Navigating Loss in Women's Contemporary Memoir

A. Prodromou

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781137482921
• Topic: Economics
• Subtopic: Development Economics
• Index: Economics

Navigating Loss in Women's Contemporary Memoir traces the grief process through the lives of contemporary women writers to show how its complex, multi-layered nature can encourage us towards new understandings of loss.

1

Life Writing and the Literature of Grief

In my analysis of grief and loss, I am concerned with bridging the gap between psychotherapy and literature in order to look at grief texts through a varied theoretical approach. I try to gather apparently disparate theories into a kind of theoretical prism, dispersed across narratives of loss to inform the study of grief in literature.

Freud and the standard model of grief

Freud’s 1917 essay, “Mourning and Melancholia” is widely recognized as being “the first to articulate a perspective on mourning as a private, interior psychological process having specific characteristics and dynamics” (Hagman 17). One of the main characteristics of mourning according to Freud is that we can “rest assured that after a lapse of time it will be over-come” (153). True, Freud concedes that the work of mourning is a very gradual process, “carried out bit by bit, at great expense of time and energy” (Freud qtd in Motte 59), but in his view (at least in “Mourning and Melancholia”), the process is finite. Thus, as Didion discovers when she researches the professional literature, there are two kinds of grief: “The preferred kind, the one associated with ‘growth’ and ‘development,’ [is] ‘uncomplicated grief,’ or ‘normal bereavement’”; the other kind is “complicated grief . . . pathological bereavement,” which is classified as a disorder (48). The neat split begun by Freud between normal and pathological grief is especially apparent in studies outlining the stages of grief which share with Freud the assumption of recovery (although in new wave theories of grief, as we shall see, “complicated” grief is not always seen as pathological).

What Didion is describing is the standard model of grief in the professional literature since the 1950s, which discusses “complicated” and “uncomplicated” grief and focuses on resolving it. It is also dominated by “universal phases [of] recovery” which proved very popular (Neimeyer 2), one of the earliest being Elisabeth Kubler-Ross’s landmark study, published in 1969, which describes the stages through which the terminally ill pass in their movement towards death.¹ The stages – Denial and Isolation, Anger, Bargaining, Depression, and Acceptance – and other common models after this remain very similar (such as Numbness, Yearning, Despair, Recovery) as summarized in Payne et al.:

For mourning to have a favourable outcome it appears to be necessary for a bereaved person to endure this buffeting of emotion. Only if he [sic] can tolerate the pining, the more or less conscious searching, the seemingly endless examination of how and why the loss occurred . . . can he come gradually to recognize and accept that the loss is in truth permanent and that his life must be shaped anew. (Bowlby qtd in Payne et al. 72)

The process is a painful one; many writers note that Freud refers to it as “work,” a concept that has reappeared countless times since and has been incorporated into our everyday lingo: psychiatrists talk about “tasks of mourning”; “to work through the pain of grief”; and “to accept the reality of the loss” (Payne et al. 75–6). Yet the outcome here is “favourable”; it ends in acceptance, adjustment, and moving on with life.

New wave theories of grief

New wave theories of grief important to my study of complex recovery have been developing since the early 1990s and emerged from criticisms of Freud and the standard model as failing to “recognize the complexity and uniqueness of mourning experience” (Hagman 24).² Therese A. Rando’s motivation for publishing Treatment for Complicated Mourning in 1993 was because information about complicated grief had not been collected or discussed at any length. Robert A. Neimeyer’s collection of essays in Meaning Reconstruction and the Experience of Loss showcases “a ‘new wave’ of grief theory” that advocates “an appreciation of more complex patterns of adaptation” (Neimeyer 3), and Thomas Attig, whose essay “Relearning the World: Making and Finding Meanings” appears in the collection, argues that “The net effect will be to highlight and promote more appreciation of some of the rich and subtle complications of grieving” (34). However, new wave theorists may risk smoothing over the complexity inherent in Freud’s grief process by concentrating on his emphasis on the favourable outcome (as opposed to melancholia) and the end of mourning.

Critiques of Freud and the standard/phase models that “assume that the final outcome of grieving will be a return to normal psychological and social functioning” (Payne et al. 80) have led to equal and opposite reactions theorizing grief as a process that in fact never ends. Many new theories argue that “Grief may not . . . have a definite end point which marks recovery” (80); it cannot be “described as a time bounded process consisting of phases, stages or tasks. . . . New models have been developed to account for the individuality and diversity of grief” (87). In his book, How We Grieve: Relearning the World, Thomas Attig says phase models “wrongly suggest that we come to an end in our grieving as we either complete the stages or at last recover. In effect, they suggest that we can somehow finish coping with mystery” (45). In his article, “Grief That Does Not End,” Paul Rosenblatt agrees:

Would-be supporters of the bereaved often talk about getting over the grief and offer suggestions and help to facilitate achieving this goal . . . Research and personal experience have led this author to believe that many Americans grieving major losses will not ever reach a time when they completely stop grieving. The expectation that they can and should reach the end of their grief is based on a misunderstanding of normal grieving and does them a disservice. (Rosenblatt, 1993, 45)

The collection Continuing Bonds: New Understandings of Grief, from which the above essay was taken, emphasizes the importance of an undisclosed lapse of time for the grieving process: “Freud described grief work as a process of hypercathecting each memory and hope connected to the deceased. By hypercathexis he meant a kind of emotional neutralizing of each memory and hope, not a forgetting” (Rosenblatt, 1983, 53). Rosenblatt and others have explained that each memory of the deceased needs to be tested against the reality of his/her absence in order for the mourner to sever attachments and once again make new attachments to others. Their argument is, however, that because people do not remember memories all at once, it seems reasonable that grief work would continue for a long time as Rosenblatt suggests, even a lifetime (53). In his article, “Beyond Decathexis: Toward a New Psychoanalytic Understanding and Treatment of Mourning,” George Hagman says that “Once we move beyond decathexis” (24), which is “the incremental divestment of libido . . . from memories of the lost object” (15), then “it becomes clear that there is no need to declare an expectable endpoint to mourning. From this new perspective a person may mourn for a lifetime” (24). Theories that contest Freud argue that “some losses are so profound and life changing that the grief never completely ends,” that “once we have lost, we always live to varying degrees in the presence of grief” (Klass 1996a, 1999) (qtd in Hooyman and Kramer 8) and that “mourning is not something that can be finished” (Gaines qtd in Hagman 24).³

However, in focusing on the importance of a grief that never ends, new wave theorists risk paring Freud’s argument down to a single favourable outcome at the expense of what is in fact a very complex process. The major bone of contention for them comes largely from Freud’s assertion that the process is finite, and that “The fact is . . . that when the work of mourning is completed, the ego becomes free and uninhibited again” (Freud 154). New wave theorists successfully add to the complexity of grief by suggesting that the outcome itself cannot be squeezed into one sentence that Freud presents as “fact.” However, in doing so, they perhaps miss the opportunity for a much richer discussion of the “work of mourning” that grows out of Freud’s otherwise very brief and ambiguous description of the process itself.

The actual “work of mourning,” reinterpreted by countless theorists since the appearance of Freud’s essay, would seem to revolve around one main sentence: “Each single one of the memories and hopes which bound the libido to the object is brought up and hyper-cathected, and the detachment of the libido from it is accomplished” (Freud 154). Beyond allowing that the process is “extraordinarily painful,” and “not at all easy to explain” (154), Freud does not say much more about it. On the one hand, this allows for rather simplistic interpretations of the process, such as Rosenblatt’s (given above): “By hypercathexis he meant a kind of emotional neutralizing of each memory and hope, not a forgetting” (Rosenblatt 1983,,53). But on the other, it encourages much more complex interpretations because of its very ambiguity. If Rosenblatt is simplifying the process by describing it as an “emotional neutralising of . . . memory,” he is also gesturing towards its complexity by insisting that “the work of mourning” is not simply “a forgetting.”

In his book, Another Kind of Love, Christopher Craft makes more of this complexity and ambiguousness in arguing that “the work of mourning” is more accurately a “work of remembering” that serves a “double or ambivalent function” because it essentially accomplishes two things at once, both a “binding and an unbinding” (60). When a mourner remembers a lost beloved, the deceased person is made present or, as Freud calls it, “psychically prolonged,” somehow bound to the mourner; however, at the same time, through this very “labour of remembering,” the mourner also achieves, in Freud’s words, a “detachment of libido” by which he/she can be freed from the memory of the beloved (Craft 60). Thus, Craft shows there is much room for complexity in what Freud has left rather ambiguous; for Craft, Freud implies that “the duplicitous work of mourning” is “‘to prolong’ in order to ‘detach,’ to give birth in order to kill” (60). What this translates to (as opposed to Rosenblatt’s interpretation), is not only an “emotional neutralising,” but a much harsher “terminal forgetting” (Craft 60) as the mourner becomes “free and uninhibited again” (Freud 154). Importantly, new wave theorists distinguish themselves from Freud in arguing that “the work of mourning” for them lies outside of the constraints of his theory precisely because mourning is never “complete.” However, perhaps equally importantly, we need to recognize the complexity behind the grief process in “Mourning and Melancholia” and see it for the rich scope of interpretation it can offer in its very ambiguity.

Another way in which new wave theorists differ from Freud is in the belief that grief, though never-ending, is neither of “a pathological variety” (Freud 161). Critics like Kathleen Woodward “want[] to clear those who continue grieving from the charge that their behavior is pathological. . . . We are not crippled if we will not be comforted. . . . Freud’s overly schematic portrait of the grieving psyche is contradicted by our common experience of a grief that, without ruining us, remains painfully immediate” (qtd in Krasner 219). This is the subject of Allan V. Horitz and Jerome C. Wakefield’s study, The Loss of Sadness, which argues that a current problem in psychoanalytical practice is that it does not allow for enough “normal sadness” or “nondisordered sadness” (36) and instead rushes to diagnose the phenomena as a disorder. Hooyman and Kramer state that while there is a consensus that “problematic grief” exists, where the person does not “return to full or nearly functioning” – also called “complicated grief” (53) – they hasten to add, “we strongly urge caution when using the term pathological” (18) and that “those who take longer than the normative period of grieving are not necessarily suffering from ‘chronic or pathological’ grief” (qtd in Hooyman and Kramer 30).

Woodward’s article, “Freud and Barthes: Theorizing Mourning,” (1990), argues for a “middle position” (100) between Freud’s mourning and his concept of melancholia – her definition of this space reads more as forerunner to new wave grief theories in a number of ways: “there is something in between mourning and melancholia . . . grief that is lived in such a way that one is still in mourning but no longer exclusively devoted to mourning” (Woodward’s italics, 96). However, this “middle position,” illustrated in part by Barthes’ Camera Lucida, nevertheless firmly occupies the other end of the spectrum in describing the grief process as “interminable” (97), whose goal is “not to come to the end of mourning but to sustain it” (99); and where “[t]he end of mourning will be impossible” (105).

Theorizing “textured recovery”

In reading through memoirs of loss (about forty in all), I noticed that a few of them resisted placement into either extreme along the spectrum of grief. Rather, they seemed ambiguous in their reflections on healing and often resisted traditional compensatory paradigms that accompany narratives of loss without – at the same time – being compelled to assert an agenda in which grief never ends and recovery is an impossibility. The extent to which these writers “recover” is not easy to determine and often seems to lie somewhere between the model based on Freud and the extreme reactions against it. I am reading my chosen texts in light of new wave theories of grief as a way to illustrate this “in-between” space of “textured recovery.” This third space is at its most visible from the perspective of new wave theories which allow me to tease out subtleties and nuances within the grief process from a theoretical position that champions complexity. Such an exercise is absolutely necessary to new understandings of loss when we consider the alternatives above that view the concept of recovery in terms of binary opposites. Although there are some characteristics of new wave theories that do not apply to my analysis of textured recovery (such as the emphasis on grief as a never-ending process), and although I also bring to the discussion some aspects not mentioned by new wave theories (such as the importance of the body), I have put together an amalgamation of the main characteristics that help to define and characterize this space.

Memoirs of textured recovery illustrate the following aspects of new wave grief theories in their portrayal of loss:

• Grief is nearly always complicated: “‘complicated’ as ‘involved, intricate, confused, complex, compound, the opposite of simple” (Oxford English Dictionary 1971, 729), (Attig, “Relearning” 33). It requires “a nuanced sensitivity to the legacy of loss as a core feature of psychotherapy” (Neimeyer xii) and requires recognition of “the complexity and uniqueness of . . . mourning” (Hagman 24).

• Loss as ambiguous: “Loss always contains some ambiguity” (Hooyman and Kramer 4). These memoirs “recogni[se] the many types and meanings of loss and the inevitability of unanswered questions” (2).

• Grief is not an event that we must “get over” quickly, though neither must it last forever: grief is recognized as “open and evolving” (Hagman 18); we do not have to get over it quickly (Silverman and Klass 1996; Wortman and Silver 2001 qtd in Hooyman and Kramer 30), but neither must it last forever.

• Gender informs experiences of grief: “This constructivist approach recognises that no two persons can be assumed to experience similar grief in response to the same loss . . . each person constructs a different phenomenological world and occupies a distinctive position in relation to culture [and] gender” (Hooyman and Kramer 34).

• Grief as a process that contains a wide range of emotions, not just negative: Grief is not always experienced as “intense distress and depression” (Hooyman and Kramer 19), but rather can include positive emotions. The “work of mourning” under the standard model could not accommodate for the range of emotions included in the grief process.⁴

• Grief as a process of redefining the self: “In grieving we must relearn our very selves” (Attig, “Relearning” 40). This encourages a “greater awareness of the implications of major loss for the individual’s sense of identity, often necessitating deep revisions in his or her self-definition” (Neimeyer 4; Hooyman and Kramer 16; Hagman 24).

• Recovery does not necessarily follow from sharing emotion/confronting loss: “sharing an emotion and confronting and processing a loss does not necessarily bring emotional relief or recovery” (Neimeyer 2000) (Hooyman and Kramer 31). As we shall see many of my chosen authors are critical of the “talking cure.”

• Recovery as “accommodation”: According to the final stage of recovery in “R-model”: “Recovery and completion carry the same inaccurate connotations as resolution. In contrast, ac...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface and Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Life Writing and the Literature of Grief
• 2 Trout Tickling for Truth in Narratives of Loss
• 3 “Writing the Self into Being”: Narrative Identity in Memoirs of Loss
• 4 “No Bones Broken”: Embodied Experiences of Loss
• Conclusion: “Weeping Constellations”
• Notes
• References
• Index