target="_blank" rel="nofollow" href="#uc5cfe1eb-822d-529a-9d38-1bede996fa05">Chapter 5 examines grief as something that is not only in the body but also in culture, in the form of material practices and systems of symbols. Grief is something felt and enacted along with others in a cultural setting consisting of cemeteries, memorials, photo albums, heirlooms and so forth. In other words, grief has both socially and materially distributed aspects. Psychology is plagued by a problematic individualism, in which grief and other psychological phenomena are assumed to be exclusively states that exist ‘inside the mind’ of the individual. Understanding grief as a socially and materially distributed phenomenon bypasses this individualism. It enables us to understand how grief is shared through traditional cultural practices, and even ‘outsourced’ to others, such as professional mourners, or ‘keeners’ in Ireland. Music, rituals and physical objects help to shape grief in a variety of ways. The chapter therefore looks at the socio-material context of the experience of loss and grief.
As a psychological phenomenon, grief is almost unparalleled in its universal human quality, which is derived from the inevitability of death and the resultant sense of loss. However, as cultural and social anthropologists have shown (see e.g. Scheper-Hughes 1993), it manifests itself differently around the world, which makes it important to tread carefully when differentiating between general and particular aspects of grief. This has been particularly important in psychiatry in recent years, with the emergence of the diagnostic category ‘complicated grief’, which it is envisaged will have a broad validity that transcends cultures. Against this background, in Chapter 6 I return to the current debate about the medicalisation of grief and discuss the rationale behind the ‘complicated grief’ diagnosis. I look at the new grief diagnoses in the light of four authoritative theories of psychopathology, and conclude that although grief can be extremely painful, even debilitating, we do not yet have sufficient reason to believe that it is pathological in and of itself. In certain cases, grief may lead to mental disorders (particularly depression), but the trend toward medicalisation should, as far as possible, be resisted. The book concludes in Chapter 7 with a discussion of grief’s status in contemporary cultural and social contexts.
It is worth noting that while the chapters collectively provide a holistic understanding of grief – from how it is experienced by the self, via phenomenology, to an understanding of the importance of body, sociality and materiality – they can also be read in isolation. Chapter 5, on the ecology of grief, is probably the most challenging, because it is the one that diverges the most clearly from the prevailing, individualistic understanding of grief. It may aid understanding to first read this introduction and then Chapter 7.
Science, art and culture
Although the book primarily seeks to convey general psychological perspectives on grief, I also wish to illustrate the discussion with references to various cultural and artistic idioms, including poetry and fiction (e.g. Joan Didion, Naja Marie Aidt), TV shows (e.g. Black Mirror), visual art (e.g. van Gogh, Munch) and theatre (both Greek tragedies and modern experimental drama). The point of this is not just to make the book more accessible. Rather, it reflects my conviction that art is more than an expression of an artist’s irrational creative power, devoid of context – it is a systematic study of the many dimensions and phenomena of human experience, including grief. Science studies the world through its special methods and then conveys the results, but art does more than merely narrate – it also shows the phenomena being examined, which facilitates a more nuanced understanding than is possible with linear research methods. With this in mind, I hope that the book will prove useful to professionals in areas like psychology, psychiatry, philosophy, sociology, anthropology and theology, as well as to anyone interested in grief as a basic human experience. Although the book is primarily about grief as an emotion that usually follows the death of someone close, it also identifies grief as a basic existential state that is better encapsulated by art than by science. In his poetry collection Rystet spejl (Shaken Mirror), Søren Ulrich Thomsen writes of loss:
Little children too dream of their past
which is huge and dusky
full of scents and unrecognizable figures
reflected in polished floors.
Even the very old feel bereft
when they sit staring in dayrooms
and suddenly remember
that they have lost their parents.3
As human beings, the bonds we forge with others are both a gift and a curse – as such, grief is a lifelong companion. This mournful, melancholic undertone to life appears quite at odds with our positivity-oriented, happiness-obsessed age, and yet there is good reason to dwell on it, because it represents something deeply human. The sociologist Clive Seale has conducted detailed analyses of the significance of death and grief to society. As well as relating to the ‘big grief’ that follows a death, he also describes the ‘little grief’ that constantly lurks just below the surface in beings like us, who live in vulnerable bodies and know that death is an inescapable reality for us all (Seale 1998). Heidegger (1962), too, cast human existence as essentially ‘being-toward-death’. We regularly experience minor senses of loss, for example when social bonds are broken in more or less dramatic ways. Seale writes that what we call grief is basically an extreme version of the ‘everyday sadness’ that confronts us when we try to turn our attention away from our finitude toward the business of getting on with our lives (Seale 1998: 211). Seale belongs to a group of sociologists and social psychologists who consider human knowledge of and respect for mortality to be an important foundation for the formation and maintenance of human society. He writes that all social and cultural life is ultimately ‘a human construction in the face of death’. For this reason, all social life is also ‘a defense against the “grief” caused by realisation of embodiment’ (1998: 8). The sociologist Peter Berger propounds a similar idea, that societies should be understood as consisting of people who have joined together in the face of death (referred to in Walter 1999: 21). Ernest Becker, in his classic 1973 book The Denial of Death, describes the fear of death as the main human condition and the engine behind social processes (Becker 2011). Hegel supposedly said a couple of centuries ago that, at its core, the history of the world is about the way in which humans relate to death (see Jacobsen 2016: 19). This book seeks to resurrect phenomenological thinking about the concept of existence and illustrate the relevance of phenomenology to social and psychological analyses, not least concerning the constitutive function of grief for both the self and society.
Grief’s recent history
In keeping with its broadly phenomenological approach, the book’s main aim is to explore the very being of grief. There is no easy answer to the question of the extent to which the essence of grief transcends cultures and eras. Nonetheless, the thesis of this book is that there is indeed something universal about what we refer to as grief, which means, for example, that we are able to understand the Greek tragedies, despite them being over 2,000 years old. At the same time, we need to remain mindful of the fact that there are, of course, many aspects of grief that do vary according to time and place, as we will see in the following chapters. I now conclude this introduction with a brief overview of the history of grief in my own part of the world, Denmark and the West, focusing on the last two centuries.
According to Horwitz and Wakefield, the oldest written reference to grief is found in the Babylonian epic Gilgamesh, from the third millennium BCE (Horwitz and Wakefield 2007: 30). When King Gilgamesh loses his friend Enkidu, his grief
