The Effect of Early Father Loss on the Artist's Work: Charles Burchfield

Psychoanalysis has had a long history of interest in and research on the psychological effects of loss, the more classical studies being those of Freud (1917) and Bowlby (1969). Hilgard and Newman (1959), trained in Chicago, noted that many patients suffering from a first psychotic episode and hospitalized seem to be having an anniversary reaction to the death of a parent in childhood. Pollock (1970) extended these studies of anniversary reactions to a number of types of trauma. He particularly noted the effect on an adult when that individual reached the age at which his parent died. There seemed to be an expectation that the individual would die at the same age, and perhaps even in the same way. Suicide could be a particular danger. Fleming (1963) developed a long-standing research project when she observed that the patients of candidates that she was supervising, who had lost a parent by death in childhood, had difficulty in forming transference neuroses. These patients seemed fixated in their ability to form relationships at the age at which the loss had occurred. In the analysis of these adults, there seemed to be a denial of the parent's death, difficulty in forming adult relationships, and, at the time of reaching the age at which the parent had died, an exacerbation of whatever pathology the patient had been suffering. Fleming's students worked as a group to develop ways of helping patients resolve issues of mourning, and get back on their developmental tracks.

The Barr-Harris Clinic

Stimulated by the work on adults, the board of directors of the Institute for Psychoanalysis set up a project to investigate the effect of the death of a parent on a