Psychological models of bereavement

Freud (1917) in his article 'Mourning and Melancholia' suggested that the 'work of mourning' is to sever the attachment bonds to the 'non-existent object'. This idea of the bereavement process as being some kind of staged 'grief work' has saturated the research literature for much of the past century (Bowlby, 1981; Glick, Weiss and Parkes, 1974; Lindemann, 1944; Shuchter and Zisook, 1993; Stroebe and Stroebe, 1987; Weiss, 1993; Worden, 1991). All the 'staged grief' models describe grief and the associated emotions as normal or abnormal based on 'norms' (i.e. what occurs usually according to the statistical meaning of the term). In Walter's words 'it is therefore the doctor, the psychologist and the statistician who can tell us how we ought to die and ought to grieve', instead of, for example, religion or tradition telling us how (Walters, 1994). Furthermore all the 'staged grief' models assume pathology being a result of a failure to follow the correct path of grief as if there is only one 'right way' to do grief work (Ingram, Hunt and Robson, 2000). This is something we have moved away from in counselling. Instead, we hyave looked at the individual’s personal experience of grief as a ‘dual process’ (Stroebe and Stroebe, 1991) of experiencing grief and withdrawing from it when it gets too painful. We have looked more at the nature of attachments for people and what happenes when those attachments are broken., Bonanno and Kaltman (1999) consider that rather than focusing on ‘grief’ we should be looking at how people are adapting to ‘living, post loss.’ And this post-loss life can be anywhere on a continuum from exactly as it was before loss to an entirely different way of existence, from 'as usual' to 'unbearable' with an infinite number of shades of existence in between. Its position may depend on such contextual factors as age and gender, circumstances and significance of the loss, or social support and cultural influences. It may be determined by a multitude of subjective attributions of meaning from apprehension for reduction of income to spiritual and religious concerns.