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At the site of the destroyed twin towers in New York City, in the lobby of an insurance company building near ground zero, a mural was displayed throughout most of 2002. It consisted of a series of self-portraits done by thousands of children, many of whom had lost a parent or other relative in the 9/11 attacks; others had lost parents in wars around the world. An extract from one of Hanna Segal's (1952) first psychoanalytic papers was placed beside the mural and served as its motto.
It is when the world within us is destroyed, when it is dead and loveless, when our loved ones are in fragments, and we ourselves in helpless despair – it is then that we must re-create our world anew, re-assemble the pieces, infuse life into dead fragments, re-create life. (p. 199)
Marygrace Berberian (2003), an art therapist and social worker who came up with the idea for the project, in which eventually 3,100 children's self-portraits of grief were combined, says, “Children were recreating life in their art. Creativity allows for describing, building and reconfiguring an injured object so that mourning can begin” (p. 33).
Segal (1952) insists on the unconditional necessity of acknowledging loss and mourning if the creative impulse is to exist: “It is only when the loss has been acknowledged and the mourning experienced that re-creation can take place” in the work of art (p. 199). For Segal, “a psychoanalytic session is an aesthetic experience, because it deals really with the same problem – how to get in touch with terrible things and contain them and sublimate them and lead them to the point of restoration” (cited in Quinodoz, 2008).1
Segal is well known for her application of the work of Melanie Klein to the fie