The Art(s) of Traumatic Loss and the Work of Mourning: art making, collaboration, and the journey from bystander to empathic self-witness

Donna Bassin, PhD with Sam Gerson, PhD

Friday, February 10, 6:30-8:30pm PT via zoom

Donna Bassin, Ph.D., is a fine art photographer, psychoanalyst, and mental health consultant to a veterans' community struggling with moral injury and traumatic loss. Her presentation, an artist talk, will include illustrations from her photographic series, film clips, and images of her public installations. Through her collaborative art, Donna will address a range of themes organized around loss and mourning. These include her personal experience of childhood loss and the guilt of survivorship. Donna also reflects on seeking empathic communities and visual analogies for psychological states.

Donna's art projects began after 9/11. The collective trauma resulting from that day punctured our illusory fabric of safety and challenged psychoanalytic ideas about the nature of mourning. Donna aims to facilitate conversations about art as a reparative relational strategy that can provide a witnessing function. It seeks to restore a sense of agency and mitigate the destructiveness that sometimes follows trauma.

Learning Objectives:

1. Explain the difference between Freud's view of Mourning and Dr. Bassin's understanding of the response to Trauma
2. Discuss how the making and the reception of Art serve as a reparative witness to the Trauma