Discussion of Alice Huang's "Finding Sense...".

In my discussion of Huang's paper on aesthetic experience, I describe how she explores new territory both conceptually and at the level of clinical observation. Huang's novel clinical observation is that, when working remotely, the therapist can find a sense of embodied connection with the patient through the play of aesthetic resonances (realized in this instance through the song, a movie, and a poem). More broadly, the paper stakes out a model of aesthetic experience in terms of its emergent pre-reflective, presentational, transitional qualities – how it gives rise to fresh states of awareness and to new forms of experience, not yet fixed in the symbolic register. This implies the existence of a shared psycho-sensory domain of experience. As portrayed in this paper, aesthetic experience plays a central role in the discovery of an embodied way of being in the world, expanding consciousness and the sense of self by connecting us, beyond the dyad, to communal ways of sensing and feeling things. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]