Grief and Its Transcendence

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, Society1 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 MemorialMasayuki Sono 5 Response to Part I: The Relics of AbsenceJohn Gale 6 Discussion of Part I: Arcs of RecoveryPaul Schwaber Part II Theory, Specificity, Authenticity7 Further reflections on object loss and mourning Marion M. Oliner 8 Memorial spaces: Further comments on mourning following multiple traumatic lossesAnna Ornstein 9 The long-term effects of the mourning processOtto 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, Memory12 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 oppressionAdele Tutter 14 Discussion of Part III: Image, Loss, Delay Diane O’Donoghue Epilogue "’Tis nameless woe"Léon Wurmser

In a book at once intellectually rigorous and emotionally astute, the authors investigate the forms of melancholia that constitute mourning. Eloquent and varied, these essays give words to wordless experiences; they reify loss and respond to it, often with quiet poetry. — Andrew Solomon (The Noonday Demon and Far From the Tree)To the study of heartache and the struggle for its transformation, to "the substance under the shadow," Adele Tutter, Léon Wurmser, and their coauthors of this remarkably powerful volume bring the freshness of personal immediacy. Rather than third party reports, they tell their own stories: the anguish of loss, the pain of trauma, the struggle to transcend being bereft through movements of memory, fresh growth of identity, and the creation of art. Here, it all is present, specific and alive, not abstract and detached. Authors already known for their scholarship now bring to their statements that special tenderness that comes from naked vulnerability. The result is a work of rare significance, one that is beautifully written and as engagingly compelling to read as a fine novel, yet one that advances appreciably our understanding. These voices describe humanity, not mere pathology. These voices will echo within, and they will last. — Warren Poland (Melting the Darkness: The Dyad and Principles of Clinical Practice)