look at things.

The Disappearance of Experience

I have become increasingly interested in patients who arrive in psychotherapy possessing considerable knowledge about their psychological difficulties but relatively little experience of their own subjectivity. They can identify their attachment patterns, recognize their defenses, describe their childhood injuries, and explain the origins of their anxiety or depression. Some have spent years in therapy and speak with considerable sophistication about their emotional lives. Yet their relationship with themselves often seems organized around a surprisingly narrow set of questions: What is wrong with me? Why do I feel this way? How can I change it? When will I finally get over this?

The problem is not necessarily that these patients lack feelings. Many experience them intensely. Nor is it that they are incapable of introspection. Some spend extraordinary amounts of time examining themselves. But their attention is directed primarily toward the management, evaluation, or elimination of experience rather than toward its discovery. Feelings are identified so they can be regulated. Memories are examined to determine their consequences. Relationships are analyzed to establish who was responsible for what. Regret, guilt, envy, resentment, disappointment, and shame are treated as conditions that should eventually yield to sufficient understanding or therapeutic effort.

There is nothing inherently objectionable about wanting relief from suffering. People seek psychotherapy because they are distressed, and a treatment that remains indifferent to their suffering has lost something essential. But I wonder whether our contemporary therapeutic vocabulary sometimes encourages a particular misunderstanding of psychological life: the assumption that an unwelcome experience is necessarily one from which a person ought to bypass.

Someone feels guilty and wants to forgive themselves. Another is disappointed and wants to achieve acceptance. A patient resents an aging parent and wants to relinquish the resentment. Another has made a consequential mistake and wants to stop thinking about it. These aspirations may be entirely understandable. Yet they can also conceal a reluctance to become involved with one’s own experience.

The person may know what they feel without having developed much interest in what it is like to be the person who feels it.

This distinction is more difficult to articulate than the familiar opposition between intellectual insight and emotional understanding. A patient can experience intense emotion without becoming psychologically engaged with it. Someone may be consumed by jealousy while remaining uninterested in the particular fantasies, humiliations, and longings that constitute their jealousy. Another may experience persistent guilt without becoming curious about the person who insists upon such relentless self-condemnation. Emotional intensity, by itself, does not establish a meaningful relationship with experience.

Nor does reflection necessarily do so. Some patients approach their inner lives with the vigilance of an auditor examining suspicious accounts. They monitor their reactions, evaluate their motives, and repeatedly determine whether their feelings are justified. Their minds are extraordinarily active, but their psychological experience remains confined within an adversarial relationship with themselves. They are continually investigating their own lives without appearing particularly interested in the people living them.

I am drawn to the possibility that one of the less recognized functions of psychotherapy is to help patients develop a different relationship with their subjectivity: one in which experience is not immediately subordinated to explanation, evaluation, or correction. The aim is not simply to become more introspective, emotionally expressive, or accepting. It is to develop a capacity to encounter one’s own experience as something personal, particular, and potentially consequential, even when its significance remains uncertain.

Against the Obvious

In At War with the Obvious: Disruptive Thinking in Psychoanalysis, Donald Moss (2017) challenges the tendency of psychoanalytic thinking to become domesticated by the very assumptions it once sought to disturb. Psychoanalysis loses something of its critical power when familiar explanations begin to substitute for inquiry. The danger is not merely that psychoanalytic concepts become conventional. It is that their apparent explanatory adequacy may discourage further engagement with what remains psychologically unfamiliar.

This problem is readily apparent in clinical work. A patient explains that she fears abandonment because her mother was emotionally unavailable. Another recognizes that his perfectionism developed in response to a demanding father. Someone attributes their difficulties with intimacy to an avoidant attachment style. These formulations may be accurate and clinically useful. But their accuracy does not tell us whether the patient has encountered the psychological implications of what is being described.

Indeed, an explanation may become particularly effective at preventing such an encounter precisely because it is convincing.

A patient may know that a childhood spent anticipating the moods of others has made her excessively accommodating. She may understand the need for boundaries and become more proficient at setting them. Yet when no one needs anything from her, she may discover that she has no idea what she wants to do. Her psychological explanation is sound; what remains unfamiliar is the experience of having a day, an interest, or a wish that belongs to her.

The clinical question then changes. Rather than asking only how she can stop accommodating others, we may become interested in what she notices when she is not occupied with them. That inquiry cannot be completed by naming a defense or rehearsing its origins. It requires experiences in which a preference might become perceptible before it has to be justified.

An Aesthetic Relationship with Experience

I sometimes think that what I am trying to help patients develop resembles, in certain respects, the sensibility of an artist. I hesitate over the comparison because it risks romanticizing psychotherapy, as though suffering becomes valuable when it can be rendered beautiful or meaningful. I do not believe that pain is inherently illuminating, that darkness necessarily contains wisdom, or that the injuries of a life must eventually yield some redeeming significance. There are experiences that remain cruel, senseless, and impoverishing, however carefully we examine them.

Nevertheless, the analogy continues to interest me.

An artist does not simply observe the world and record what is there. An artist notices, selects, associates, juxtaposes, and discovers relationships among experiences that may initially appear unrelated. A novelist gives psychological consequence to an apparently insignificant gesture. A filmmaker allows a camera to remain on a face after the conversation has ended, making the silence more revealing than the words that preceded it. A painter finds something arresting in a familiar arrangement of objects, not because the objects have changed, but because a particular way of seeing has made them newly available.

What interests me is not the production of art, or the conversion of pain into beauty, but the activity of giving experience a form that is recognizably one’s own. The aesthetic dimension lies in the relations a person begins to perceive among details, memories, feelings, and images—not in the attractiveness of what is perceived.

Consider the difference between looking at an event in one’s life as evidence of success or failure and allowing the event to become an object of sustained psychological attention. A patient may remember an unhappy marriage primarily as a mistake. Another may remember a childhood primarily as an explanation for current difficulties. A third may regard a period of professional failure as something to be overcome and forgotten. Each experience has already been assigned a place within an established account of the person’s life.

But what happens when the person begins to notice what has escaped that account? Why does a particular afternoon remain vivid? Why does the memory of a mother’s voice evoke tenderness in someone who otherwise remembers her with resentment? Why does a man who insists that he was relieved when his father died continue to remember the father’s hands? Why does an ordinary domestic scene, recalled decades later, suddenly seem to contain something that was not available when it occurred?

These questions are not necessarily directed toward recovering a hidden truth. They concern the possibility that an experience may contain psychological meanings that cannot be exhausted by the explanation already attached to it.

In On Not Being Able to Paint, Marion Milner (1950), a British psychoanalyst whose work explored the relationship between creativity, perception, and unconscious experience, examined the difficulties involved in relinquishing predetermined ways of seeing and allowing something unexpected to emerge through creative activity. Her account of painting is also an investigation of the psychological conditions under which experience can take form without being entirely controlled in advance. The creative process requires a willingness to encounter what one has not yet decided to perceive.

Something analogous may occur in psychotherapy. The patient arrives with a familiar picture of their life. The therapist’s attention, questions, associations, and sometimes unexpected reactions disturb the arrangement. Details that had been dismissed become significant. Experiences previously understood as separate begin to acquire relationships with one another. The patient may discover that what appeared to be a simple feeling contains contradictory wishes, memories, identifications, and fantasies.

The achievement is not necessarily a more accurate picture. It may be a way of seeing that belongs more unmistakably to the person whose life is being considered.

Christopher Bollas’s conception of the idiom of the self is particularly relevant here. In The Shadow of the Object (1987) and Being a Character (1992), Bollas describes the distinctive ways individuals organize and express their experience through relationships with people, objects, environments, and cultural forms. The self is not merely an accumulation of psychological characteristics or a coherent narrative of personal history. It possesses a particular idiom, a way of encountering and transforming the world that cannot be fully captured by general psychological categories.

This suggests a conception of psychotherapy that interests me considerably. Perhaps the task is not simply to help patients understand who they are, but to participate in the emergence of the particular ways they might experience being themselves.

The Things We Cannot Make Better

A woman in her early fifties tells me that she feels guilty about her relationship with her mother who died several years earlier. She had cared for her mother during a prolonged illness but had frequently resented the demands placed upon her. She remembers being impatient, occasionally unkind, and sometimes relieved when her mother was hospitalized because it meant that someone else would assume responsibility for her care.

This patient has spent years attempting to reconcile these memories with her conviction that she was a devoted daughter. She understands that caregiving is exhausting, that resentment is common, and that she did more for her mother than many children would have done. Friends and relatives have repeatedly reassured her that she has nothing to feel guilty about. She agrees with them intellectually, but the guilt persists.

She asks whether I think she has been too hard on herself.

I tell her that I am not particularly interested in deciding whether she deserves to feel guilty.

She looks disappointed. She had hoped, I suspect, that I might provide a more authoritative version of the reassurance she has already received.

I ask what she remembers most vividly about caring for her mother.

She describes the medications, the appointments, the exhaustion, and the arguments. Then she recalls a morning when her mother asked her to brush her hair. She had been running late for work and was irritated by the request. She remembers brushing too quickly and her mother complaining that she was hurting her. She had responded sharply, telling her mother that she was doing the best she could.

For a moment, the patient seems embarrassed by the triviality of the memory. She has described far more consequential events in their relationship. Yet this particular morning has remained with her.

I ask what she remembers about her mother’s hair.

She looks puzzled. Then she tells me that her mother had always taken great pride in her appearance. Even during her illness, she wanted her hair brushed in a particular way. The patient remembers sitting on her mother’s bed as a child, watching her mother arrange her hair before going out. She remembers the smell of hairspray, the mirror on the dressing table, and the extraordinary patience with which her mother attended to small details of her appearance.

As the patient speaks, something changes. The memory of her impatience becomes connected to a much earlier experience of watching her mother. She begins to cry, but the tears do not seem to concern guilt alone. She tells me that she had forgotten how beautiful her mother was.

I do not know whether this experience will relieve her guilt. Nor am I certain that it should. What interests me is that the morning she has remembered as evidence of her failure as a daughter has begun to acquire other psychological dimensions. The brush, the hair, the impatience, the childhood memory, the beauty of her mother, and the indignity of illness have become related in ways that were not previously available.

The experience has not been made better. It has become more complicated, more personal, and perhaps more fully hers.

There is something important about the fact that this development could not have been prescribed in advance. Had I attempted to reassure her that she had been a good daughter, or interpreted her guilt as a defense against anger, we might have arrived at a plausible understanding. But we might also have bypassed the particular memory through which the patient’s relationship with her mother became newly available.

The memory did not need to be redeemed. It needed room to become something other than evidence in an ongoing prosecution of herself.

The Patient as an Observer of Their Own Life

The artistic analogy becomes less useful if it suggests that patients should learn to appreciate suffering or discover beauty in everything that happens to them. I am interested in something less consoling and more psychologically demanding: the development of a capacity to observe one’s own experience without immediately converting it into a judgment, diagnosis, explanation, or project of self-improvement.

This is not the same as detachment. An artist’s relationship to a subject may be intensely emotional, even obsessive. Nor is it simply mindfulness, understood as nonjudgmental awareness of the present moment. The kind of observation I have in mind includes memory, fantasy, association, imagination, and the discovery of unexpected relationships between experiences separated by years or decades.

A patient may suddenly recognize that the humiliation experienced during a recent professional setback resembles something felt as a child when a parent failed to attend an important event. But the significance of the connection is not exhausted by identifying the repetition. The patient may begin to recognize how much of their adult ambition has been organized around the imagined presence of someone who was not there. Success may acquire a different psychological meaning. So might disappointment. The patient may even begin to wonder whether certain ambitions belong to them or to a relationship they have continued to sustain internally.

The discovery does not necessarily produce relief. It may complicate decisions the patient had previously considered straightforward. Yet something about the person’s relationship with their own life has changed.

Thomas Ogden’s writings on reverie and the creation of psychological experience offer a useful theoretical context. In Reverie and Interpretation (1997) and This Art of Psychoanalysis (2005), Ogden explores forms of analytic experience that cannot be reduced to the communication of interpretations or the recovery of previously established meanings. His emphasis on dreaming, reverie, and the creation of experience within the analytic relationship suggests that psychological life is not simply something waiting to be discovered. It is also something that becomes possible through particular forms of participation with another person.

This distinction seems essential. The therapist is not merely helping the patient observe an already constituted inner world. The therapeutic relationship may participate in the emergence of experiences that have never acquired sufficient psychological form to be encountered.

A patient may have spent a lifetime feeling responsible for everyone around them without ever experiencing the loneliness of being someone upon whom everyone depends. Another may have repeatedly described themselves as independent without recognizing the fear associated with needing another person. A third may have organized their life around achievement without ever becoming interested in what achievement was supposed to make possible.

The psychological significance of these arrangements may emerge not through the discovery of an underlying explanation, but through the patient’s encounter with something that had never been experienced in quite this way before.

A Life That Does Not Require a Verdict

A man in his forties comes to therapy because he cannot decide whether to leave his marriage. He describes his wife as intelligent, loyal, and fundamentally decent. They have two children, a comfortable home, and a life that appears successful by most conventional standards. Yet he has felt dissatisfied for years. He experiences little sexual desire for his wife and often imagines another life in which he might feel more excited, spontaneous, and emotionally alive.

He has read extensively about marriage, attachment, and the psychology of desire. He has consulted friends, listened to podcasts, and constructed elaborate arguments for staying and leaving. He wants therapy to help him determine what he truly wants.

Over several sessions, I become struck by the peculiar absence of his wife from his descriptions. She appears primarily as a collection of attributes relevant to the decision he is trying to make. She is kind, attractive, responsible, emotionally available, and a good mother. He seems to be evaluating a proposition rather than describing a person with whom he has shared fifteen years of his life.

I ask him what he enjoys about her.

He begins listing her qualities again.

I interrupt and ask whether he can remember a particular moment when he felt happy to be with her.

He becomes quiet. Eventually, he recalls a vacation they took before having children. They had rented a small house near the ocean. One evening, the electricity went out during a storm, and they sat on the floor eating sandwiches by candlelight. He remembers that she was wearing an old sweatshirt and that they laughed about something he can no longer recall. He says he had not thought about that evening in years.

I ask what he remembers about her face.

He pauses for a long time. Then he says, “She looked happy.”

Something in his expression changes. He begins talking about the person he was during those early years, how little he worried about the future, and how surprised he had been that someone like her wanted to share a life with him. He remembers that he had once felt fortunate simply to be in her company.

I do not suggest that these memories demonstrate that he should remain married. They do not. Nor do I interpret his dissatisfaction as a defense against intimacy, although that possibility may eventually deserve consideration. What interests me is that he has begun to encounter his marriage as an experience rather than exclusively as a decision.

The distinction is consequential. A decision requires evaluation, comparison, and the anticipation of outcomes. A psychological relationship with one’s marriage involves something else: the capacity to recognize the particular person one has loved, the person one has become within the relationship, and the complicated meanings of remaining or leaving.

He may ultimately decide to end the marriage. But I wonder whether it matters that he do so as someone who has experienced the relationship rather than merely assessed it.

This is where the aesthetic analogy seems especially useful. A work of art does not necessarily tell us what to conclude about its subject. It may instead enlarge our capacity to encounter that subject without requiring that the encounter culminate in a verdict.

Psychotherapy can sometimes sustain that interval between encountering a life and passing judgment upon it.

The Therapist’s Participation

It would be misleading to suggest that the therapist simply provides an atmosphere of receptive attention in which the patient’s subjectivity gradually unfolds. The therapist is not a neutral spectator, and the emergence of psychological experience is not always gentle.

Sometimes the therapist’s contribution is an interruption, an objection, an expression of surprise, or a question that the patient experiences as irritating or even impertinent.

A patient complains that she is disappointed in her adult son. She has devoted enormous energy to his education and professional development, and he has chosen a career that she considers beneath his abilities. She feels betrayed by his lack of ambition and wants to understand why she cannot accept his decisions.

I ask whether she has considered that her son may not be particularly interested in fulfilling her expectations.

She looks offended. She tells me that she has only wanted what is best for him.

I say that I understand this, but I am not sure he has agreed to organize his life around what she considers best.

The exchange becomes uncomfortable. She experiences me as unsympathetic, perhaps even accusatory. I am aware that my intervention may have been unnecessarily sharp. Yet I am also interested in the intensity of her reaction. Her son’s independence seems to register not simply as a difference between two people but as an injury to something fundamental in her relationship with herself.

Eventually, she begins describing how much she had sacrificed to provide him with opportunities unavailable to her. She recalls her own father’s disappointment when she abandoned an academic career after becoming pregnant. She had always regarded her son’s accomplishments as evidence that her sacrifices had been worthwhile.

Now his choices threaten something she had not recognized as precarious: the meaning she had assigned to her own life.

The clinical movement is not from an incorrect understanding to a correct one. Nor is it simply the recognition that she has projected her ambitions onto her son. She begins to encounter the particular significance of his independence, including the possibility that his life cannot provide the retrospective justification she has expected from it.

The therapist’s subjectivity matters because the intervention introduces a perspective that does not automatically conform to the patient’s established arrangement. The resulting collision may make something available that could not emerge while therapist and patient remained in agreement about the nature of the problem.

Jessica Benjamin’s account of recognition and thirdness is relevant here. In Beyond Doer and Done To: An Intersubjective View of Thirdness (2004), Benjamin describes the difficulty of sustaining recognition when relationships become organized around complementary positions in which one person’s subjectivity appears to invalidate the other’s. Her work suggests that psychological development involves the capacity to encounter another mind without requiring that difference be eliminated.

The therapist’s disagreement can be useful when it makes possible a more complex relationship between perspectives. But disagreement alone is not therapeutic. A therapist who takes pride in unsettling patients may simply substitute the therapist’s preferred understanding for the patient’s. The clinical question is whether the encounter creates greater freedom for psychological experience or merely establishes another relationship in which the patient must accommodate someone else’s mind.

The Trouble with Beauty

There is something potentially objectionable about describing psychotherapy in aesthetic terms. The analogy can imply that psychological suffering becomes worthwhile when it produces insight, complexity, or an appreciation of life’s darker dimensions. Such a view risks turning the therapist into a connoisseur of experiences from which the patient understandably wishes to escape.

I would not want to romanticize a patient’s despair, admire the intricacies of a painful obsession, or treat a traumatic experience as psychologically valuable because it has generated a compelling narrative. Some experiences are destructive. Some feelings are disabling. Some patients need relief before they can become interested in anything beyond surviving the day.

Nor is every psychological experience an invitation to deeper exploration. A person may be angry because they have been mistreated, exhausted because they have worked too hard, or unhappy because they are living in circumstances that need to change. There is no virtue in discovering elaborate unconscious meanings when the immediate reality of the situation is sufficient.

And yet I remain interested in beauty as a dimension of psychological life, provided that the word is not confused with consolation.

A film can be beautiful without being reassuring. A novel can be psychologically compelling without offering redemption. A painting may arrest our attention through something disturbing, obscure, or difficult to assimilate. The aesthetic experience does not necessarily make its subject more agreeable. It may make the subject more available to us.

Perhaps something similar can occur in psychotherapy. A patient may come to recognize a peculiar tenderness in a memory that has always been associated with grief. Another may discover that a longstanding resentment contains an unacknowledged attachment. Someone may begin to recognize the poignancy of an earlier version of themselves whose ambitions now seem misguided or even embarrassing.

These developments need not transform suffering into beauty. They may simply reveal that an experience possesses qualities that had been obscured by the patient’s established understanding of it.

There is also the possibility that an experience remains ugly, disappointing, or irreconcilable. The patient may come to recognize that a parent was cruel, that a marriage was impoverishing, or that a particular decision caused suffering that cannot be repaired. The achievement is not necessarily forgiveness, acceptance, or a more generous interpretation.

It may be the capacity to encounter the experience without requiring it to become something else.

This returns us to the problem of reconciliation. The wish to reconcile oneself to the past can sometimes represent a genuine psychological development. But it can also become another demand for resolution, another way of insisting that an experience must eventually assume an acceptable form.

What if the past remains disappointing? What if a person continues to regret a decision? What if love and resentment persist without yielding to a more harmonious understanding?

A psychological life capacious enough to contain these experiences may be no less developed than one in which they have been resolved.

The Emergence of a Personal Sensibility

Winnicott’s distinction between living creatively and living through compliance remains important to this discussion, particularly in Playing and Reality (1971). For Winnicott, creativity is not confined to artistic production. It concerns the quality of a person’s relationship with reality, the possibility of experiencing life as something personally encountered rather than merely accommodated.

I find this formulation compelling, although I am interested in approaching the problem from a somewhat different direction. Many patients are not obviously compliant, inhibited, or lacking in spontaneity. They may be assertive, successful, emotionally expressive, and capable of considerable pleasure. Yet they seem to have relatively little interest in the particularity of their own psychological lives.

Their experiences are rapidly classified according to familiar categories. Anger becomes a problem of regulation. Guilt becomes a problem of self-forgiveness. Disappointment becomes a problem of expectations. Anxiety becomes a problem of uncertainty. Each experience is assigned a therapeutic task before it has acquired much personal significance.

What seems missing is not necessarily creativity in the conventional sense, but something I would call a personal sensibility: a distinctive way of noticing, associating, imagining, remembering, and being affected by one’s experience.

A sensibility is not simply a set of preferences or personality traits. It is the particular manner in which a person encounters the world and discovers significance within it. Two people may experience the same event and remember entirely different details. The same memory may acquire different meanings at different periods of life. An ordinary encounter may evoke an association that belongs to no one else’s psychological history.

Indeed, the imposition of an ideal of psychological richness could become another form of compliance. Patients might begin producing elaborate reflections, emotionally compelling narratives, or apparently profound insights because they believe these are what the therapist values.

This possibility deserves particular attention. There are patients who become exceptionally good at psychotherapy. They learn to associate, identify conflicts, recognize transference, and speak fluently about their inner lives. Yet their psychological activity may remain organized around the desire to be a good patient, to produce the kind of material that confirms the therapist’s expectations.

A personal sensibility cannot be another accomplishment performed for the therapist. The patient must remain free to find certain experiences uninteresting, to reject the therapist’s preferred associations, and to notice what the therapist overlooks. Otherwise, the apparent richness of the work may reproduce the very accommodation that has made the patient a stranger to herself.

In this respect, the therapist may need to relinquish not only the wish to make the patient feel better, but also the wish to make the patient psychologically interesting in a particular way.

Becoming Someone to Oneself

A patient tells me that she has never understood why people enjoy spending time alone. She is sociable, accomplished, and involved in numerous activities. She has a successful professional life and a large circle of friends. Yet when she has an unstructured afternoon, she becomes restless and uneasy. She checks her phone, makes plans, or finds something productive to do.

She explains that she has always been an energetic person and that inactivity makes her anxious. She wants to know whether this is related to her childhood.

I ask what she imagines might happen if she spent an afternoon without accomplishing anything.

She laughs and says that she would probably be bored.

I ask whether she finds herself boring.

She becomes quiet.

Over subsequent sessions, she begins describing her childhood in ways that differ from the familiar account she has previously offered. Her parents were loving but preoccupied, and she was praised for being independent, cheerful, and easy to manage. She remembers entertaining guests, performing well in school, and finding ways to make herself useful. She recalls that her mother enjoyed telling friends how little trouble she caused.

Then she describes an afternoon when she was about nine years old. She had been sent to her room while her parents entertained visitors. She remembers sitting on the floor beside a window, watching shadows move across the wall. She had been drawing pictures in a notebook. She cannot remember what she drew, but she remembers feeling peaceful.

The memory seems inconsequential, and she is initially uncertain why she has mentioned it. But she returns to it several times. She begins wondering when she stopped drawing and why she has so little recollection of spending time alone as a child.

One day she tells me that she bought a notebook. She has begun sketching occasionally, although she insists that she is not particularly good at it. She seems almost embarrassed to mention this, as though it were too trivial to deserve our attention.

I ask what she likes about drawing.

She says that she enjoys looking at things.

The answer is so simple that I am tempted to overlook it. But something about her pleasure seems unfamiliar, even to her. She has spent much of her life doing things that were useful, admired, or expected. Now she has begun doing something that has no obvious purpose beyond the experience itself.

I do not know whether drawing will become important to her. It may remain a passing interest. What interests me is that she has begun to discover a form of experience that does not depend upon achievement, usefulness, or another person’s recognition.

She has become interested in something because it interests her.

I wonder whether this apparently modest development may be more consequential than many of the insights she has acquired during treatment. She has not simply discovered a new activity. She has encountered a possibility of being with herself that had scarcely existed within her familiar psychological life.

Perhaps this is one of the ways subjectivity develops: not through a definitive discovery of who one really is, but through experiences that gradually make one’s own company more available, particular, and surprising.

What Is the Point?

Patients sometimes ask what they are supposed to gain from this kind of work. They want to know whether they will become happier, more confident, less anxious, or better able to make decisions. These are reasonable expectations, and psychotherapy should not evade questions about its usefulness.

But I find myself increasingly uncertain that the value of psychological experience can be adequately described through the language of improvement.

A patient may become more aware of the compromises that have shaped a marriage without becoming more satisfied with the relationship. Another may recognize the significance of a childhood loss without feeling less saddened by it. Someone may develop a more intimate relationship with their own ambitions and discover that they no longer know whether those ambitions are worth pursuing.

These developments can make life more complicated. They may introduce questions that had previously been settled, expose disappointments that had been successfully minimized, or disturb identities that once provided considerable stability.

Why should this be considered therapeutic?

One possible answer is that psychological life becomes more available for participation. A person who has organized their experience around avoiding disappointment may begin to recognize possibilities that avoidance has foreclosed. Someone who has lived primarily through obligation may discover wishes that cannot be reduced to what others expect. Another may develop a capacity to remember the past without requiring every memory to confirm an established account of who they have been.

But I am reluctant to turn these possibilities into another promise of treatment. The patient may not become happier, more coherent, or more reconciled to their life. The development of a personal psychological sensibility does not guarantee a more satisfying existence.

Its significance may not be entirely instrumental.

There are experiences we value without requiring them to accomplish anything beyond themselves. We read a novel, listen to music, watch a film, or spend an afternoon with someone we love, not necessarily because the experience will improve us, but because there is something about participating in it that matters.

I wonder whether a person’s relationship with their own psychological life might sometimes possess a similar quality.

The therapist may contribute to this development by offering a particular kind of attention: an interest in the patient’s experience that is not entirely governed by the wish to correct it. The patient encounters another person who finds something worth considering in memories, feelings, fantasies, and contradictions that the patient has regarded primarily as problems.

Over time, some of this interest may become the patient’s own.

The person begins to notice things. An ordinary conversation remains with them. A memory acquires an unexpected emotional quality. A familiar feeling becomes connected to something previously unrelated. The patient may discover that an experience they had wanted to eliminate contains something they do not entirely wish to lose.

I think again of the woman who came to therapy because she resented her husband. I do not know whether her resentment will diminish, whether her marriage will become more satisfying, or whether she will return to photography. Perhaps she will discover that her resentment has little to do with her husband. Perhaps she will come to recognize aspects of the marriage that genuinely require change. Perhaps both will prove true.

But I remember the way she described wandering through museums when she was younger, how she could spend an afternoon looking at paintings without feeling that she had wasted her time. She remembered a particular museum she used to visit, a room where she would sometimes sit for an hour without speaking to anyone.

She had forgotten the name of the painter whose work she loved. She could remember only that the paintings were large and that she liked the way the light seemed to come from somewhere inside them.

For a while, she stopped talking about her marriage. Instead, she lingered, remembering the paintings.

Questions and Answers

What does an aesthetic relationship with experience mean?

It refers to a way of encountering one’s psychological life through attention, imagination, association, and the discovery of personal significance. It does not require finding beauty in suffering or transforming painful experiences into positive ones.

How is this different from insight?

Insight involves recognizing psychological relationships or meanings that were previously unappreciated. An aesthetic relationship with experience also concerns how a person notices, remembers, and gives form to experience, including aspects that may resist explanation.

Does this approach discourage symptom relief?

No. Relief from distress remains an important therapeutic objective. The question is whether the pursuit of relief sometimes prevents patients from encountering experiences that may have psychological significance beyond their immediate unpleasantness.

Why is the therapist’s subjectivity important?

The therapist’s reactions, questions, associations, and disagreements can introduce perspectives that interrupt familiar ways of understanding experience. Such interventions are useful when they expand the patient’s capacity to discover meanings rather than impose the therapist’s preferred interpretation.

What is meant by a personal sensibility?

A personal sensibility is the distinctive way an individual perceives, remembers, associates, imagines, and responds to experience. Psychotherapy may contribute to its development by helping patients establish a less exclusively evaluative or corrective relationship with their inner lives.

About the Author

James Tobin, Ph.D. is a licensed psychologist based in Irvine, California, with more than two decades of clinical experience. He earned his undergraduate degree magna cum laude from Harvard University, an M.F.A. in creative writing from Indiana University, and a doctorate in clinical psychology from The Catholic University of America. He completed postdoctoral training at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School, where he subsequently served as a staff psychologist and Clinical Instructor.

Dr. Tobin maintains a private psychotherapy practice working with adults and couples navigating complex relationship difficulties, developmental transitions, grief, trauma, and questions of identity and meaning. His clinical approach draws on contemporary psychodynamic and psychoanalytic psychotherapy, especially relational and intersubjective perspectives, attachment theory, and developmental psychology.

His clinical and literary essays examine the ways memory, unconscious processes, intimate relationships, and personal history shape the possibilities of psychological experience. He is particularly interested in how psychotherapy may help individuals develop a more personal and complex relationship with their own emotional lives.

www.jamestobinphd.com

Disclaimer

This essay is intended for educational and reflective purposes. It does not constitute psychological diagnosis, psychotherapy, treatment recommendations, or individualized clinical advice, and it is not a substitute for consultation with a qualified mental health professional. The clinical vignettes are fictionalized composites developed to illuminate psychological processes; they are not verbatim accounts of identifiable patients or treatment encounters. Details and circumstances have been invented or altered to protect privacy and to serve the essay’s illustrative purposes. The experiences described are not universal, and an aesthetic relationship with psychological experience should not be taken to imply that suffering must be meaningful, beautiful, or therapeutically valuable. Relief of distress and attention to practical circumstances may be essential parts of clinical care.

References

Benjamin, J. (2004). Beyond doer and done to: An intersubjective view of thirdness. The Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 73(1), 5–46.  Source

Bollas, C. (1987). The shadow of the object: Psychoanalysis of the unthought known. Free Association Books.  Source

Bollas, C. (1992). Being a character: Psychoanalysis and self experience. Hill and Wang.  Source

Milner, M. (1950). On not being able to paint. Heinemann.  Source

Moss, D. (2017). At war with the obvious: Disruptive thinking in psychoanalysis. Routledge.  Source

Ogden, T. H. (1997). Reverie and interpretation: Sensing something human. Jason Aronson.  Source

Ogden, T. H. (2005). This art of psychoanalysis: Dreaming undreamt dreams and interrupted cries. Routledge.  Source

Winnicott, D. W. (1971). Playing and reality. Tavistock Publications.  Source