A Place for Beauty in the Therapeutic Encounter

By Dorothy Hamilton

London: The Harris Meltzer Trust, 2021

This book is wide ranging and fascinating, bringing in a plethora of quotations from an extraordinary variety of sources. Hamilton makes a strong case for beauty to be more widely recognized within the practice of psychoanalysis and lends her voice to those of Bion, Meltzer and Harris Williams in calling for psychoanalysis to be seen as an art form.

This is a small book that tackles a huge subject. On the face of it, beauty in the context of psycho analysis should not be so monumental, particularly since, as the author’s survey of its place in the main canon of that subject (Freud, Klein et al.) reveals, it is rarely mentioned, and is only featured in the work of less well-known authorities such as Melzer, Likierman and Milner. For Hamilton, however, beauty is an intriguing iceberg of a topic, and exploration takes her well below the waterline. […] explores a theme of depth and complexity with admirable clarity.