Grief: the early theoretical journey

It is interesting to look at the early grief theorists, as they have influenced a lot of the popular beliefs about grief that still exist today, despite theory having taken a major shift in the interim. I like to remind myself that these are all theories, not facts, and subject to change as new reflections and research occur. Theories also need to be considered in the social contexts of their times.

Definition of bereavement

I like the definition by Dunne, Dunne-Maxim and McIntosh:

Bereavement is all the physiological, psychological, behavioural and social response patterns displayed by an individual following the loss of a significant person or thing.

Lindemann 1944

In Symptomatology and Management of Acute Grief Lindemann identified five features of grief, and these were:

• Somatic distress
• Preoccupation with thoughts of the deceased
• Guilt
• Hostility
• Loss of normal patterns of behaviour

Three tasks necessary to complete grief work were identified as follows:

• Emancipation from the bondage to the deceased
• Readjustment to the environment in which the deceased is missing
• Establishment of new relationships.

A distinction was made between normal and morbid grief and it was claimed that it takes 4-6 weeks to overcome acute grief. I can see an on-going influence here in the popular, but erroneous, beliefs that people should be over their grief in 6 weeks and that people should “let go” of the person who has died.

Freud 1957

In his book Mourning and Melancholia Freud said that mourning is the period of desolation following the loss of a significant “object” (person) and, in order to recover, energy needs to be withdrawn from the “object” and action needs to be taken to reinvest this energy in another “object” to replace the one which has been lost.

This reinforces the concept of the need to “let go”, which current theorists refute. Even so, it does remain as a popular belief in some quarters.

Kubler-Ross 1970

In her book On Death and Dying Elizabeth Kubler-Ross introduced the idea of stages of grief, but she was, in fact, referring to stages of dying, and her work was based on terminally ill patients anticipating their own deaths. However this was also generalised to a grief model for survivors of a major disaster at the time.

The stages of dying that she identified were:

• Denial and isolation
• Anger
• Bargaining
• Depression
• Acceptance

The long held belief that people go through stages of grief followed on from her work and this led to seeing  people who fail to begin or end a stage successfully as “pathological”. Current theorists no longer subscribe to this theory but, once again, it does still exist in popular beliefs.

Bowlby 1980

Bowlby saw grief as a form of separation anxiety in the process of breaking the emotional bonds of attachment and wrote about this in his book Attachment and Loss.

His four phases of grief were:

• Numbing
• Yearning and searching
• Disorganisation and despair
• Re-organisation

This reinforced the ideas that grief has stages/ phases and that, in order to have a new relationship, the person has to let go of the old one. These ideas have, of course, been challenged by current theorists.

Putting the theorists in the contexts of their times

It is important to remember that all of these theorists were influenced by the social contexts of their times. For instance, Lindemann was writing in the context of major losses in relation to WWII, which had occurred in the lifetimes of those who had been through WWI.

During WWl many communities faced unprecedented losses of young men from their communities, and mass mourning was acknowledged in the form of the construction of war memorials in many towns. Around this time there was also a major growth in spiritualism as people attempted to make contact with young men who had been killed in battle (especially where bodies were not able to be returned home).

However, by the time WWll came along, communities could no longer cope with the extent of the losses, and went more into denial in relation to grief and trauma, believing that it was better not to talk about it as this would “upset” those who were affected.

The interesting  journey through grief theories will continue in the next post.