The Story of Original Loss

Grieving Existential Trauma in the Arts and the Art of Psychoanalysis

Malcolm Owen Slavin, PhD

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2024
• Print ISBN: 9780367367084
• eBook ISBN: 9781040018958
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Creative Ability in Psychology

This book explores the universal human existential trauma of "original loss," a trauma the author describes as arising from our primal, human evolutionary loss of experiencing ourselves as innately belonging to, and instinctively at home within, the larger natural world.

In this trauma arose our existential awareness of impermanence and mortality along with the need to mourn that loss in order to create a sense of belonging and identity. The book describes how the invention of art and group ritual became the collective ways we mourn our shared existential loss. It describes as well how it is the art within the psychoanalytic practice that enables both patient and analyst to grieve their individual versions of our shared original loss. Drawing on the work of Winnicott, Loewald and Ogden, as well as art theory and religion, this book offers a new perspective on the intersection of metaphorical artistic thinking and psychoanalysis.

This book will appeal to psychoanalysts, psychotherapists, and scholars of poetic, visual and muscial metaphor, creativity, evolution and history of art.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Endorsement Page
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Foreword by George Hagman
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: The Story of “Original Loss”
• 1 The Enigma of Cave Art
• 2 Original Loss and the Emergence of Existential Anxiety
• 3 Surviving Original Loss, Part I: Envisioning Winnicott’s “Transitional Creativity” and “Object Use” in Evolutionary-Existential Terms
• 4 Surviving Original Loss, Part II: Envisioning Loewald’s Dynamic Unconscious as an Evolved-Existential Structure
• 5 Original Loss in Everyday Life, Part I: A Developmental Story
• 6 Original Loss in Everyday Life, Part II: Existential Grieving in Development and Clinical Process
• 7 Original Loss and Original Sin: Myth, Mortality and Morality
• 8 After the Fall: From Sin to Loss
• 9 Why Do We Need Art?
• 10 How Art Works
• 11 Traveling with Metaphor
• 12 Metaphor, Playing and Pretending
• 13 The Art of Losing: Some Psychoanalytic Versions of the Evolved Capacity for Grieving and Mourning
• 14 The Art of Losing and the Presence of Absence in Metaphor
• 15 Mourning Versus Melancholia in the Arts
• 16 From Melancholia to Mourning in The Arabian Nights
• 17 Loss Made Visible: Grieving Existential Trauma in the Paintings of Edward Hopper
• 18 The Music Knows
• 19 Epilogue: Home for a Hybrid, Divided Species
• Index