personal grief.
Parkes and Prigerson share this concern, arguing that an agreed period of grief ‘provides social sanction for beginning and ending grief, and it is clearly likely to have psychological value for the bereaved…. the absence of any social expectations, as is common in Western cultures today, leaves bereaved people confused and insecure in their grief’ (Parkes and Prigerson 2010: 211). In other words, there is a risk of a kind of tyranny of formlessness, to use an expression taken from the Danish philosopher K.E. Løgstrup. Walter (1999: 119) notes dryly that when we look at all sorts of cultures, there is no society – save perhaps our own – where people are left alone with their grief.
The key question for our era, then, is whether people can grieve without a ‘script’ or ‘template’. We might speculate whether the current debates about psychiatric diagnoses for complicated grief are based on a recognition that a definition of ‘wrong’ grieving becomes necessary when there is no general consensus about the grief process. Paradoxically, while diagnoses are essentially used to define the abnormal, they also provide new ways in which to be normal. It might be said that the diagnoses at least offer ‘normal forms of abnormality’, which may help in an era when norms are otherwise diffuse (Kofod 2015). I will return to this toward the end of the book. First, I will look at humans as creatures with the potential to grieve, at the phenomenology of grief, and at the role of the body and culture in the grieving process.
Notes
1 1. See Sofie Sørensen, ‘Vi befinder os i sorgens århundrede’, Politiken, 14 April 2017, at https://politiken.dk/kultur/art5912012/Vi-befinder-os-i-sorgens-%C3%A5rhundrede.
2 2. In this context, I understand ontology as the part of philosophy that deals with the basic ways in which something can exist (or not).
3 3. This poem was translated into English by Susanna Nied and is available at: http://www.soerenulrikthomsen.dk/sut/translations/english/ShakenMirror.pdf.
4 4. Quotes in Stearns and Knapp 1996: 136.
5 5. See Kerrigan 2007 for a comprehensive and richly illustrated monograph on the subject.
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