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The Story of Original Loss: Grieving Existential Trauma in the Arts and the Art of Psychoanalysis

Author(s) : Malcolm Owen Slavin

Reviews and Endorsements

This fantastic book offers a unique perspective. It reminds us that the study of the psyche is much broader than any strictly psychoanalytic or psychotherapeutic approach. Intimately linked to evolutionary anthropology, visual arts and music, the book connects the wisdom of these disciplines to our theoretical and clinical work in a way that we will refer to for many years.
Gianni Nebbiosi, President, ISIPS, Institute for Self Psychology and Relational Psychoanalysis, Rome, Italy

This brilliant, artistic book takes us into the original loss of our prehuman, visceral, innate ways of knowing and defining ourselves and our world. Slavin argues that the loss meant our psychological survival as a species depended upon a vital, new creative capacity to build human subjectivity—including building meaning around what became a new awareness of life’s finitude and our mortality. Through the invention of visual, verbal and musical metaphors, the arts carry the process of creating meaning around connection and loss that is closely akin to the art of psychoanalysis.
Beatrice Beebe, PhD, Clinical Professor, Columbia University Medical Center

Original Loss offers the Reader a powerful, finely presented view of how our contemporary human consciousness originated and became active. The author merges three perspectives: the evolutionary, the psychoanalytic and the existential. Beautifully conceived and precisely delivered, from early hominids to the theories of Freud and Winnicott, Slavin demonstrates that it is loss and grief that generate the human ability to create metaphor as the vehicle of consciousness of ourselves as both agents and as objects. This masterpiece is a radical and innovative book that will change both contemporary psychoanalytic thinking and our understanding of aesthetic language."
Kevin McGrath, Associate of the Department of South Asian Studies and Poet Laureate at Lowell House, Harvard University; author of Raja Yudhisthira, Vyasa Redux, Fame, and several other volumes on Bronze Age literature and metaphor

Both new and seasoned readers of Mal Slavin’s work will be enriched by this profound book. Drawing from his decades of thinking and writing along with his clinical acumen, this book is novel, evocative and compelling. Slavin ignites our imagination, stirs our minds and offers a balm for navigating and grieving our abiding existential angst. He probes our ongoing struggles with mortality, loss, longing, finding, losing again, along with our need to land in places beyond words. He sees the arts—visual, musical and indeed psychoanalytic—as crucial places where we can express and find expression for complex and contradictory struggles. Reading this book is an experience that goes well beyond the words it contains.
Hazel Ipp, Ph.D., Editor in Chief Emeritus, Psychoanalytic Dialogues: International Journal of Relational Perspectives; Founding Director and Past President of the International Association of Relational Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy; Founding Director of the Toronto Institute of Contemporary Psychoanalysis

The Story of Original Loss is a revolutionary new version of the mythical account of original sin and the Fall from Eden. Freudian drive-based psychoanalysis unfolded within the framework of the “sins” of Eros and Thanatos as the origin of human emotional suffering. Relational psychoanalysis shifted towards the traumatic effect of relationships. Here, Slavin takes a new step towards a psychoanalysis in which all trauma is actually a re-traumatization of the Original Loss that shaped us as a species. Brilliantly, he evokes the immediacy of trauma in the arts and in being psychologically understood. It is thus warmly recommended for both literary and psychoanalytic readers.
Ramon Riera, M.D. has translated and introduced Self Psychology and Relational Psychoanalysis to the Spanish- and Catalan-speaking psychoanalytic worlds