Published: October 2026

Keywords:
Maria Nichterlein, John Morss, Aesthetics; lines of flight; multiplicity; uncertainty; co-existence; systemic therapy; Gregory Bateson; Humberto Maturana; Gilles Deleuze; becoming; co-drifting; affect; relational ethics; community; Indigenous experiences; colonial trauma.

Maria Nichterlein

Clinical Psychologist, Counselling Psychologist and Family Therapist, specialising in complex presentations, including complex trauma. Enjoys teaching and supervising.

m.nichterlein@bigpond.com

Maria Nichterlein: My Background

My background, like many in my generation, is one of displacement and nomadic life. My parents escaped a mad Europe – my father from Germany as a youngster between the two World Wars, and my mother as a child with her family from the Spanish Civil War. They did so in Chile, a welcoming country at the time. My mother lost her family very early, and when she married my father, she was welcomed into my father’s family. This meant that I was born into German as my mother tongue and Spanish as the official language of the country.

Displacement – being different – was central to my making sense of the world, so, perhaps not surprisingly, I became interested in psychology as an area of further studies.

Studying at the university is when things became really difficult for me. If they were complex before, studying psychology in the midst of a dictatorship was beyond comprehension. A point that exemplifies this is the fact that the head of our department at the Universidad de Chile – the most prestigious place of study for this career – was not only an expert in phenomenology and qualitative traditions of testing, but also the head of the dictatorship’s propaganda and the trainer of torturers.

Of course, censorship, violence and significant fear were central ingredients of the regime, but the strong contradiction between the purposes of the knowledge I was studying and its perverse application into civil life was deeply problematic for me. This contradiction created an insatiable desire to ‘solve the enigma’ that defined my studies: the human condition. This enigma was further complicated by the fact that, in line with our colonial heritage (Europe and then an emerging ‘brave America’), the books and the theories we read and studied were immersed in normativities that were foreign to my experience. They belonged to the North and were often alien to the cultural practices of the South. No matter how hard I tried in my studies, some of its assumptions or its claims simply did not make sense.

A note from the Metalogos Editorial Team

This conversation with Maria Nichterlein and John Morss took place in September 2025 in their hotel lobby, just a few hours before their departure from Greece. They had come to Thessaloniki to celebrate the anniversary of a training institute. When Maria heard about the annual Metalogos event, she expressed an interest in contributing a talk. We suggested an “interview”, which she accepted with the enthusiasm and energy that characterise her as a passionate thinker, with the prospect of showing it at the Metalogos event if it “turned out well”.

The interview was recorded using an amateur video camera. Fany Triantafillou and Yanna Karanikolaou participated on behalf of Metalogos.

Creative video editing, translation and subtitling: Fani Triantafyllou. Editorial review: Aliki Karavalasi.

Abstract

The discussion with Maria Nichterlein revolves around the concept of aesthetics, not as the pursuit of beauty or an ideal form, but as a way of being, relating, and creating meaning within life, therapy, and society. Maria distinguishes between two levels of aesthetics: on the one hand, the philosophical/epistemological question “what is aesthetics?” and on the other hand, the personal aesthetic sensibilities and preferences of each individual. Referring to Gregory Bateson and Humberto Maturana, she connects aesthetics with the “pattern that connects” — the relational patterns linking the domains of experience and explanation. Aesthetics is not a static form, but a dynamic coherence between life and the narratives we create about it.

Through the work of Gilles Deleuze, aesthetics is presented as a process of “becoming” and continuous transformation. Art does not serve the representation of an ideal; rather, it creates territories of existence as well as lines of flight beyond normative structures. Maria refers to Francis Bacon and Paul Klee as examples of different aesthetics that challenge dominant notions of beauty. A central theme of the conversation is the distinction between a teleological understanding of “becoming” (as a movement toward a predetermined goal or ideal self) and a systemic/dialogical understanding, where life is a drift, a co-drifting process, open-ended and without a fixed destination.

(Seated, as always, beside Maria, John Morss contributed in his quiet, supportive way. One particular contribution, which sparked the audience’s interest and drew positive comments, concerned Homer’s epic poems).

The reference to The Odyssey serves as an example of a journey with a destination, while The Iliad is presented as a more open-ended and non-teleological narrative.

Aesthetics is closely linked with ethics and therapeutic practice. For Maria, therapy is not the application of a “correct” method, but the creation of a space where people can feel, speak, and listen differently. Influenced by Baruch Spinoza through Deleuze, she emphasises affects — forces that increase or diminish one’s capacity for life, joy, and connection. Therapeutic aesthetics concerns the creation of conditions that expand people’s possibilities rather than imposing normative solutions.

An important part of the discussion also concerns: community and the loss of collective rituals in contemporary society, disconnection from relationships and traditions, and a critique of the romanticised idea of a “return to the roots.”. Maria argues that, for Indigenous peoples, the issue is not a “return” to an authentic past, but the acknowledgement of trauma, violence, and colonial ruptures, along with the creation of new possibilities for life and continuity. The conversation refers especially to the experiences of Aboriginal communities in Australia and Indigenous populations in Canada.

Toward the end, Maria describes a therapeutic incident (“the handshake”) in which, as a supervisor, she intervenes in a session involving suicidal ideation. The story highlights a therapeutic aesthetic grounded in transparency, responsibility, the avoidance of the therapist's humiliation, and the creation of trust and connection rather than control or judgment.

Overall, the talk proposes an aesthetics of relationship, multiplicity, and uncertainty: an aesthetics that does not seek perfection or a return to a lost unity, but cultivates ways of coexisting, dialoguing, transforming, and creating meaning within the complexity of life.