Sublime in Everyday Life: Psychoanalytic and Aesthetic Perspectives

The concept of the sublime is explored in this book through psychoanalytic and aesthetic theories, highlighting its relevance for contemporary life and its potential to be found in the ordinary, everyday, and quotidian. It demonstrates how the sublime can evoke an ordinary human response that contains inter-psychic, inclusive, and even mass-media cultural elements, with therapeutic and political potential. The book explores loving and caring as well as hateful, traumatic, and destructive encounters with the sublime, showing how it can overflow and destabilize psychological and social symbolic structures, but also how it can be engaged with to re-create and heal ourselves.

Format: Paperback / softback
Length: 178 pages
Publication date: 31 December 2020
Publisher: Taylor & Francis Ltd

The concept of the sublime is frequently linked to extraordinary and exceptional experiences, encompassing the inner psychological, high-cultural, and exceptional moments of elation and exaltation that form part of the overall encounter. This book seeks to revitalize the sublime by re-evaluating its relevance in contemporary life, embarking on a unique and captivating exploration that delves into the sublime within the ordinary, everyday, and quotidian.

Through the exploration of familiar threads of the sublime experience, such as love, death, art, and nature, as well as unfamiliar ones, such as pornography, education, and politics, this book posits the sublime as evoking an ordinary human response that encompasses minute, inter-psychic, inclusive, and even mass-media cultural elements. It demonstrates how the sublime can elicit a range of responses, including loving and caring encounters, as well as hateful, traumatic, and destructive ones. By showcasing how the sublime can overflow and destabilize our psychological and social symbolic structures, exposing their fictional and constructed nature, this book also reveals its potential for re-creation and healing, surpassing the limitations of any given form of reality.

Recognizing the urgent need to understand the sublime as an inherent aspect of our everyday lives, a source of energy and inspiration that can be invoked to support our mental health and well-being, this book holds significant interest for psychoanalysts, psychotherapists, art therapists, scholars, and students of philosophy and popular culture. It offers valuable insights into the complexities of the human experience and encourages us to embrace the extraordinary within the ordinary, fostering a deeper understanding of ourselves and our world.

Weight: 304g
Dimension: 154 x 234 x 20 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9780367202972