Stephen K. Levine's new book explores the nature of traumatic experience and the therapeutic role of the arts and arts therapies in responding to it. It suggests that by re-imagining painful and tragic experiences through art-making, we may release their fixity and negative hold on our lives and resist the temptation to assume the role of the victim. Among the many concerns that the book addresses is the damage done by the tendency to adopt stock methods of understanding and superficial explanations for the depths, complexities, wonders, and exasperations of human experience. The book explores the chaos and fragmentation inherent in both art and human existence and the ways in which memory and imagination can find meaning by acknowledging this chaos and embodying it in appropriate forms. The book builds on the important theories of Stephen K. Levine's previous book, Poiesis: The Language of Psychology and the Speech of the Soul, also published by Jessica Kingsley Publishers. It challenges dominant psychological perspectives on trauma and provides a new framework for arts therapists, psychotherapists, psychologists and social scientists to understand the effectiveness of the arts therapies in responding to human suffering.

Stephen K. Levine's new book explores the nature of traumatic experience and the therapeutic role of the arts and arts therapies in responding to it. It suggests that by re-imagining painful and tragic experiences through art-making, we may release their fixity and negative hold on our lives and resist the temptation to assume the role of the victim. Among the many concerns that the book addresses is the damage done by the tendency to adopt stock methods of understanding and superficial explanations for the depths, complexities, wonders, and exasperations of human experience. The book explores the chaos and fragmentation inherent in both art and human existence and the ways in which memory and imagination can find meaning by acknowledging this chaos and embodying it in appropriate forms. The book builds on the important theories of Stephen K. Levine's previous book, Poiesis: The Language of Psychology and the Speech of the Soul, also published by Jessica Kingsley Publishers. It challenges dominant psychological perspectives on trauma and provides a new framework for arts therapists, psychotherapists, psychologists and social scientists to understand the effectiveness of the arts therapies in responding to human suffering.

Trauma-tragedy investigates the extent to which performance can represent the ‘unrepresentable’ of trauma. Throughout, there is a focus on how such representations might be achieved and if they could help us to understand trauma on personal and social levels. In a world increasingly preoccupied with and exposed to traumas, this volume considers what performance offers as a means of commentary that other cultural products do not. The book’s clear and coherent navigation of complex relation between performance and trauma and its analysis of key practitioners and performances (from Sarah Kane to Socìetas Raffaello Sanzio, Harold Pinter to Forced Entertainment, and Phillip Pullman to Franco B) make it accessible and useful to students of performance and trauma studies, yet rigorous and incisive for scholars and specialists. Duggan explores ideas around the phenomenological and socio-political efficacy and impact of performance in relation to trauma. Ultimately, the book advances a new performance theory or mode, ‘trauma-tragedy’, that suggests much contemporary performance can generate the sensation of being present in trauma through its structural embodiment in performance, or ‘presence-in-trauma effects’.

Journey with me through the odyssey of my dark night of devastation following the demise of Daisy, my wife and teammate of almost fifty-four years. Arrive with me at the dawn of a new day. Survey with me a new vista of life that is worth living - even amidst a changed landscape. Discover with me a serene and biblical secret for triumphing over tragedy and trauma. Stand with me victorious on the summit of a new beginning - blurred but not blinded, dismayed but not dissuaded, wounded but not wasted, bruised but not broken. Tragedy is universal and strikes in many forms - flood, fire, storm, bankruptcy, divorce, disease, death, etc. May these pages inspire strength in tough times, ease pain in the face of loss, seed courage to not quit on life, and stimulate the healing power of treasured memories and of God's Love that enables one to transcend trauma and to triumph in life.

Is life even worth living? That's the gut-wrenching question Tyson Dever had to ask himself after an unexpected tragedy stripped away his lifelong dream, his most important relationship and even his ability to walk. Once he decided to live, he didn't want to simply survive-he wanted to thrive. By sharing the details of tragedy that no one talks about, Tyson offers an action plan for both those enduring personal tragedy, and the loved ones who long to help. Through vivid storytelling, he holds nothing back, explaining how the aftershocks of a moment's collateral damage ripple well beyond the person at the center of a crisis. Learn from Tyson's front row seat in the ICU and rehab, and gain powerful tools tested through his decade of experience as a motivational speaker, to help you overcome the most difficult moments, as well as the everyday obstacles that threaten to hold you back. Trauma doesn't have to be an emotional death sentence. Let Tyson's inspirational message provide the playbook you need to set and crush new goals, even in the midst of excruciating change.

Following the most solemn moments in recent American history, comedians have tested the limits of how soon is “too soon” to joke about tragedy. Comics confront the horrifying events and shocking moments that capture national attention and probe the acceptable, or “sayable,” boundaries of expression that shape our cultural memory. In Tragedy Plus Time, Philip Scepanski examines the role of humor, particularly televised comedy, in constructing and policing group identity and memory in the wake of large-scale events. Tragedy Plus Time is the first comprehensive work to investigate tragedy-driven comedy in the aftermaths of such traumas as the JFK assassination and 9/11, as well as during the administration of Donald Trump. Focusing on the mass publicization of television comedy, Scepanski considers issues of censorship and memory construction in the ways comedians negotiate emotions, politics, war, race, and Islamophobia. Amid the media frenzy and conflicting expressions of grief following a public tragedy, comedians provoke or risk controversy to grapple publicly with national traumas that all Americans are trying to understand for themselves.

Contending that criticism of Marlowe’s plays has been limited by humanist conceptions of tragedy, this book engages with trauma theory, especially psychoanalytic trauma theory, to offer a fresh critical perspective within which to make sense of the tension in Marlowe’s plays between the tragic and the traumatic. The author argues that tragedies are trauma narratives, narratives of wounding; however, in Marlowe’s plays, a traumatic aesthetics disrupts the closure that tragedy seeks to enact. Martin’s fresh reading of Massacre at Paris, which is often dismissed by critics as a bad tragedy, presents the play as deliberately breaking the conventions of the tragic genre in order to enact a traumatic aesthetics that pulls its audience into one of the early modern period’s most notorious collective traumatic events, the massacre of French Huguenots in Paris in 1572. The chapters on Marlowe’s six other plays similarly argue that throughout Marlowe’s drama tragedy is held in tension with-and disrupted by-the aesthetics of trauma.

The contributors to this volume are keenly aware that mental health professionals, while well trained to identify and treat psychopathology, are insufficiently informed or cognizant of human resilience, of how, and of what, intrapsychic, interpersonal, and psychosocial factors are operative in adaptive coping with and recovering from trauma. These authors, several of whom themselves were subjected to severe trauma, address the matter of resilience from the vantage point of their own personal and clinical experiences.

Transforming Tragedy draws from Dr. Hickling's own experience with a near death trauma and how he survived, through all the trials and tribulations that experience involved. It shares how being a psychologist with over 25 years experience, gave him a unique perspective on how to deal with the trauma. Transforming Tragedy further shares excerpted experiences of real patients to illustrate how transformation can occur. It liberally shares anecdotes found in literature as well as eastern and western philosophy to connect in teachable and meaningful ways. Last, it succinctly summarizes in readable text, the very latest and best of what we know about treating psychological trauma, how and why some people are resilient to trauma, and for some how they go on to show positive growth from these traumatic and painful experiences. This book can take the reader from a personal tragedy to a place where they can have hope and move in a positive direction. It is a self-help book, but not in the traditional way. More like a wise friend and teacher is sharing something very personal and powerful to touch wherever they are in their own pain.

A deeply moving story of the beauty and brutality of life, and death, on the world’s most unpredictable and perilous mountain. Sitting just lower than Everest at 8,611 meeres above sea level on the China–Pakistan border, the Savage Mountain claims the lives of even the most experienced climbers. Alongside severe altitude, the weather is notoriously volatile and the climb relentlessly steep. A staggering one in four attempts result in death on the mountain. In One Man’s Climb, Adrian Hayes details an intensely personal account of his attempts to climb K2 – first in 2013 and again in 2014. Absorbing and self-reflective, his journey is as much a story of climbing a mountain as it is a testament to the human spirit’s ability to endure.