Grief, Aesthetics and Emotional Regulation

The workshop was inspired by and build around the forthcoming book Aesthetics in Grief and Mourning (University of Chicago Press, 2024) by Professor Kathleen Higgins, an American Professor of Philosophy at the University of Texas at Austin and Honorary Visiting Professor at the University of York.

After a few words of welcome by Matthew Ratcliffe, the Principal Investigator of the AHRC project and a Professor in the Department of Philosophy at York, Professor Higgins spoke about some of the principal themes in her new book. She explained how loss and the grief resulting from this leave us feeling disconnected from the world around us. This is because our personal connections anchor us to places. Without the person we knew there, a place can feel empty and unfamiliar and we no longer feel secure or ‘at home’. There is the danger then that, faced with this frightening unfamiliarity, we withdraw into ourselves and remain cognitively stuck in the past, unwilling to embrace the present. Artistic practices help us not only to express and make sense of our grief but aid us in recognising and developing new connections with the current world around us or relating our past to the present. It is also the case that after experiencing loss we often long for the familiar. Too much predictability can however mean we become ossified in our habits and then our mood and productivity suffers. Art can open up a space of imaginative playfulness where we explore new potential ways of being in the world.

It is not just practising art however that can be beneficial to the bereaved. Engaging with aesthetically-pleasing objects remind us that, although we have lost something precious, there is still much beauty in the world to enjoy – hence the widespread custom of sending flowers to the bereaved. Professor Higgins also observed how artistic heirlooms, because of their aesthetic value, are ideal vehicles for preserving the memory of a loved one. She concluded by remarking how seeing our grief mirrored in great works of art can be reassuring and cathartic. The talk was very well received and a participant contributed the thought that grief and loss could have their own intrinsic aesthetic value as evinced in fleeting natural phenomena and the sensation of poignancy.  

The next speaker, Dr Joel Krueger from the University of Exeter talked about the recent phenomenon of grief chat-bots as part of a wider ‘grief-tech’ landscape in which technology supports the development of multi-sensory aesthetic environments in which bereaved individuals can, in a sense, continue to engage with the person they have lost. These chat-bots are trained on a large data-set of communications from the dead person – oral and written – mined from social media and other sources in order to recreate that individual’s voice, opinions, habits of speech and mannerisms. Although there might be the concern that some people would use this capability to perpetuate a maladaptive response of denying the loved one’s passing, in practice it has been found that those who engage with this technology are not so much deluding themselves as willingly suspending disbelief. Rather as a participant in grief counselling is sometimes invited to write a letter to the deceased person or imagine, in speaking to the therapist, that they are addressing the dead person, the technology can allow the bereaved person to work through their grief. This could, for instance, be by articulating what they did not get a chance to say to the person before they died or enabling them to preserve (at least for a while longer) certain aspects of the person and the advisory and/or emotionally supportive role they fulfilled for them in life.

The talk sparked many questions, including one around the danger that a chat-bot could ‘go rogue’ and start acting out of the character of the deceased and/or raise some traumatic past experience that the person was not ready to address, particularly in their currently vulnerable state.

Professor Ulrika Maude from the University of Bristol explored the place of grief in literature, considering works ranging from Shakespeare through to contemporary authors. She challenged the position adopted by Sigmund Freud and those who followed him that healthy mourning requires letting go completely of the departed person. Quoting from Shakespeare’s play ‘King John’, and poems by William Wordsworth and Thomas Hardy, she argued that it is not necessarily pathological to try to perpetuate an aspect or a memory of a person – as Shakespeare put it grief is a ‘friend’ so long as it keeps the memory of a loved one alive. Indeed, much modern literature encourages the reader to dwell on grief.

There was an interesting debate in the Q&A which followed around the duality of a temporally-specific personal expression by the author and a more universal poetic expression which transcends time, and whether there was any tension between these. Another theme identified was the impossibility, even for a great author or orator, of fully expressing feelings of grief in words.

The final presentation of the delay was delivered by Dr Jussi Saarinen from the University of Jyväskylä, Finland about how grieving is mediated through painting. Dr Saarinen invoked the term ‘affective scaffolding’ to explain how artists, through their work, reimagine their environment in order to regulate and give expression to their feelings of grief and evoke more positive feelings. He argued that there is therapeutic value in the tangibility of art-making when grief can, as Professor Higgins highlighted in her talk, engender feelings of incoherence and disassociation. Paintings by René Magritte, whose mother committed suicide when he was 14, were chosen to pose the question: ‘How does a person’s awareness and/or acceptance of their grief as motivating, to an extent, their art-making, influence the nature of the resulting work?’ Magritte was explicit in his writings that none of his painting bare any relation to his mother’s death however some of the motifs he chose bear such close resemblance to the circumstances of this death as to doubt the veracity, if not the honesty, of that statement.

The day brought together a number of fascinating case studies across a variety of creative media of how grief has inspired or influenced art works and how aesthetic practices shape and regulate the experience of grief and its course over time. It seems to be a universal human impulse not only to make something aesthetically moving and artistically expressive out of adverse experiences like grief and loss but to recognise in this a way of processing, learning from and ultimately becoming reconciled to that loss.

Author: Philip Kerrigan