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“What are the roles of creativity in the wake of loss?”, David Aberbach asks in Surviving Trauma: Loss, Literature and Psychoanalysis. Surprisingly, literary scholars have not yet systematically explored this important question. Most of the
research on the theme of loss in literature has been done by psychologists, such as Anthony Storr, Malcolm Fraser, and George Pickering. Despite the enormous resurgence of psychoanalytic literary criticism, few critics are familiar with the clinical research on loss and bereavement, and the insights of John Bowlby's monumental three-volume work, Attachment and Loss (1969-1980), have not yet become widely known among literary critics.
David Aberbach is uniquely qualified to show that the growing clinical interest in loss and bereavement has long been anticipated by creative writers. An Associate Professor of Jewish Studies at McGill University, he studied literature at the University of London and Oxford and studied psychotherapy at the Tavistock Clinic in London. As the subtitle of his book implies, he takes an interdisciplinary approach, combining literature and psychoanalysis. Surviving Trauma represents the first full-length thematic study of loss in literature.
Surviving Trauma contains nine chapters, each about 20 pages long. The chapter titles reflect the comprehensive nature of the study: “Creativity and the Survivor,” “Loss and Creativity,” “Loss and Dreams,” “Loss and Childhood Memories,” “Grief and Mysticism,” “Loss and Philosophical Ideas,” “Loss and Charisma,” “Grief and Pathology,” and “Loss and Suicide.” Aberbach discusses how mourning has affected a wide range of works by novelists, poets, and philosophers ranging from Walt Whitman to D. H. Lawrence to Spinoza. The chapter on “Loss and Creativity” contains one of Aberbach's most important insights, the recognition that the creative process may help the artist to express, master, and work through intense personal grief:
[Creativity] might give the bereaved greater co