{"id":10905,"date":"2021-12-04T21:07:01","date_gmt":"2021-12-04T21:07:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/iarpp.net\/?post_type=article&p=10905"},"modified":"2021-12-15T15:15:13","modified_gmt":"2021-12-15T15:15:13","slug":"from-the-editor-15","status":"publish","type":"article","link":"https:\/\/iarpp.net\/thesite\/article\/from-the-editor-15\/","title":{"rendered":"From the Editor"},"content":{"rendered":"

Sometimes people leave you
\nHalfway through the wood
\nDo not let it grieve you
\nNo one leaves for good<\/p>\n

Dear colleagues,<\/p>\n

Another year of tremendous loss draws to its close.<\/p>\n

Donna Bassin offered us an exquisite elucidation on \u201cThe Art of Mourning\u201d in her October Symposium presentation, within the panel entitled \u201cRelational Perspectives on the Capacity to Grieve and Mourn in Times of Intense Frustration, Terror, and Destructiveness.\u201d As any of you who had the privilege of attending her talk no doubt recall, Donna shared a photograph of a museum piece, \u201cBy Our Own Hand,\u201d recalling both Tibetan prayer flags and the September 11th \u201cmissing people\u201d posters from the days and weeks following the fall of the Twin Towers.<\/p>\n

Donna shared that, following the great intensity of her volunteer work at Ground Zero supporting grieving September 11 families twenty years ago, she herself sought support. Looking for fellowship among those who knew great loss intimately, she spent time with American war veterans, in an effort to find or create \u201cnew models of community mourning after collective catastrophic loss.\u201d She and a group of veterans with whom she had been working collaborated on a piece that offers just this, a public space for mourning in the presence of a community of empathic witnesses.<\/p>\n

Donna explained:<\/p>\n

\u201cBy Our Own Hand,\u201d an installation created in collaboration with the veterans’ organization of Frontline Arts, was inspired by the ancient practice of Tibetan prayer flags hung to mark a significant occasion. It was conceived to be a reflective memorial space \u2013 a refuge by which to contemplate the price of war and call our attention to military service people who have died by their own hand (a number that consistently remains at a rate more than twice that of the rest of the population.) The installation consists of handmade paper by veterans in the presence of others in the veterans’ community. While seemingly a blank surface, the paper is made from military uniforms and symbolically holds their war experience, as the uniforms contained the blood, tears, and dirt of war. The colors of these flags reflect the various uniforms of each of the branches of the military.<\/p>\n

Their process of making handmade paper from military uniforms embodies their mourning after traumatic loss: finding, reclaiming, re-assembling, and enlivening fragments into art in the presence of a community of empathic witnesses. The artist finds something new, vital, and fresh through the re-organization of the old. Hanna Siegel (1952) wrote: “It is when the world within us is destroyed, when it is dead and loveless, when our loved ones are in fragments, and we in helpless despair — it is then that we must re-create our world anew, re-assemble the pieces, infuse life into dead fragments.\u201d<\/p>\n

With Donna\u2019s permission, here is a photograph of the installation, currently on view at the Montclair Art Museum (Montclair, New Jersey) until September 2023.<\/p>\n

\"\"

Photo by Steve Hellerstein<\/p><\/div>\n

Along with a number of other symposium reflections, Donna\u2019s elaboration of aesthetic responses to death and suffering helped to hold space for us, giving us an opportunity to reckon with and grieve the enormous losses we have witnessed and suffered as a result of Covid-19, as well as all the other political and personal losses \u2013 of life, safety, stability, illusions (Layton, 2018) \u2013 that have mounted so intensely in recent time.<\/p>\n

Here I hope you\u2019ll indulge me a personal note: I lost an old and good friend over the summer, a man of immense talent with a nearly unparalleled appreciation for life, its beauties and absurdities, whose gifts for cherishment were an inspiration to many. Gone too soon at age 54 from cancer, Peter was a composer and lyricist who would otherwise have lived to see the premiere of his latest musical, some 14 years in the making, were it not for the year\u2019s delay caused by Covid. A week from now I\u2019ll return to the theatre \u2013 my first such visit since the onset of the pandemic, and, as fate would have it, in Montclair, New Jersey \u2013 to be in community as an audience member for Peter\u2019s last show.<\/p>\n

Peter had the good fortune to be mentored across nearly 40 years by composer and lyricist nonpareil Stephen Sondheim, a relationship borne of a teenager\u2019s fan letter. As any of you with even a passing interest in Broadway musicals surely know, the master himself passed away at the end of November, less than 4 months after my friend\u2019s passing, and less than 24 hours after enjoying Thanksgiving dinner among friends. I think of Sondheim as my own guide not just to the art and beauty of musical theater at its best and deepest, but also as an early and lasting guide to what it is to be human \u2013 joy, delight, beauty, pain, cleverness, brittleness, sureness, doubt, ecstasy, agony, ambivalence, love. He was also a fervent adherent of ongoing, unwavering commitment to work and craft, to the joys, frustrations and satisfactions of finding, creating, discovering something new: \u201cAnything you do\/Let it come from you\/Then it will be new.\u201d Winnicott never said it better.<\/p>\n

A lot of great analysts are with me in my clinical work, a number of you readers among them, but there is no one I quote more often to patients \u2013 certainly to NY actor and singer patients, but by no means only to them \u2013 than that inexhaustible font of wisdom regarding the human condition, Stephen Sondheim, analyst of the psyche par excellence<\/em> \u2013 himself a well-known analysand of many years\u2019 standing. In fact, I recall my friend Peter once telling me appreciatively, \u201cSteve never speaks of his \u2018therapy\u2019; it\u2019s always his \u2018analysis.\u2019\u201d Sondheim gave us so much beauty and helped us with our pain. His lyrics, so often limning love and death and love in the shadow of death, offer great consolations during times of grief. As he wrote in Into the Woods, <\/em>\u201cSometimes people leave you\/Halfway through the wood\/Do not let it grieve you\/No one leaves for good\/ \u2026 No one is alone.\u201d<\/p>\n

In this year-end issue of The IARPP Bulletin<\/em>, you\u2019ll find a Letter from the President; reports from a dozen IARPP chapters from around the globe; updates from a number of IARPP\u2019s committees, including an inaugural report from the newly-formed Membership Outreach Committee; and a special section collating a range of reflections on the recent symposium.<\/p>\n

I wish you all the joys, and hopefully at least some of the rest, of the holiday season.<\/p>\n

I encourage you to share news of your latest books, papers and presentations in the next edition of\u00a0The IARPP Bookshelf. <\/em>Keep your colleagues abreast of your contributions and activities.\u00a0Submission deadline for the February edition of the Bookshelf<\/em> is Sunday, January 23, 2022<\/strong>. Kindly include the following materials with your submission:<\/p>\n