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This book on the subject of trauma, loss, and mourning, is necessary, because it addresses devastating human experience that needs to be understood from a psychoanalytic perspective. It grew out of a conference, “Psychoanalysis and Politics,” held at the Swedish Psychoanalytic Society, and is compelling and challenging. That it is sometimes painful to read attests to the authenticity and depth of the contributions by ten very focused authors. The book indeed is a major contribution to the psychoanalytic literature on trauma.
A number of chapters follow a theme of the role of play, and the arts, in our ability to approach and process experiences of, and memories of, extreme trauma. Since a major aspect of this book is a psychoanalytic understanding of political events, events which create extreme trauma, these chapters address traumatic experiences arising in various cultures in different parts of the world, mostly in the 20th century C.E. (Common Era).
The very first chapter, “War games—mourning loss through play,” by Hannah Zeavin, sets a particular tone, rooting contemporary understanding of the effects of war time trauma in Freud, invoking Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Freud's description of the fort-da game played by a child who is attempting to master his fears of losing his mother (1920-1922). Zeavin then raises a question, “is this re-enactment of a trauma, through the loci of the toy, unique to childhood?” (p. 2). The question leads her to link the child's game with adult trauma and loss, with the adult “playing,” with the art functioning as “toy.” She explores the work of three contemporary artists who, she says, use play in art in a way that goes beyond working through to comment on the traumatic experience, so that the artists “make artworks focused on remembrance, but also are able to make interventions on the process of remembering and performing. This includes references to therapy and ideas surrounding healing from trauma” (p. 2). Thus we have trauma r