Remember. Mourning and the creative process

Abstract

ObjectivesThe authors attempt to bring to light certain psychic mechanisms that make sense of death, in particular through objects of high symbolic value that act as links between the dead and the living. MethodThis clinical article draws upon an heuristic methodology. We compare the analysis of a situation involving antenatal death, paradigmatic of grief that risks becoming pathological, and that of the artistic creation of the visual artist Michel Nedjar, in connection with the Jewish genocide. ResultsThe psychological working-through of the loss of a loved one carries with it significant psychopathological risks. If, in many case, the funeral rites (religious or secular), and the support of relatives and of the community provide the mourners with a framework for a grieving process that allows them to live with the loss (and not to not live without the deceased), some particularly traumatic situations preclude access to non-pathological mourning. DiscussionThe authors will question the exclusivity of the Freudian model of Mourning and Melancholia by drawing upon the Winnicottian theoretical model of transitional phenomena to illuminate the psychic processes at work. ConclusionsThe creativity at play in these two situations contains a certain distinction: sublimation for the artist, a resurgence of transitional phenomena for the bereaved individual.