Art as a Field of Existential Reconfiguration: A Phenomenological, Psychoanalytic, and Philosophical Psychology of Artistic Experience

This article develops an integrated phenomenological, psychoanalytic, and philosophical psychology of artistic experience by bringing three theoretical resources into critical dialogue: Daseinsanalysis, existential psychoanalysis, and Niami's ontology of finite continuance. We conceptualize the artwork as a bounded experiential field—the artistic frame—within which habitual ways of perceiving, feeling, interpreting, and inhabiting the world can become temporarily unsettled without requiring immediate practical closure. Daseinsanalysis asks how being-in-the-world is disclosed, narrowed, or opened through the encounter; existential psychoanalysis attends to affective investment, unconscious conflict, repetition, and defensive organization; finite continuance supplies an ontology of continuity-through-transformation, in which a finite subject remains continuous by retaining sufficient meta-capacity to reorganize its relation to determinations under constraint and erosive pressure. We argue that reconfigurative capacity is not a synonym for cognitive or psychological flexibility but a higher-order construct concerning whether the organization of possibility itself can be revised while sufficient continuity and agency are preserved. The model is differentiated across seven artistic forms— cinema, television series, theater, painting, music, sculpture, and architecture. Contemporary research on transformative aesthetic experience, predictive processing, aesthetic emotions, and arts and health is used as convergent evidence and conceptual constraint rather than empirical validation. We distinguish constructive from defensive aesthetic stabilization and propose a clinically cautious model in which aesthetic experience may support reflective openness when intensity remains proportionate to available regulatory and interpretive capacity. The article concludes with testable propositions and a research agenda for examining whether reconfigurative capacity is a theoretically distinct construct. Keywords: aesthetic experience; Daseinsanalysis; existential psychoanalysis; phenomenology; imagination; finite continuance; artistic frame; transitional space; embodiment; reconfigurative capacity