Continuing Bonds

New Understandings of Grief

Dennis Klass, Phyllis R. Silverman, Steven Nickman, Dennis Klass, Phyllis R. Silverman, Steven Nickman

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317763604
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Mental Health in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

First published in 1996. This new book gives voice to an emerging consensus among bereavement scholars that our understanding of the grief process needs to be expanded. The dominant 20th century model holds that the function of grief and mourning is to cut bonds with the deceased, thereby freeing the survivor to reinvest in new relationships in the present. Pathological grief has been defined in terms of holding on to the deceased. Close examination reveals that this model is based more on the cultural values of modernity than on any substantial data of what people actually do. Presenting data from several populations, 22 authors - among the most respected in their fields - demonstrate that the health resolution of grief enables one to maintain a continuing bond with the deceased. Despite cultural disapproval and lack of validation by professionals, survivors find places for the dead in their on-going lives and even in their communities. Such bonds are not denial: the deceased can provide resources for enriched functioning in the present. Chapters examine widows and widowers, bereaved children, parents and siblings, and a population previously excluded from bereavement research: adoptees and their birth parents. Bereavement in Japanese culture is also discussed, as are meanings and implications of this new model of grief. Opening new areas of research and scholarly dialogue, this work provides the basis for significant developments in clinical practice in the field.

Part One Examining the Dominant Model

Chapter 1 Introduction: What's the Problem?

Phyllis R. Silverman and Dennis Klass

DOI: 10.4324/9781315800790-1

This book was conceived to give voice to an expanded view of the bereavement process. Specifically, this book reexamines the idea that the purpose of grief is to sever the bonds with the deceased in order to free the survivor to make new attachments. We offer an alternative model based on the mourner’s continuing bonds with the deceased.

A model is an ideal set of interactions or processes that make sense of multifarious data. As such, a model is a conceptual archetype. “By archetype I mean a systematic repertoire of ideas by means of which a given thinker describes by analogical extension, some domain to which those ideas do not immediately and literally apply” (Black, 1962, p. 241). Models are intellectual schemata, but as we will note, they are part of the Zeitgeist, the spirit of a particular age. Very often the assumptions in the model we use are unexamined. Batson (1980) wrote,

Now, an explanation is a mapping of the pieces of a description onto a tautology, and an explanation becomes acceptable to the degree that you are willing and able to accept the links of the tautology. If the links are “self-evident” (i.e., if they seem undoubtable to the self that is you), then the explanation built on that tautology is satisfactory to you. That is all. It is always a matter of natural history, a matter of faith, imagination, trust, rigidity, and so on of the organism, that is of you or me. (p. 93)

This means that people persistently hold on to models, even in the face of contrary evidence. Bowlby (1961) linked the difficulty of abandoning old intellectual models to the pain of grief.

The painfulness of new ideas, and our habitual resistance to them, can also be seen in this context. The more far-reaching a new idea, the more disorganization of existing theoretical systems has to be tolerated before a new and better synthesis of old and new can be achieved. (p. 335)

The authors in this book present data from populations who differ in the origins of their grief. We think that the net effect of all these contributions is to show that the resolution of grief involves a continuing bond that the survivor maintains with the deceased. We hope that this book demonstrates the rich possibilities of what we see as healthy, enduring bonds with the dead.

This chapter will

1. outline the model of grief in general use, and show how this model of grief was developed in the face of data that suggested its inadequacy;
2. discuss the assumptions of this dominant model of grief, which are part of the passing world view of modernity;
3. explore the way inadequate assumptions about the nature of the self as well as assumptions about what is good social scientific methodology contributed to the remarkable resiliency of this model in the face of contrary data;
4. begin to sketch out another model of grief, leaving the other chapters in the book to provide a fuller, more complex understanding of this model.

We realized in reviewing the contributions to this volume that the majority of the authors did qualitative, not quantitative, research. This realization about method brought us full circle, for it seems to us that the quantitative method, with its roots so deep in the logical positivism of modernity, is based on the same inadequate assumptions underlying the model of grief that this book sets out to correct. At the end of the chapter, we comment on an alternate methodological paradigm.

Disengaging as a Goal of Grief

The view of grief most accepted in this century holds that for successful mourning to take place the mourner must disengage from the deceased, and let go of the past (Abraham, 1927; Clayton, Desmarais, & Winokur, 1968; Edelstein, 1984; Furman, 1984; Hofer, 1984; Peppers & Knapp, 1980; Pollock, 1975; Rando, 1986; Raphael, 1983; Sanders, 1989; Volkan, 1981; Weizman & Kamm, 1985). To experience a continuing bond with the deceased in the present has been thought of as symptomatic of psychological problems (Dietrich & Shabad, 1989; Horowitz, Wilner, Marmor, & Krupnick, 1980; Jackson, 1957; Miller, 1971). A continued attachment to the deceased was called unresolved grief. Some practitioners likened unresolved grief to other forms of phobic avoidance, which have been treated successfully by exposure to the avoided situation, such as the treatment of obsessive-compulsive and phobic patients (Mawson, Marks, Ramm, & Stern, 1981). Temporarily “hypercathecting” to the dead person was normal because “in the normal process of mourning … the person reacts to a real object loss by effecting a temporary introjection of the loved person. The main purpose of this hypercathecting is to preserve the person’s relationship to the lost object” (Volkan & Showalter, 1968, p. 359).

In this model the bond with the deceased is not a part of the resolution of grief, but is an attempt to preserve the relationship by fighting against the reality that the person is dead. In this formulation such resistance to reality is doomed to failure, for eventually the person must accept the fact that death is real and permanent, and in the end the bond must be relinquished.

In this view, maintaining an ongoing attachment to the deceased was considered symptomatic of pathology. Indeed, pathology was defined in terms of sustaining a relationship to the dead. Jackson (1957), in a book that was popular with clinicians for many years, said that attempts to maintain ties with the deceased is “a form of regression and psychological incorporation that should be discounted and discouraged. Regression is not cured by accepting it. It must be actively opposed, for it becomes worse if it is encouraged” (p. 65).

This theory led to some rather brutal clinical techniques. Though he later abandoned it in favor of more traditional psychoanalytic reliance on the productions of the unconscious and on managing the transference, Volkan’s (1985) “regriefing” psychotherapy received wide attention. Part of his report on the case of a 16-year-old girl whose mother committed suicide is as follows:

Instead of talking with her about her mother as a dead person, her mother was referred to as an inanimate object consisting of degenerating anatomic structures such as skin, muscle, and bone. Such an attempt, after the phase of abreaction, serves to hasten the actual return to normal reality testing while paradoxically giving impetus to repression of some conflictual ideas expressed. As can be readily seen, this somewhat harsh technique does not provide for full emotional insight but rather serves to repress some instinctual demands, especially the patient’s “death wishes” toward the lost object. … The therapist must be authoritative but at the same time he must be understanding. In this way the “strong” therapist can take over most of the guilt that the patient had been experiencing. (Volkan & Showalter, 1968, p. 370)

Historical Perspective

This model of grief is a 20th-century phenomenon. Only in the past 100 years have continuing bonds been denied as a normal part of bereavement behavior. In this section we will trace some of the development of the modern understanding of grief. We will show how, as the theory grew, observations of the continuing bond with the dead were made, but the data were not integrated into the conceptual framework that guided most practice.

The modern idea of bereavement began with Freud’s (1917/1961a) definition of mourning as the sad process by which “Each single one of the memories and situations of expectancy which demonstrate the libido’s attachment to the lost object is met by the verdict of reality that the object no longer exists” (p. 255).

Freud was not talking about grief after a death in this definition. The loss Freud described was the child giving up the direct attachment (Oedipal love) to the parent. He theorized that grief is different from depression in that he thought depression is caused by internalizing the parent, who then remains as a critical voice in the ego ideal. Grief, as Freud saw it, frees the ego from the attachment to the deceased: “When the work of mourning is completed the ego becomes free and uninhibited again” (1917/1961a, p. 245). Freud never applied this theory to cases of grief after a significant death.

Freud’s life has particular significance to us, because he generated a world view for those who followed him. We will examine Freud’s personal difficulties in mourning rather closely, because his life clearly shows the dilemmas created by a modern world view (Homans, 1989). We know that his personal experience with grief did not support his theoretic model of grief. After important deaths, Freud seemed unable to find new attachments and unable to find a sense of transcendent connection that he seemed to think necessary if his bond with the deceased were to be continued. As Freud framed it for himself, the problem was that he could not allow himself to acknowledge any experience of a transcendent connection. When a friend said religion was based in an “oceanic feeling,” Freud said he could find no such experience in himself except in regressive infantile narcissism (1961b). The idea that transcendent feelings are regressive led him to some interesting ideas about the nature of civilization, but did not serve him well when he became a mourner. When his daughter Sophie died, he wrote:

Since I am profoundly irreligious there is no one I can accuse, and I know there is nowhere to which any complaint could be addressed. “The unvarying circle of a soldier’s duties” and the “sweet habit of existence” will see to it that things go on as before. Quite deep down I can trace the feeling of a deep narcissistic hurt that is not to be healed. My wife and Annerl are terribly shaken in a more human way. (Jones, 1957, p. 20)

We later see that Freud was equally shaken, but could not allow himself the luxury of expressing his distress directly. In another letter written immediately after Sophie’s death, he discussed the kind of control he tried to exercise: “It is such a paralyzing event, which can stir no afterthoughts when one is not a believer and so is spared all the conflicts that go with that. Blunt necessity, mute submission” (Jones, 1957, p. 19).

Nine years later, on what would have been his daughter’s 36th birthday (April 11, 1929), Freud wrote to his friend Ludwig Binswanger after he learned that Binswanger’s son had died. Freud acknowledged that after such a death he could not go on as before:

Although we know that after such a loss the acute state of mourning will subside, we also know we shall remain inconsolable and will never find a substitute. No matter what may fill the gap, even if it be filled completely, it nevertheless remains something else. And actually this is how it should be. It is the only way of perpetuating that love which we do not want to relinquish. (Freud, 1961a, p. 239)

When Sophie’s son died at age 4:

It was the only occasion in his life when Freud was known to shed tears. He told me afterward that this loss had affected him in a different way from any of the others he had suffered. They had brought about sheer pain, but this one had killed something in him for good. … A couple of years later he told Marie Bonaparte that he had never been able to get fond of anyone since that misfortune, merely retaining his old attachments; he had found the blow quite unbearable, much more so than his own cancer. (Jones, 1957, p. 92)

The connection Freud had drawn between grief and depression played out in a more complex way in his own life than in his theory. After his grandson died, Freud said that the boy had represented for him all children and grandchildren. After that death, he was unable to enjoy life. “It is the secret to my indifference [toward his cancer]—people call it courage—toward the danger to my own life” (Jones, 1957, p. 92).

From his own experience Freud understood that grief work did not turn out to be a process that could ever be completed, nor did it turn out to be a process that resulted in cutting old attachments and forming new attachments, but he did not give theoretical form to these feelings...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Contributors
• Preface
• PART ONE Examining the Dominant Model
• PART TWO Setting the Stage
• PART THREE Bereaved Children
• PART FOUR Spousal Bereavement
• PART FIVE Parental Bereavement
• PART SIX Bereaved Siblings
• PART SEVEN Adoptee Losses
• PART EIGHT Meanings and Implications
• PART NINE Conclusion
• Index