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A Place for Beauty in the Therapeutic Encounter

Author(s) : Dorothy Hamilton

Reviews and Endorsements

‘This book re-opens an investigation: that of the nature of inner space, and of the place held within it by the experience of beauty. The author looks at the relation of loss to the awareness of beauty, and at the part played by the perception of beauty in the structuring of the world. She looks into the regions of darkness and light surrounding any apprehension of beauty.

Relations between desire, knowledge, love, and hate play a part in this study, and some of the psychoanalysts that she discusses have made this explicit. She takes Freud’s elliptical comment “psychoanalysis … has scarcely anything to say about beauty”, and gives a stage setting to the drama hidden within it.’ - Bernard Burgoyne, Emeritus Professor of Psychoanalysis at Middlesex University.


‘I was excited to discover this way of experiencing patients’ material. The book is beautifully written and the subject treated concisely and passionately. It is presented it in such a way as to be truly useful for psychotherapists. This book adds something unique to existing theory and practice.’ - Lindsay Wells, Association for Group and Individual Psychotherapy.


‘Dorothy Hamilton’s monograph offers the reader a sweeping, yet concise, journey through the intricacies of beauty as a concept in psychoanalysis and more widely. She concludes her analysis with a strikingly beautiful account of a patient’s emergence into, and use of, beauty.’ - Frederick Stanwood, College of Psychoanalysts UK.