Art and Mourning
Art and Mourning

Author: Esther Dreifuss-Kattan

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2016-03-10

Total Pages: 277

ISBN-13: 1317501101

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Art and Mourning explores the relationship between creativity and the work of self-mourning in the lives of 20th century artists and thinkers. The role of artistic and creative endeavours is well-known within psychoanalytic circles in helping to heal in the face of personal loss, trauma, and mourning. In this book, Esther Dreifuss-Kattan, a psychoanalyst, art therapist and artist - analyses the work of major modernist and contemporary artists and thinkers through a psychoanalytic lens. In coming to terms with their own mortality, figures like Albert Einstein, Louise Bourgeois, Paul Klee, Eva Hesse and others were able to access previously unknown reserves of creative energy in their late works, as well as a new healing experience of time outside of the continuous temporality of everyday life. Dreifuss-Kattan explores what we can learn about using the creative process to face and work through traumatic and painful experiences of loss. Art and Mourning will inspire psychoanalysts and psychotherapists to understand the power of artistic expression in transforming loss and traumas into perseverance, survival and gain. Art and Mourning offers a new perspective on trauma and will appeal to psychoanalysts and psychotherapists, psychologists, clinical social workers and mental health workers, as well as artists and art historians.

Grief and Its Transcendence
Grief and Its Transcendence

Author: Adele Tutter

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2015-09-16

Total Pages: 257

ISBN-13: 1317606361

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Grief and its Transcendence: Memory, Identity, Creativity is a landmark contribution that provides fresh insights into the experience and process of mourning. It includes fourteen original essays by pre-eminent psychoanalysts, historians, classicists, theologians, architects, art-historians and artists, that take on the subject of normal, rather than pathological mourning. In particular, it considers the diversity of the mourning process; the bereavement of ordinary vs. extraordinary loss; the contribution of mourning to personal and creative growth; and individual, social, and cultural means of transcending grief. The book is divided into three parts, each including two to four essays followed by one or two critical discussions. Co-editor Adele Tutter’s Prologue outlines the salient themes and tensions that emerge from the volume. Part I juxtaposes the consideration of grief in antiquity with an examination of the contemporary use of memorials to facilitate communal remembrance. Part II offers intimate first-person accounts of mourning from four renowned psychoanalysts that challenge long-held psychoanalytic formulations of mourning. Part III contains deeply personal essays that explore the use of sculpture, photography, and music to withstand, mourn, and transcend loss on individual, cultural and political levels. Drawing on the humanistic wisdom that underlies psychoanalytic thought, co-editor Léon Wurmser’s Epilogue closes the volume. Grief and its Transcendence will be a must for psychoanalysts, psychotherapists, psychiatrists, and scholars within other disciplines who are interested in the topics of grief, bereavement and creativity.

Mourning and Creativity in Proust
Mourning and Creativity in Proust

Author: Anna Magdalena Elsner

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2017-03-09

Total Pages: 265

ISBN-13: 113760073X

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This study explores Proust’s answers to some of the fundamental challenges of the inevitable human experience of mourning. Thinking mourning and creativity together allows for a fresh approach to the modernist novel at large, but also calls for a reassessment of the particular historical and social challenges faced by mourners at the beginning of the twentieth century. The book enables the reader to acknowledge loss and forgetting as an essential part of memory, and it proposes that this literary topos has seminal implications for an understanding of the ethics, aesthetics, and erotic in Proust’s A la recherche du temps perdu. Drawing on the works of Sigmund Freud and Jacques Derrida, Anna Magdalena Elsner develops an original theory of how mourning and creativity are linked by emphasizing that ethical dilemmas are central to an understanding of the novel’s final aesthetic apotheosis. This sheds new light on the enigmatic and versatile nature of mourning but also pays tribute to those fertile tensions and paradoxes that have made Proust’s novel captivating for readers since its publication.

Mourning, Spirituality and Psychic Change
Mourning, Spirituality and Psychic Change

Author: Susan Kavaler-Adler

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2004-06-02

Total Pages: 322

ISBN-13: 1135451869

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In her earlier books, Susan Kavaler-Adler identified healthy mourning for traumas and life changes as an essential aspect of successful analysis, and drew the distinction between a healthy acceptance of mourning as part of development and pathological mourning, which 'fixes' a patient at an unhealthy stage of development. This new book brings such distinctions into the consulting room, exploring how a successful analyst can help patients to utilise mourning for past troubles to move them forward to a lasting change for the better, emotionally, psychically and erotically. The author also tackles the controversial issue of spirituality in psychoanalysis, and explores how psychoanalysis can help patients come to terms with difficult issues in a time of great psychic and spiritual disturbance. These themes are brought to life via two richly detailed case studies.

Grief and the Healing Arts
Grief and the Healing Arts

Author: Sandra L. Bertman

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 1999

Total Pages: 444

ISBN-13:

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Illuminates the many facets that link grief, counseling, and creativity. This book suggests multiple strategies that will help practitioners enlarge their repertoire of hands-on skills and foster introspection and empathy in reader.

Drawing On Grief
Drawing On Grief

Author: Kate Sutton

Publisher: Drawing On

Published: 2022-04-12

Total Pages: 162

ISBN-13: 0711272522

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Drawing On Grief is a uniquely creative journal and mindful keepsake which draws on the soothing therapeutic power of drawing for self-care/to heal whilst going through the grieving process.

Mourning the Person One Could Have Become
Mourning the Person One Could Have Become

Author: Witold Simon

Publisher: Jason Aronson, Incorporated

Published: 2011-12-16

Total Pages: 287

ISBN-13: 0765708477

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This book introduces the concept of the "Person One Could Have Become" and shows the importance of mourning for individuals with all sorts of traumatic experiences (abuse, neglect, or pregnancy loss). Presented here are philosophical tenets (existential-humanistic) as well as the clinical applications (integrative group psychotherapy). The role of the psychotherapist and appropriate supervision is emphasized. The book utilizes examples of traumatized individuals who struggle during psychotherapy.

Transformation of Rage
Transformation of Rage

Author: Peggy Fitzhugh Johnstone

Publisher: NYU Press

Published: 1994-10-01

Total Pages: 224

ISBN-13: 0814743978

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George Eliot has been widely praised both for the richness of her prose and the universality of her themes. In this compelling study, Peggy Fitzhugh Johnstone goes beyond these traditional foci to examine the role of aggression in Eliot's fiction and to find its source in the author's unconscious sense of loss stemming from traumatic family separations and deaths during her childhood and adolescence. Johnstone demonstrates that Eliot's creative work was a constructive response to her sense of loss and that the repeating patterns in her novels reflect the process of release from her state of mourning for lost loved ones.

Mended by the Muse: Creative Transformations of Trauma
Mended by the Muse: Creative Transformations of Trauma

Author: Sophia Richman

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2014-03-21

Total Pages: 269

ISBN-13: 113691403X

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Mended by the Muse: Creative Transformations of Trauma is an in-depth exploration of the relationship between trauma and creativity. It is about art in the service of healing, mourning, and memorialization. This book addresses the questions of how artistic expression facilitates the healing process; what the therapeutic action of art is, and if there is a relationship between mental instability and creativity. It also asks how self-analysis through art-making can be integrated with psychoanalytic work in order to enrich and facilitate emotional growth. Drawing on four decades of clinical practice and a critical reading of creativity literature, Sophia Richman presents a new theory of the creative process whose core components are relational conceptualizations of dissociation and witnessing. This is an interdisciplinary book which draws inspiration from life histories, clinical case material, neuroscience, and interviews with creators, as well as from various art forms such as film, literature, paintings, and music. Some areas of discussion include: art born of genocide, confrontation with mortality in illness and aging, and the clinical implications of memoirs written by psychoanalysts. Visual images are interspersed throughout the text that illustrate the reverberations of trauma and its creative transformation in the work of featured artists. Mended by the Muse: Creative Transformations of Trauma powerfully articulates how creative action is one of the most effective ways of coping with trauma and its aftershocks - it is in art, in all its forms, that sorrow is given shape and meaning. Here, Sophia Richman shows how art helps to master the chaos that follows in the wake of tragedy, how it restores continuity, connection and the will for a more fully lived life. This book is written for psychoanalysts as well as for other mental health professionals who practice and teach in academic settings. It will also be of interest to graduate and post-graduate students and will be relevant for artists who seek a better understanding of the creative process.

Cancer and Creativity
Cancer and Creativity

Author: Esther Dreifuss-Kattan

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2018-10-25

Total Pages: 385

ISBN-13: 1351206257

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Cancer and Creativity is a dialogue between accounts by cancer patients and survivors and a more clinical consideration and theoretical discussion from a psychoanalytic point of view of using creativity in coping with serious illness. The contributions featured demonstrate the power of creative expression as a tool for dealing with somatic, chronic and potentially life-threatening illnesses, giving patients a way of expressing and managing their individual cancer journeys and its attendant emotional sequelae. Ten artist-patients and survivors, who were involved in several long-term art therapy groups, give accounts of their experiences with cancer and with their support group, where they create paintings, embroidery, digital photography, comic books, maps and other works to express their experiences of being diagnosed and treated for cancer. The contributors describe their symptoms and their relationships to physicians and family members in words and visual representations. The book also addresses the experience of the public when they are confronted with art by cancer patients. Dreifuss-Kattan's own work as a psychoanalyst and art therapist informs her approach to the art space as what Winnicott calls a "transitional space," influenced by both the personal psychological experience and the physical environment. Dreifuss-Kattan closes her discussion with a reflection on terminal cancer care and the complex transferential and countertransferential relationship between patient and therapist. The book ends with a practical guide for both therapy groups, as well as individuals at home, to creatively address their experiences with cancer and its treatments. Cancer and Creativity will be of great interest to psychoanalysts, psychoanalytic psychotherapists, psychooncologists and art therapists, as well as health professionals working in oncology and in palliative care.