You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Mended by the Muse: Creative Transformations of Trauma is a sustained, impassioned argument for the psychotherapeutic potential of the creative arts. In particular, author Sophia Richman (a member of the faculty at New York University Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis) argues that art plays an important role in the process of self-repair following trauma. Building on Winnicott's idea of transitional space, Richman describes how the artist plays with aspects of reality and fantasy, and in the process comes to articulate and give aesthetic form to aspects of self-experience that have been damaged and hidden—perhaps even from the self.
The book begins with an account of Richman's family's experiences of trauma during and after the Holocaust. Posing as a daughter and her widowed Catholic mother, Richman and her mother lived out the Second World War in plain sight, all the time fearing discovery of their Jewish identities. Her father, having escaped from a concentration camp early in the war, hid in their attic, where he eventually began to compose a memoir of his incarceration and escape. Richman describes how the process of writing down her father's words (and then later her own) provided “a sense of control and mastery over the humiliating experiences” (p. 15) they had endured. In addition, she notes that in her father's case, sharing his writing with her mother helped the two of them to reconnect. However, her own failure to connect with her father endured during the years of hiding and continued throughout their later years. Clearly, the story of family trauma and recovery through art is fundamental to Richman's thesis.
Richman moves from her personal story to an exploration of the psychoanalytic literature on creativity. This chapter is an excellent review,