The Story of Original Loss

Grieving Existential Trauma in the Arts and the Art of Psychoanalysis
1. Auflage 2024
ISBN: 978-0-367-36707-7
Verlag: Routledge

Buch, Englisch, 260 Seiten, Format (B × H): 161 mm x 240 mm, Gewicht: 561 g

Reihe: Art, Creativity, and Psychoanalysis Book Series

This book explores the universal human existential trauma of "original loss," a trauma the author describes as arising from our primal, human evolutionary loss of experiencing ourselves as innately belonging to, and instinctively at home within, the larger natural world.

In this trauma arose our existential awareness of impermanence and mortality along with the need to mourn that loss in order to create a sense of belonging and identity. The book describes how the invention of art and group ritual became the collective ways we mourn our shared existential loss. It describes as well how it is the art within the psychoanalytic practice that enables both patient and analyst to grieve their individual versions of our shared original loss. Drawing on the work of Winnicott, Loewald and Ogden, as well as art theory and religion, this book offers a new perspective on the intersection of metaphorical artistic thinking and psychoanalysis.

This book will appeal to psychoanalysts, psychotherapists, and scholars of poetic, visual and muscial metaphor, creativity, evolution and history of art.

Zielgruppe

Postgraduate, Professional, and Professional Practice & Development

Autoren/Hrsg.

Slavin, Malcolm Owen

Slavin PhD, Malcolm Owen

Fachgebiete

• Sozialwissenschaften Psychologie Psychologie / Allgemeines & Theorie Psychologische Theorie, Psychoanalyse Psychoanalyse (S. Freud)
• Geisteswissenschaften Kunst Kunst, allgemein Geschichte der Kunstwissenschaft und Kunstkritik
• Geisteswissenschaften Kunst Kunst, allgemein Kunsttheorie, Kunstphilosophie
• Sozialwissenschaften Psychologie Allgemeine Psychologie Kognitionspsychologie Emotion, Motivation, Handlung

Inhaltsverzeichnis

1. The Enigma of Cave Art 2. Original Loss and the Emergence of Existential Anxiety 3. Surviving Original Loss  Part 1: Envisioning Winnicott’s “Transitional Creativity” and “Object Use” in Evolutionary-Existential Terms 4. Surviving Original Loss  Part 2: Envisioning Loewald’s Dynamic Unconscious as an Evolved-Existential Structure 5. Original Loss in Everyday Life, Part I: A Developmental Story 6. Original Loss in Everyday Life, Part II: Existential Grieving in Development and Clinical Process 7. Original Loss and Original Sin 8. After the Fall: From Sin to Loss 9. Why Do We Need Art? 10. How Art Works 11. Traveling with Metaphor 12. Metaphor, Playing and Pretending 13. The Art of Losing 14. The Art of Losing and the Presence of Absence in Metaphor 15. Mourning Versus Melancholia in the Arts 16. From Melancholia to Mourning in The Arabian Nights 17. Loss Made Visible 18. The Music Knows 19. Epilogue: Home for a Hybrid, Divided Species

Über Autor(innen)

Malcolm Owen Slavin, PhD, is a founder, faculty and supervisor at the Massachusetts Institute for Psychoanalysis, and a director of the International Association for Relational Psychoanalysis and the Council for Psychoanalytic Self Psychology. A Yale graduate, with a PhD in psychology from Harvard, he has authored many papers, including "Why the Analyst Needs to Change," and a book (with D. Kriegman), The Adaptive Design of the Human Psyche: Psychoanalysis, Evolutionary Biology, and the Therapeutic Process.