Finding "Sense" without Co-Presence: The Role of Aesthetic Sensibility in an Ontological Approach to Psychoanalysis.

Aesthetic sensibility is a feature of an ontological approach to psychoanalysis. The author writes about an analysis that switched to video work during the COVID-19 pandemic. Without co-presence, the analyst found sensorial substitutes for in-person contact with the patient through her aesthetic experiences of a film, a song, and a poem, which served as transitional spaces for analytic functioning. This was central in facilitating an affective, embodied contact – a felt-sense – with the experience of separation during the pandemic. The analyst's aesthetic engagement can enable connectivity within the analytic field and mediate an expansion of consciousness in analytic work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]