**1. Introduction**

Before we can embark on a discussion of aspects of the perception of beauty, we might ask just what we mean by beauty? As is often the case with such exercises, what initially seems selfevident becomes increasingly obscure and difficult to pin down with increased scrutiny. We notice something "out there" which we label as beautiful. But is beauty really a feature of the object? Is it objective? If we were to say that it resides in features of the object(like symmetry or proportion) it would not necessarily render a discussion of the perception of beauty moot; our perceptual apparatuses configure our appreciation of objective features of the external world also. These questions of the relation of the subjective to the objective have parallels in psychoanalytic theories, such as object relations theory, attachment theory, and relational theory, among others. They also echo the traditional discussions of nature versus nurture,

© 2016 The Author(s). Licensee InTech. This chapter is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. © 2017 The Author(s). Licensee InTech. This chapter is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

that is, the subject finding itself within a particular environment, which becomes, for better or worse, its nurture.

Contemporary analytic models emphasize a view of the subject in relation with his or her environment, which initially for humans(due to our utter, and long, dependency at birth) is always another human caregiver. Winnicott's phrase "there's no such thing as a baby" [1] is a pithy summary of the shift to seeing the dyad of infant and caregiver as the phenomenon of interest, study, and care, rather than the infant in isolation. The dyad is seen as having emergent properties that are derived from the contributions of the individuals, but that go beyond them. Development unfolds through a process of the infant internalizing moments of self-other interaction [2], which then form the basis of implicit working models that configure the experience of subsequent interactions. The influence between self and environment then is bidirectional, though not necessarily always symmetric or equal.

Ekman [3] has demonstrated that humans experience a set of basic emotions that are hardwired and set biologically and are therefore universal. These emotions are, however, invariably mediated through culturally specific expression rules. The expression rules are the proximate influence of the larger culture in configuring how the individual can give social expression to the underlying emotions. Those rules are the medium of expression. They can facilitate or hinder those expressions. Since it requires an intersubjective process to integrate emotion, the expression rules are crucial contributors to what developmental avenues are available for the self in development. The expression rules transmit what amounts to aesthetic languages, languages that are either rich or impoverished in terms of developmental potential.

Several authors have described stages of human cultural development that are conceived as being derived from the average individual development of participants in that culture. We can look to these descriptions as providing a picture both of the cultural worldview, including its aesthetics, as well as the psychological processes of the individuals participating in that culture. Just as in relational theory, in which the quality of relating is an expression of characteristics of the developing self-in-relation, we can look to evolving aesthetics on the level of cultural stages to characterize aspects of the evolving self.

I have contended elsewhere that psychoanalysis should be considered a form of applied aesthetics, parallel to medicine as applied science [4]. A corollary to this is the idea that art has a tendency to engage self-development as well as to reflect it, which psychoanalysis then makes use of. In this essay, I will explore how features of self-development configure broad stages of group consciousness, which then reflect, among other things, aesthetic vision, including the experience of beauty.
