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In the second scene of Shakespeare's Hamlet, Claudius, seeming in masterful control of courtly business, glibly reminds Hamlet in his “inky cloak” of the universality of death and mourning, “since the first cor[p]se” (1.2.105). Loss of fathers is common; grieving for a limited time prescribed; life moves on. “Why seems it so particular to thee?” (1.2.75), says Gertrude to her son in this play of “maimed rites” (5.1.12). Yet Hamlet is unconsoled. He has “that within which passes show” (1.2.85). In the world of this tragedy, both the intense particularity of grief and the human need for shared mourning are poisoned by guilt and the hasty appearance of renewal. How can such tragic failures be transcended? How can grief find, in its own time, adequate symbolic representation and communal recognition?
Grief and Its Transcendence: Memory, Identity, Creativity, a superb collection of essays edited by Adele Tutter and Léon Wurmser, explores these questions with theoretical sophistication, historical range, and interdisciplinary richness. In an expansive development of a panel held at the Winter Meeting of the American Psychoanalytic Association in January 2013 (see Nimroody 2014), Tutter and Wurmser have assembled writings (and over three dozen black-and-white illustrations) that cover mythology, literature, poetry, history, anthropology, theology, photography, music, painting, and sculpture, as well as clinical experiences and theoretical reflections from several perspectives. Most important, within its broad compass, the “personal specificity” (p. xxxiii) of loss, trauma, and creative responses pervades the volume. Though Freud's “Mourning and Melancholia” (1917) remains a touchstone, the essays are intended to move well beyond Freud's formula of successful mourning as an acceptance of finality of loss (“the verdict of reality that the object no longer exists” [p. 255], a view his own painful experience proved incomplete) to explore individual and collective ways in which