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.

Table of Contents:
Illustrations and credits Acknowledgements Contributors Foreword Daria Colombo Prologue Give sorrow words Adele Tutter Part I Family, Community, Society 1 Cicero on grief and friendship David Konstan 2 Rituals of memory Jan Assmann 3 The Staten Island September 11 Memorial: Creativity, mourning, and the experience of loss Jeffrey Karl Ochsner 4 Designing the Staten Island September 11 Memorial Masayuki Sono 5 Response to Part I: The Relics of Absence John Gale 6 Discussion of Part I: Arcs of Recovery Paul Schwaber Part II Theory, Specificity, Authenticity 7 Further reflections on object loss and mourning Marion M. Oliner 8 Memorial spaces: Further comments on mourning following multiple traumatic losses Anna Ornstein 9 The long-term effects of the mourning process Otto F. Kernberg 10 Mourning, double reality and the culture of remembering and forgiving: A very personal report Léon Wurmser 11 Discussion of Part II: Nothing Gold Can Stay? Jeanine Vivona Part III History, Ancestry, Memory 12 Lost wax to lost fathers: Installations by British sculptor Jane McAdam Freud Jane McAdam Freud in conversation with Adele Tutter 13 Sudek, Janáček, Hukvaldy, and Me: Notes on art, loss, and nationalism under political oppression Adele Tutter 14 Discussion of Part III: Image, Loss, Delay Diane O’Donoghue Epilogue "’Tis nameless woe" Léon Wurmser