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

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.

Introduction: Art and Mourning 1. Alberto Giacometti, Louise Bourgeois, Rainer Maria Rilke Time and Timelessness in Art and Mourning 2. Paul Klee Psychic Improvisations in the Shadow of Death 3. Dinah Gottlibova Painting Trauma—Painting History 4. Ferdinand Hodler From the Vertical of Life to the Horizontal of Death 5. Eva Hesse A Transition from the Edge of Loss to the Containment of Emptiness 6. Lucian Freud The Permeable Membrane 7. Rene Magritte Tracing the Lost Object 8. Albert Einstein Creativity and Intimacy

Esther Dreifuss-Kattan, Ph.D., is a senior faculty member at the New Center for Psychoanalysis in Los Angeles, a psychoanalyst in private practice in Beverly Hills, a clinical specialist at the Simm/Mann UCLA Center for Integrative Oncology, and a practicing artist and curator of art.