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This is a time of loss and lessness. The economic depression has resulted in the loss of many jobs. People are buying less, both quantitatively and qualitatively. Tensions due to exacerbated, formerly repressed conflicts are emerging in full force. And, as Edward Luttwak (1992) has noted, in America we have an “annual total of 4.7 million assaults, million plus robberies, and 22,000 homicides at the last count” (p. 7). When we move from these types of losses to various individual losses and the reactions to them, we move into a domain that has occupied psychoanalysts, psychiatrists, psychologists, and other mental health practitioners—that of mourning, grief, and liberation and the resolutional mechanisms designed to reestablish preloss psychic equilibrium.
Moorjani teaches French, but her scholarly interest is in psychoaesthetics, discourse theory, and feminist social critiques of the literary and visual configurations of loss. Her approach is novel and one that is known probably to few clinicians and mental health theoreticians. But what she has to say is, or should be, of great interest to these professionals. This complex, original work is nontraditional in its approach. Her in-depth analyses of the various literary and artistic creations of Mérimée, Nerval, Hoffmann, H. D., Anne Hébert, Proust, Beckett, Kollwitz, Giacometti, Klee, Gidal, and Oulton shed new lights on the relationship among artistic creativity, imagery, and the mourning process. Her approach is new and initially difficult to understand. But careful reading, rereading, and contemplation of the author's approach, methods, and conclusions is well worth the effort. One must keep in mind, however, she is not a clinician, and her experience of textual, thematic, stylistic, and referential contexts may be at variance with those of the reader who utilizes other frames of observation. This is one of the bonuses of studying this monograph. It can open new vistas for the reader to consider and become famili