Art and Mourning: The role of creativity in healing trauma and loss

by Esther Dreifuss-Kattan

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.

207 pages, Kindle Edition

First published March 24, 2016

Reviews

[Dilyana Karadzhova · Rating 5 out of 5]

Very interesting analysis of artistic and scientific work. It uses psychoanalysis to see art through the eyes of trauma, loss, and mourning. It critically discusses cases when healing was enabled by art but also cases when the artist found himself trapped in a vicious circle of re-living the trauma.