The Price of Love

The selected works of Colin Murray Parkes

Colin Murray Parkes

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317645252
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Psychotherapy Counselling
• Index: Psychology

In the course of a long career Colin Murray Parkes, one of the most important and influential psychiatrists working in the field of bereavement and loss, has produced a body of work which can be considered truly ground-breaking. His early studies involved working alongside John Bowlby in the development of attachment theory and led to his pioneering work on the Harvard Bereavement Project in the USA and at the new St Christopher's Hospice in Britain. Parkes focussed on two psychological processes, grief, which is the painful search for a lost person or object of attachment, and transition, which is the process of changing the assumptive world in ways that ensure that nothing worthwhile need be completely lost. Out of the struggle to resolve the conflict between holding on and letting go of the old assumptions there gradually emerges a new and more mature model of the world.

These ideas throw light on a wide range of life change events and have proved useful to people faced with bereavement, physical disabilities, dying, disasters and even terrorist attacks. In recent years he has supported humanitarian efforts in countries including Rwanda, India and Japan. Parkes' career has spanned several decades and touched countless lives. In The Price of Love, Parkes presents papers which span the full extent of his career, covering and linking together our understanding of the five major areas of his work:

- Love and grief;

- Crisis, trauma and transition;

- Death and dying;

- Disasters;

- War and terrorism: breaking the cycle.

The papers included here have been carefully selected and annotated to show how Parkes' thinking has developed during a career as researcher, practitioner and educator. In each section of the book psychological and social causes are paired with consequences and interventions (both preventive and therapeutic) and explored from Western and cross-cultural perspectives, all with Parkes' customary clarity and compassion.

This unique collection of papers will prove invaluable to psychologists, psychiatrists, palliative care staff, counsellors and students, as well as those studying international conflict and working with the bereaved.

Part 1
Love and Grief

In many respects, then, grief can be regarded as an illness. But it can also bring strength. Just as broken bones can end up stronger than unbroken ones, so the experience of grieving can strengthen and bring maturity to those who have previously been protected from misfortune. The pain of grief is just as much a part of life as the joy of love; it is, perhaps, the price we pay for love, the cost of commitment. To ignore this fact, or to pretend that it is not so, is to put on emotional blinkers which leave us unprepared for the losses that will inevitably occur in our lives and unprepared to help others with the losses in theirs.

This extract from the first edition of Bereavement: Studies of Grief in Adult Life (1972) sums up the main findings of my early researches into the psychology of bereavement. These ideas have justified and motivated much of what has followed in a career that has led into some dark places and challenging situations.

In searching for the roots of grief I started by comparing the griefs of small children with the griefs of other species. With John Bowlby and others I helped to develop the new field of Attachment Theory and to show how love and loss are intertwined to the point where problems in attachments to parents were shown to explain some of the problems in grieving that had emerged from empirical research. Out of these studies it became possible to identify people at the time of bereavement who were at greater risk of a range of problems and to develop cost-effective services aimed at reducing the risk and solving some of those problems.

New thinking often gives rise to new language but then becomes incomprehensible to those who do not speak it. I have always preferred to make use of existing words, whenever possible, but this requires clarity and consistency. Part 1 ends with a warning about the ambiguities and misperceptions that have arisen in our discourse about love and loss, most of which can be avoided by the careful and consistent use of words. Poetic language has its own precision and the right words in the right order can both inform and inspire.

Chapter 1
All in the End is Harvest

From Introduction. In Agnes Whitaker (ed.) All in the end is harvest: an anthology for those who grieve (pp. ix–xii). London: Dartman, Longdon & Todd in association with Cruse Bereavement Care, 1984.

Although written as my introduction to Agnes Whitaker’s anthology of poems and quotations about bereavement, the following can also be read as an additional introduction to this book of selections from my own prose.

To a lover of books, libraries are a fearsome blessing – we approach them with awe, conscious of the treasures they contain, but half paralysed by the necessity of choice. In the same way, to a lover of poetry, anthologies are awesome.

We may be tempted to simplify the need for choice by reading them cover to cover, or we may prefer to open the book at random and read on. In either case, we are likely soon to find ourselves suffering from a condition which psychologists have termed ‘reactive inhibition’, but which is more usually referred to as ‘too much of a good thing’.

This anthology is more awesome than most because it treats of a species of poetry and prose which most of us find hard to take. Much of the greatest writing is about death and grief, but to concentrate it together under one cover is to expect a lot of the reader – particularly if that reader has been bereaved or come close to death.

Yet these are the very readers who are most likely to seek out a book of this kind. Grief fills the mind and, for a while, it may be difficult to think of anything else. Since grief cannot be avoided, we might as well accept it and find some way to think about it and to make sense of it. But as every relationship is different, so every grief is different, and we should not expect to find much uniformity in the response to loss or in the solutions which people find to the problems of loss. Words which give comfort to one person may seem like sentimental pap to another. Symbols which to one person are charged with meaning evoke no response in another. Advice which has proved helpful to one person may even harm another.

And yet there is a common chord beneath all this diversity. There are things which most bereaved people have in common, and there are meanings which emerge again and again in the writings of those who find themselves impelled to write about grief.

One function of poetry is to express emotion, fear, despair, anger, bewilderment, rage – all reflect some aspect of the impact of bereavement. We share the poet’s grief and in doing so we make our own grief easier to accept, more real, more earthy, more controlled. A sorrow shared may not reduce that sorrow, but it does remind us we are not alone. Grief is the price we pay for love and we must all be prepared to pay it.

Why should this happen to me, and me, and me? Why not? God never promised you a rose garden. Why should you be exempted from the laws of chance or mischance? Life was never fair.

This book reflects bewilderment and outrage, naked fear and flat despair. It echoes the heartache of disappointed hopes, the agonies of regret and the ugly images which haunt the memory when death comes violently in the night. It is not a comfortable book.

But it also contains positive emotion. Some deaths can be a triumph and some people in the face of loss feel joy and pure delight burst unexpectedly upon their minds. Laughter explodes at the most awkward moments and modern man’s capacity for pricking the bubbles of pomp and seeking out hypocrisy shows most keenly in the face of solemn condolence.

Some find the ‘peace that passes all understanding’ in the successful completion of a life well lived together. Some celebrate the passage of the one they hold most dear from this ‘vale of tears’ into a better place and time. Some simply feel relief that suffering is done. It is an arguable question whether these different reactions result from various philosophies of life or whether philosophy itself reflects emotion. Some hold that faith arises from divine enlightenment (‘enthusiasm’ – to be possessed of gods), others that logical conviction (by the use of scientific method) is the only road; others cynically deride man’s objectivity and point out that those beliefs to which we hold most strongly are the ones about which we have least evidence.

The poet struggles with ideas in ways which give offence to logic. Yet there is a truth in poetry and myth that can transcend dry reason. Just as a dream, being the creation of a person’s sleeping mind, plays out the meaning of unconscious mental traffic, so the poet plays with symbols in a game whose truth arises from the feelings it contains. How we interpret dream and poem depends on our ability to learn the rules of the game and the meanings of the symbols, And, since poets, like dreamers, are inclined to change the rules and to play upon the ambiguities of symbols, the meanings which we glean will be elusive. Yet there are common themes, ideas of potent imagery and meaning, which emerge again and again throughout this book. One is the theme of hope, hope that, however bad grief may be, it has a meaning; hope that all the good that can come out of love is not lost; hope that the meaning of life extends beyond life.

Another theme is the idea that, however dimly we comprehend it, everything relates to everything else; all is not chaos. Light and shade, pain and pleasure, love and loss are elements of a pattern whose details we perceive, even though we can never hope to perceive the whole. Each one of us is a part, and only a part, of something bigger and more important than ourselves, and that something is ordered by a natural order which is so all-pervading that we find it difficult to name, though some call it ‘God’.

And there is another theme which cuts across and includes the others, the theme of transcendence. This is, perhaps, the hardest to contain with words; it struggles and bolts to leap free. It develops out of despair into resignation, from resignation to surrender, from surrender to renunciation, from renunciation to acceptance and from acceptance to transcendence. In this process fear is transmuted into anger and anger into peace.

Death may happen in a moment but grief takes time; and that time is both an ordeal and a blessing. An ordeal in the sense that grief is often one of the most severe mental pains that we must suffer, and a blessing in the sense that we don’t have to do it all at once. We can, to a degree, ration out our grief in bearable dosage; according to our circumstances we may choose to give full vent to grief, and like the Maoris, cry and shout and chant three days and nights on end; or we may stultify our grief, avoiding public show, and leak it, drip by drip, in secret, over many months. But sooner or later, in time, our grief will out, like truth, a harsh reminder of our own mortality.

There are many turning points in the progression of our grief, occasions when events bring home its impact: anniversaries, meetings, recapitulations. At first we think these only serve to aggravate our pain, break down our brittle structures of escape. But, with experience, we learn to treasure them for what they are, reminders of the good things that make up our lives, evidence that ‘he (or she) lives on in my memory’. At last it becomes possible to look back with pleasure and look onward now with hope.

This book is a tribute to the work of Cruse Bereavement Care. Cruse is an unlikely body, a group of people with no other aim than to ameliorate the griefs of others. From small beginnings it has grown to offer counsel and support to widows, widowers and their families all over Britain. Those who know Cruse know grief, but they also know compassion and a kind of love – the love which each of us can offer to each other at times of loss. Cruse is an instrument and a symbol of change. We look back at its history with pride, but also with sadness. Many of the people who gave life to Cruse have died; helpers are now bereaved; age and sickness take their toll. But despite these losses, and because of them, the life of Cruse continues. Those who have taken passage through the storms of grief and reached calm waters may return as pilots, and although a major loss is not the only way to know the needs of the bereaved, it adds conviction to the words, ‘I understand’. So the bereaved who come for help may stay as helpers, and the cycle is renewed …

[Agnes included in her anthology quotations from two Annual Reports of Cruse that would otherwise have been forgotten.]

All is not lost

There is no magical anaesthetic for the pain of grief … We cannot give to the bereaved the one thing they most want; we cannot call back Lazarus or Bert or Harry from the dead. The bereaved know that. They know that ‘There is nothing you can say.’ And they have seen others turn away, embarrassed by their uselessness. But anyone who turns towards the widow and the widower, and gives confidence that they do have something to offer at moments of utter despair, helps to reassure them that all is not lost. Goodness is not gone from the world because one good person has died. Meaning has not gone from life because one who meant so much is no longer present. The loss of one trusted person need not undermine trust in all of those who remain.

The old pattern and the new

We are one people, one community and the death of one is the concern of all. In the face of death man can achieve grandeur, but if he turns his back on death he remains a child, clinging to a land of make-believe. For death is not the ending of the pattern of life’s unwinding, but a necessary interruption. Through the painful work of grieving we rediscover the past and weave it afresh into a new reality.

Our aim cannot be to cancel out the past, to try to forget, but to ensure that the strength and meaning which gave beauty to the old pattern is remembered and reinterpreted in the pattern now emerging. Every man must die but the world is permanently changed by each man’s existence. At the point of death we meet the forces of social evolution. We may back away in fear, refuse the chance to change, drown our pain in drugs or alcohol or meaningless activity, or we may accept the pains of grief and begin the long struggle to rediscover meaning in a life whose meaning can no longer be taken for granted. There is no easy way through the long valley but we have faith in the ability of each one to find his own way, given time and the encouragement of the rest of us.

Chapter 2
‘Seeking’ and ‘Finding’ a Lost Object: Evidence from Recent Studies of the Reaction to Bereavement

Extracted from ‘Seeking’ and ‘finding’ a lost object: evidence from recent studies of the reaction to bereavement. Social Science & Medicine 4: 187–201, 1970.

Written while I was working with John Bowlby at the Tavistock Institute of Human Relations, this paper provides evidence for a theory that lies at the root of much of my thinking about grief. It recognises the importance of the emotion of ‘pining’ or ‘yearning’ that distinguishes grief from other emotional states, and provides an explanation for this emotion and for the behaviour that accompanies it. This was one of several issues on which Bowlby and I found ourselves at odds with Freud’s theories. Re-reading it today I am uncomfortable with the use of the term ‘object’ for all of the objects of love. It does, however, serve to remind us that it is not only human beings to whom we become attached.

Grief is the reaction to the loss of an object of love. It is a complex process which, as Bowlby (1961) pointed out, passes through a succession of phases before it is resolved. This article is concerned with one aspect, the most obvious and, to many, the pathognomonic feature of grief, restless pining for the lost object. It is our contention that this represents a frustrated search common to all social animals who maintain attachments to other objects in the life space.

‘The urge to recover the lost object’ has been described by Bowlby as a principal component of the reaction to loss. The evidence which he cites is largely derived from studies of animals and young children, and although much of it is anecdotal in form, its consistency and clarity carry weight. The behaviour patterns which Bowlby finds in accounts of...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part 1 Love and Grief
• Part 2 Crisis, Trauma and Transition
• Part 3 Death and Dying
• Part 4 Disasters
• Part 5 War and Terrorism: Breaking the Cycle of Violence
• Final Conclusions – Love is the Key
• Index