Orphans of the Real by Marilyn Charles

Reflections on Love and Loss

Psychoanalysis-based Poetry Collection Repositions Grief into Remembrance

TRAVERSE CITY, MICHIGAN— Describing the sacredness of suffering and the process of working through loss and memory, Marilyn Charles adds to her existing publications with Orphans of the Real: Reflections on Love and Loss, a poetry collection that follows her journey of self-exploration through psychoanalysis, and depicts the landscape of turning loss into remembrance. 

“This book was written during my own psychoanalysis, as I reflected on loss as it has permeated various layers of my experience,” Charles described. “This is an era where human suffering is often rewritten and pathologized as 'depression'. Suffering is part of the human experience and we are social beings, needing to be able to share with one another our sorrows as well as our joy. In a time when so many are displaced, and the world tells us to just 'move on,' we need spaces to be more present with the truths of our lives and experience.”

Understanding the Grief

Since she was young, she has turned to writing as her “first language,” finding writing through thoughts and feelings to be easier than verbalizing them.

“My early life was shaped by the shadows of the Holocaust, unspoken trails of trauma that informed my being in ways that psychoanalysis has helped me to uncover and integrate. The poems reflect these uncoverings, through various lenses of relationship,” Charles explained. 

She denotes her life as being shaped by loss, and nods toward Judy Atkinson’s concept of recognizing “trauma trails” in terms of unresolved mourning, which in turn allow people to face traumatic pasts to strengthen connections and human ties. 

While the collection focuses on grief on a surface level, it encourages readers to dive deeper, looking to understand redemption and transformation, and how grieving is a gift of remembrance, tying people to family and heritage in complex ways. 

“This book in many ways wrote itself. The poems would come to me, often in the mornings, and I would try to get them down as faithfully as possible. They came from the turmoil of making sense of the internal tensions arising in me as I tried to make sense of my life and history,” she said. “This book likely represents the other side of the work I have been doing as a psychoanalyst, trying to make sense of intergenerational trauma and the ways in which it permeates meanings in an individual's life.”

Advance Praise

Early reviews commend Charles for her powerful writing across Orphans of the Real and continuing to add to a repertoire that surrounds psychoanalysis and its effects. 

“In the wake of great loss and sorrow, C.S. Lewis described a ‘hole of absence’ experienced as a ‘vast emptiness’ that recurs in cycles of pain and returning anamnesis. As he says, the loss is always there, from time to time ‘fluttering in the stomach,’ but also changes according to the unique and personal experience of each person’s mourning. Marilyn Charles’s book of poetry, Orphans of the Real, initiates us to an Orphic descent into the depths and aporias of bereavement, the physicality of emotional grieving embodied by trauma triggers of ordinary images and earthly reminders. In her poems she is part Rachel in Jeremiah ‘who weeps for her children and will not be consoled,’ and at the same time like Miriam in Exodus who dances with an energic, faithful irreverence toward past sufferings, and yet with a joy of a deepening renewal of life. Marilyn Charles’s poetic art, heir to such rich lexicons of all those who found language, meaning, and shape to enumerate ineffable hurts, betrayal, and brokenness, remind us of our own human vulnerabilities that can also beckon a timely, potential soul-making as we live through the evening land of sorrow and what we can make of the eternal returns of loss.” — Claude Barbre, PhD, LP, distinguished professor of clinical psychology, The Chicago School; vice-president, The Chicago Center for Psychoanalysis

The Author

Marilyn Charles is a psychologist and psychoanalyst at the Austen Riggs Center, co-chair of the Association for the Psychoanalysis of Culture and Society (APCS), and Scholar of the British Psychoanalytic Council. Affiliations include the Chicago Center for Psychoanalysis, Universidad de Monterrey, Harvard Medical School, and the Association for Psychosocial Studies. 

Marilyn lived in Spain, Switzerland, and the Netherlands during her early adolescence, affording a growth-enhancing disruption to her Midwestern childhood. Exposure to diversities of culture and the musicality of languages informed her love of art, language, and literature, and her psychoanalytic interest in the aesthetic underbelly of life as lived. Her artwork was featured at the George Mason University Gallery and in her book chapter “Remembering, Repeating, and Working Through: Collage: Piecing Together the Fragments of Traumatic Memory” in DellaPiettra’s Perspectives in Creativity.

During her young adulthood, Marilyn lived on the Navajo Reservation. Exploring those history-rich terrains of subtle colors and nuance helped her heal from the too-much of urban existence, and informed her research interests, which include creativity, the intergenerational transmission of trauma, and the impact of devaluation on women and other marginalized groups.  

She is committed to mentoring future generations of psychoanalytic scholars, clinicians, and researchers, and has consulted with many groups including Gunawirra, in New South Wales, and has presented her work nationally and internationally.

Currently, Marilyn resides in the Berkshires with her life partner and enjoys visits to her home and gardens by her son, daughter, son-in-law, grandchildren, and cherished family and friends.

The Book

Orphans of the Real: Reflections on Love and Loss

Marilyn Charles

138 pages, 6” x 9”, B/W

Poetry / Subjects & Themes / Death, Grief, Loss / Women Authors / Grief & Loss

ISBN: 978-1-968761-79-0, $24.95 (Hardcover)

ISBN: 978-1-968761-80-6, $16.95 (Softcover)

Publication Date: 06/17/2026

Mission Point Press

Copies are available for preorder at Bookshop.org, Amazon, and other online retailers. On its publication date, it will be available for purchase wherever books are sold. For information or to arrange for signings and events, contact the author at mcharlesphd@gmail.com. 

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