‘The Culture of Grief’ project for discussing the themes covered in the book: Ester Holte Kofod, Ditte Winther-Lindqvist, Allan Køster, Brady Wagoner, Ignacio Brescó, Luca Tateo, Anne Suhr, Mikkel Krause Frantzen, Peter Clement Lund, Alfred Bordado Sköld and Anders Petersen – Ester, Allan and Anders in particular for their help in reviewing the manuscript. I am grateful to the whole team at Polity for all their help with the English version of the book. Finally, I would like to thank the Obel Family Foundation for so generously funding the five-year ‘Culture of Grief’ project, especially Britta Graae, with whom I enjoy an excellent working relationship in my capacity as head of research.
The theoretical ideas in this book were first explored in articles in the journals Mortality (‘The body in grief’), Culture & Psychology (‘Grief as an extended emotion’, co-authored by Ester Holte Kofod), Theory & Psychology (‘The grieving animal: Grief as a foundational emotion’), Nordic Psychology (‘Could grief be a mental disorder?’), Qualitative Inquiry (‘The presence of grief’, co-authored by nine other scientists from ‘The Culture of Grief’) and Integrative Psychological and Behavioral Science (‘General psychological implications of the human capacity for grief’). I would like to take this opportunity to thank the journal editors and peer reviewers for all of their work.
It is impossible to relate to grief purely analytically – as a phenomenon to consider objectively, from a safe distance – because as adult human beings we have all, in one way or another, had personal experience of loss and grief. In February 2017, not long into ‘The Culture of Grief’ project, I lost my father. Ever since, I have had a peculiarly dualistic view of my own grief – both from the inside, by dint of the relationship between father and son, and from the outside, by virtue of my gradual accumulation of scientific, theoretical and empirical knowledge about the phenomenon. I have attempted to relate critically to the scientific theories through the lens of my personal experience, but I also believe that the research has helped me process my own loss. I would like to dedicate this book to the memory of my father, T.A. Christensen.
1 Introduction: The Century of Grief
Grief has taken centre stage in how we reflect on life – not just in private, enclosed spaces, but also in public debate. The evidence is unavoidable. In the cultural sphere, interest in the phenomenon is reflected by the preponderance of grief-based memoirs and television documentaries. Musicians including Nick Cave, Arcade Fire, Mount Eerie, Leonard Cohen and David Bowie have all released albums and songs on the subject – the latter two almost literally sang their way to their graves. Bereavement discussion groups, cafés, operas and plays have emerged, and social media has created new spaces for sharing experiences of loss, grief and absence.
Michael Hviid Jacobsen, a sociologist specialising in death, has said that we live in ‘the century of grief’, which in his view began with the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001.1 Once a taboo subject, grief has entered the public sphere and collective consciousness, a trend that has coincided with a process of medicalisation that has situated grief in a healthcare context, culminating in the psychiatric diagnosis ‘complicated grief’. The diagnosis seems set to reinforce the tendency to view grief as a medical and psychological matter, rather than an existential or religious one. At the same time, a range of organisations have also come to the fore that offer treatment to people whose parents, siblings or children are seriously ill or have died.
The century of grief is a ‘post-secular’ era, in which it is no longer widely believed that religion will peter out (McLennan 2010). We are witnessing a general revival of interest in religious, spiritual and existential questions – and grief , as a phenomenon, lies at the heart of these issues. The premise of this book is that grief is a basic existential phenomenon that occurs when love and death intersect. In order to experience the deep grief covered by this book, it is necessary to understand that a deceased loved one is irrevocably lost. Without love on the one hand, and an awareness of death’s inevitability on the other, there is no genuine human grief. This brings us to the central thesis of this book: that humankind can be categorised as a grieving animal, because it appears to be a defining characteristic of our species that we are capable of relating profoundly and intimately to both love and death, which is a prerequisite for the ability to feel genuine grief. Other animals clearly feel separation anxiety and stress, and they too can have persistent, affective relationships with other beings that appear reminiscent of human love (think of the faithful dog). However, the book contends that it is only on the surface that other species appear to feel grief. Genuine grief is reserved for humankind, for better or worse. Worse, because grief hurts; better, because it is a meaningful pain, one that informs the entire network of emotional relationships that constitute the basic psychological substance of our lives. It is through grief that we maintain our bonds with the dead. Grief is – as is quite often and probably rightly said – the price we pay for love.
The philosopher Simon Critchley expresses a similar thought when he writes that the death of a loved one puts us in a position of ‘radical impossibility’ (2010: 40). It is an event over which we have no control. It is impossible to will the other’s death away. There is nothing we can do. According to Critchley, the grief we feel invades and structures our subjectivity. He believes that humans can ultimately be categorised by our ability to grieve, and I concur (see especially Chapter 2). Grief tells us that we can never completely master life. We are forever doomed to fall short due to our dependency on others, who vanish from our lives. This may render us impotent, existentially speaking, but according to Critchley it is precisely this impotence, this fundamental fragility, that creates the ethical demand in our interactions with others. In that sense, grief and ethical life are interlinked.
This realisation – that grief is not just a simple pain to be cured, like a headache, but a meaningful experience following a loss – is reflected in popular culture. It is increasingly recognised that the goal is not to erase grief, to ‘move on’ and leave the dead behind, but to continue living with them. This is entirely consistent with recent grief theories, which emphasise continuing bonds (Klass, Silverman and Nickman 1996), whereas Freud, for example, believed that we should sever ties with the dead and reinvest our mental energy in new relationships (Freud 2005). New relationships can, of course, be significant and life-giving, but, thankfully, few would now argue that they should be at the expense of emotional bonds to the dead. If I may allow myself to be normative here, at the beginning of the book, it is a central part of my thesis that we should incorporate the dead into our lives, not shut them out. But what does this mean in a day-to-day context?
Back to the things themselves
This book takes as its starting point the need to adopt a phenomenological approach in order to identify the nature of grief. Ever since Edmund Husserl, more than a century ago, phenomenology’s watchword has been ‘back to the things themselves!’ In other words, the aim is to shed light on how people experience the world before forming scientific theories about it (for example, about grief as an illness or about its neurological basis). The book also contends that being able to describe grief’s essential nature would help us to identify what is special about human beings, what distinguishes us from other living creatures. In this way, phenomenology is a philosophical and scientific (in this case, psychological) study of how a phenomenon manifests itself in our experience. The goal is to describe the essential structure of a phenomenon, also referred to as the invariant – in other words, that which remains constant throughout its manifestations.
At this point, it is worth pausing to outline the history of the phenomenological project that underpins this book. Phenomenology differs from the dominant theories in psychology, which seek to shed light on causal relationships and communicate them to the public. In a way, phenomenology goes back to ancient philosophy, including Aristotle (according to Nussbaum 1986), who believed that every study should start with an in-depth description of the phenomenon in question. The description of the
