dirt and wanders restlessly through the desert. These feelings are quite recognisable to modern humans, many millennia later. An even more famous description of grief is provided by Homer 1,500 years later. In The Iliad, after losing his friend Patroclus, Achilles too covers himself with dirt, and tears out his hair. Kofod (2017) has drawn up a historical timeline for grief, starting with the ancient Greeks, for whom grief was considered a ‘moral practice’ and an essential part of human reason. For both Plato and Aristotle, the objective was for individuals to regulate their emotions in a manner proportionate to the situation. Later on, under the influence of Christianity, medieval culture endowed grief with a religious aspect. But perhaps the most significant change came in the nineteenth century, when Romanticism replaced the ancient and medieval ‘cosmological grief’ – directed outward toward a meaningful cosmic order – with ‘inward grief’, in which individuals engaged in dialogue with their inner selves. It was, in other words, a transition from cosmology to psychology.
In their account of historical perspectives on grief, Stearns and Knapp (1996) argue that grief reactions are, to a certain extent, cultural constructs. They also date the important historical shift in the perception of grief to the early nineteenth century, when the West’s traditional (and previously relatively subdued) ways of expressing grief gave way to much more intense mourning practices, bordering on worship of grief, during the Victorian era. Although they appear natural, our modern grief responses, it is claimed, did not emerge until the early nineteenth century. The Victorian age is often thought of as a period of great self-control and suppression of desire, and yet expressions of grief were positively encouraged. Stearns and Knapp link this development in particular to the increasing importance of love in families, which had previously been purely practical units. Emotional ties between spouses – and between parents and children – were cultivated more intensely than before. At the same time, improvements in medical science facilitated the treatment of many more diseases and lowered mortality rates, particularly for children, far more of whom survived infancy. Poets started to write about death and grief, for both children and adults. Artistic expressions of grief were personal and immediate, as seen in this typical song from 1839:
Mingled were our hearts forever, long time ago;
Can I now forget her? Never. No, lost one, no.
To her grave these tears are given, ever to flow.
She’s the star I missed from heaven, long time ago.4
It became increasingly common to dress in black and to spend money on funerals, with the wealthiest building lavish monuments to their dead. The sculptor William Wetmore Story’s Angel of Grief (1894) is often seen as the culmination of the Victorian relationship to grief (even though Story was American). He produced it after his wife’s death, and it was his final sculpture. The original is in the Protestant Cemetery in Rome, but it is frequently copied.
The original Angel of Grief by William Wetmore Story (1894)
Unlike earlier ornamentation of graves, which often sought to depict the deceased’s life or portray angels in Heaven (what might be called outward grief, directed toward the cosmos), Angel of Grief expresses the grief of the bereaved (which is inward and psychological). It does so in what now seems an almost archetypal way – the angel has collapsed with her arms over her eyes and face (I will return to this sculpture in Chapter 4). Grief is, in every sense, a heavy emotion, and this weightiness is beautifully conveyed by Story’s sculpture. Of course, the Anglo-Saxon world was not alone in defining grief in Victorian times, but Britain was a cultural superpower in those days, comparable with the USA today. Nowadays, grief discourse is not shaped by English poets and sculptors, but by pop musicians and Hollywood film and TV directors.
The early years of the twentieth century saw a gradual rethink of the Victorian era’s poetic and artistic idolisation of grief. Increasingly, it was considered preferable to conceal grief and move on. This trend was reinforced during the First World War, when expressing deep and lasting grief was considered weak and bad for morale. Throughout the twentieth century, Western countries gradually changed from industrial to consumer societies. Stearns and Knapp (1996) write that consumerism led to a further polarisation between positive and negative emotions, in which the former were to be supported and enacted. Conversely, the consumer society simply does not afford the same time for grief. People are expected to be flexible and adaptable, rather than mired in the past and maintaining their bonds with the dead. The second half of the twentieth century saw the emergence of a burgeoning happiness industry, in which emotional culture focused on the positive, on ‘motivation’ and ‘passion’ (Davies 2015). Grief was almost diametrically opposed to the feelings of proactivity and euphoria that were dominant and in demand. Psychologists and psychiatrists began systematically drawing up symptom checklists and formulating psychiatric diagnoses for (‘complicated’) grief, in order to ensure that nobody grieved needlessly and the bereaved were able to resume their social and work roles quickly.
In simple terms, in the last two centuries, grief in the West has changed from being a normal part of life, expressed mainly through religious practices and rituals, to a defining emotion of the Victorian age, when it was cultivated in art and literature and elaborate mourning practices emerged that were independent of the religious context. This started to change again with the first major war of the twentieth century. From that point on, grief became more contained and concealed, leading eventually to medicalisation. Right now, grief again appears to have become a central phenomenon, one through which human beings can be understood, especially via art and popular culture.
Parallel with the story of how grief is enacted and practised in different epochs is a corresponding account of how research into grief has changed. One of the earliest sources in the West was Robert Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy (1651), in which the author interprets grief as a form of melancholia. However, he stresses that while melancholy is a disease of the mind, grief is a normal, melancholic response to loss (Granek 2010: 49). In 1872, Charles Darwin’s The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals was published. In this famous work, Darwin briefly touches on grief and formulates a distinction between depression and grief, and between an active form of grief and a more passive, depressive form (Granek 2010: 50). John Shand was the first to conduct a proper psychological analysis of grief, in 1914 – interestingly, the year of the outbreak of the First World War – but it was Freud’s analyses from roughly the same period that made the deepest impression on twentieth-century understandings of grief. Freud saw mental health and pathology as being on a continuum, and so did not think that there was a sudden leap from one extreme to the other. In his 1917 essay on grief and melancholy, he looked at what he saw as the core aim of ‘grief work’ (to use the psychodynamic term), which is helping the bereaved to redirect their emotional energy away from the deceased toward other aspects of life, and possibly a new loved one (Freud 2005). Freud also stressed that we should not see grief as a mental disorder and treat it with medicine or therapy. According to him, the difference between grief and melancholy (or depression, as we would say today) is simple – the former is understood within the context of loss; the latter does not involve loss and is, therefore, pathological. Phenomenologically speaking, depression is very close to grief, but without the element of loss. Or, in language closer to Freud’s own: in grief, it is the world that has become empty, while in melancholia or depression it is the self.
The first significant pathologisation of grief was formulated by Helene Deutsch in 1937. She asserted that grief work can be abnormal, and may result in a chronic, pathological condition (Granek 2010: 53). However, she also considered the absence of grief after a loss to be pathological, introducing the idea of normal grief – neither too much nor too little – which would start to have an impact on research. A few years later, Melanie Klein and other psychoanalysts talked about grief as an actual illness. In the 1940s, Erich
