Following the suicide of the celebrated photographer Francesca Woodman at the age of twenty-two, the creative work of her artist parents, Betty and George Woodman, was profoundly transformed. Following Abraham and To?ro?k, these aesthetic developments seem analogous to internalization of the lost object. Incorporative processes in George Woodman’s work subsume and immobilize transformative identifications, suggesting a dynamic tension between the symbolizing processes that facilitate mourning, and the incorporative processes invested in opposing it. Visualizing the response to unspeakable loss, the art of the Woodmans gives sorrow form. You’ll see many more works of art here than will appear in the published version.

Adele Tutter, M.D., Ph.D. is Associate Clinical Professor of Psychiatry; Director, Psychoanalytic Studies Program, Graduate School of Arts and Sciences; Training and Supervising Analyst, Center for Psychoanalytic Training and Research, Columbia University; Faculty, New York Psychoanalytic Institute. For her interdisciplinary scholarship, largely concerned with mourning and creativity, she has won the Menninger, Liebert, Hartmann, CORST, Holtzman, and Ticho Prizes. She is author of Dream House: An Intimate Portrait of the Philip Johnson Glass House; co-editor: Grief and its Transcendence: Memory, Identity, Creativity; editor: The Muse: Psychoanalytic Explorations of Creative Inspiration. She is a member of the editorial boards of International Journal of Psychoanalysis, Psychoanalytic Quarterly, and American Imago, and regularly contributes art criticism to The Brooklyn Rail.

Jane G. Tillman, PhD, ABPP, is the Evelyn Stefansson Nef Director of the Erikson Institute for Education, Research, and Advocacy of the Austen Riggs Center; Assistant Clinical Professor, Yale Child Study Center; Lecturer on Psychology, Department of Psychiatry, Harvard Medical School. She serves on the editorial board of Psychoanalytic Psychology and is a past Associate Editor of The Psychoanalytic Quarterly. Her research focuses on suicide assessment, intervention, and postvention.