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A crucial figure, usually a parent, is lost in early childhood. Mourning is arrested or deflected because of the immaturity of the bereaved. Years later, creativity flowers in the bereft subject. Grief clearly imprints the artistic products. In good measure this brief volume scrutinizes literary creativity that it proposes is kindled by the urge to resume and process a checked bereavement. Its audior, Aberbach, is a psychoanalytically trained professor of Jewish studies at McGill University.
Pithy literary selections illustrate Aberbach's psychodynamic postulates. The poignancy of tJhese choices, sometimes a mere couplet, dissolves intellectual and isolating defenses in the reader against the helplessness, panic, sorrow, outrage elicited by the subject's misfortune. Poring over these lines from the Psalms permits no escape from feeling cast aside along with the pining to merge with the parent:
For my father and my mother have forsaken me, but the Lord will take me up.
Again, attend the blighting guilt evoked in the recounting by Robert Frost of his wife's angry charge that “You couldn't care!” in an argument years after the death from cholera of his first-born son. He had buried the child with his own hands.
You could sit there with the stains on your shoes Of the fresh earth from your own baby's grave And talk about your everyday concerns.
At this moment neither the agonized poet nor his wife consider that deadened sensitivity could have been a bulwark against anguish.
The reader may well close this book imagining everyone as carrying within an identity as a forlorn two-year-old stripped of a mother, men shipped out to aloof grandparents or an impersonal foster home. The new caretakers fail to address the child's calamitous feelings: being abandoned,