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.

It will be a must for psychoanalysts, psychotherapists, psychiatrists, and scholars within other disciplines who are interested in the topics of grief, bereavement and creativity.

Adele Tutter, M.D., Ph.D. is Assistant Clinical Professor of Psychiatry, Columbia University; and Faculty, the Columbia University Center for Psychoanalytic Training and Research and the New York Psychoanalytic Institute. She is the author of Dream House: An Intimate Portrait of the Philip Johnson Glass House and editor of The Muse: Psychoanalytic Explorations of Creative Inspiration. Dr. Tutter is in private practice in Manhattan.

Léon Wurmser, M.D., Ph.D. is Past Clinical Professor of Psychiatry, University of West Virginia, and Training and Supervising Analyst at the Contemporary Freudian Society. He has authored and co-authored many books on the theory and practice of psychoanalysis, including The Mask of Shame, Jealousy and Envy-New Views on Two Powerful Emotions, and Nothing Good Is Allowed to Stand. Dr. Wurmser lectures extensively in the USA and abroad.

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, Janá¿ek, 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