Albert Camus and Damien Hirst: Always looking on the absurd side of life

The aim of this text is to consider the notions of life and art, revealed in Camus’s texts, mainly The Myth of Sisyphus (published in French in 1942) and The Rebel (1951), and extrapolate them to the present state of contemporary art by analysing a few artworks by Damien Hirst, the richest living artist, a modern Sisyphus in the self-awareness he manifests towards the incongruity of his work. Always looking on the absurd side of life dwells on the inevitability of life and art, accepting the fact, according to Camus’s words, that: the impossible remains impossible. Instead of denying the meaningless and finding some form of redemption, both French writer and British artist have embraced this potential and have used the absurd as a form of conveying meaning to their art. Hirst’s artworks that will be referred in this text include the series: The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living (1991); Mother and Child Divided (1993); For the Love of God (2007) and For Heaven’s Sake (2008).

Tornar-se pai/mãe de uma criança com transtornos graves do desenvolvimento

The interest in research on parents of children with severe developmental disorders has known different focuses of interest over time, from a more psychopathological approach, interested in describing the negative aspects of the impact of having a child with disabilities, to the study of coping strategies used to deal with the situation, and the study of the strength and resilience mobilized by these parents. The big change, however, is that the concern about parents is not only because of the child, but also for what happens in their own development processes. This developmental perspective is addressed here to the construction of the fundamental attachment between mother/father and the baby, how this bond is broken, and how it can be reconstructed when the child has a severe disability diagnosis. Only the resumption of parents’ developmental process will enable them to perform their parenting in an emotionally appropriate and consistent manner, based on adequate responsiveness in everyday life situations. This view allows to open new interdisciplinary challenges about how to work on early intervention in child development and to a comprehensive understanding of the family centered intervention.