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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.
List of contents
1. The Enigma of Cave Art 2. Original Loss and the Emergence of Existential Anxiety 3. Surviving Original Loss Part 1: Envisioning Winnicott’s “Transitional Creativity” and “Object Use” in Evolutionary-Existential Terms 4. Surviving Original Loss Part 2: 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 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 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 18. The Music Knows 19. Epilogue: Home for a Hybrid, Divided Species
About the author
Malcolm Owen Slavin, PhD, is a founder, faculty and supervisor at the Massachusetts Institute for Psychoanalysis, and a director of the International Association for Relational Psychoanalysis and the Council for Psychoanalytic Self Psychology. A Yale graduate, with a PhD in psychology from Harvard, he has authored many papers, including "Why the Analyst Needs to Change," and a book (with D. Kriegman), The Adaptive Design of the Human Psyche: Psychoanalysis, Evolutionary Biology, and the Therapeutic Process.
Summary
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.
