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Here, the aim is to outline the effort of mourning required today in response to what Marcel Gauchet calls ‘leaving religion behind'. In continuation from his previous book, La Quête spirituelle hier et aujourd'hui , Jacques Arènes analyses the psychic efforts imposed upon the believer by a culture which questions the very roots of faith. He explores how the believer can accept - or not accept - this deficit of meaning. But could the traumatism also constitute an opportunity? Jacques Arènes focuses on the notion of ‘trauma', in its risks and uncertain outcomes. He describes the ‘dessication' of the believer's psychic space when emptied of the ornament of religious language and ‘impoverished' of its representations. At the heart of the image-free desert, the creative model becomes essential. Religion constantly teeters on the edge of the abyss of ‘non-faith'. Well beyond the mere register of faith, this book explores the ways of possible creativity in the context of mourning. Is there also something 'gained' in life's inevitable losses? If psychoanalytical thought plays an essential role in the ‘purification' of the religious imagination, then religious knowledge would bring the resources of emerging thought, a surge of newness through the fissures and ordeals of our lives, which are more complex and diffuse than before.