Читать книгу Grief - Svend Brinkmann - Страница 10

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 is described as highly intense – so much so that he coats himself with 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 Lindemann conducted the first major empirical studies of grief among bereaved people (Granek 2010: 57). After interviewing more than 100 respondents, he concluded that grief was an illness, and a matter for medical science. Doctors were now advised to monitor patients’ grief work, and later empirical studies by other researchers resulted in the same perspective on the phenomenon. In the 1960s, however, a critique of this strongly normative idea of grief work emerged. For example, in 1967, the anthropologist Geoffrey Gorer identified the cultural requirement to be happy as an obstacle to people grieving in ways more appropriate to their needs (Granek 2010: 61). In the late 1960s, Elisabeth Kübler-Ross also formulated the famous five stages of death and grief (isolation and denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance). The jury is still out on whether it is reasonable to regard grief as a normative process in this way, but most contemporary scholars reject this view. It now appears that grief is much more individualised than any theories about phases or stages would imply (Guldin 2014).

There is also a more biological track in grief research, beginning with Darwin, and particularly associated with John Bowlby, a psychoanalyst who formulated an influential psycho-biological theory about the bonds between children and parents. This theory has also been deployed in research into patterns of grief. Colin Murray Parkes in particular has refined Bowlby’s approach by conducting empirical studies of the process and of various interventions for complicated grief. Parkes (1998) summarised the grief research up to that point and grouped it into four leading types: (1) stress and crisis theories that explain grief as a stress reaction; (2) psychodynamic theories in the Freudian tradition; (3) attachment theories in the tradition of Bowlby; and (4) psychosocial theories about life transitions. Similarly, he identifies three basic models for the current scientific knowledge about grief: (I) phase models that attempt to describe the grief process in a more or less linear fashion; (II) the medical model, which looks at grief as a medical condition; and (III) the grief work model, which emphasises the importance of the bereaved person acknowledging their loss. All of these models have, however, been strongly criticised (Walter 1999: 103), and there is currently little consensus in the field. In a review, Leeat Granek concludes that, in the early 1990s, researchers were almost exclusively concerned with grief’s dysfunctional nature. This book can be seen as an attempt to move in a different direction – one that stresses the idea that grief is existentially interesting in and of itself, and not only because of its possible clinical and pathological forms. According to Granek, the dominant themes of current research – which are not central to this book – are quantifying grief (the development of diagnostic symptom scales and lists); grief and trauma; continued discussion of the stages theory; individual differences in terms of grief reactions and mastering them; and above all else, complicated grief, in other words grief as an illness (Granek 2010: 65). While these themes are important, the focus in this book is on grief’s very essence.

In addition to the changes in recent centuries in the practice of grief – and research into it during the same period – it is also relevant to mention changing relationships to death. Historically, far more research has been conducted into death than grief. The biggest name in the field is the French historian Philippe Ariès, who researched changing attitudes to death from the Middle Ages to modern times (Ariès 2009). He divided the history of death into the following epochs: the tamed death (the medieval approach, in which death was considered ubiquitous and familiar due to high levels of mortality and widespread rituals); the death of self (from the early Renaissance, when more elaborate ceremonies were introduced and the dying were even permitted to plan their death); the death of the other (the increasing alienation from death in modern society, and an increasing focus on the mourner, as discussed above in a Victorian context); and finally the forbidden death – a modern phenomenon, in which, according to Ariès, death is more taboo than ever. Death is now increasingly controlled and institutionalised in hospitals, separate from ordinary life. Grief is therefore, almost by necessity, more readily seen as a pathological condition to be treated, rather than a necessary experience governed by societal norms (see Jacobsen and Kofod 2015).

Jacobsen has recently proposed a new, fifth phase to Ariès’ chronology, which he calls the spectacular death. In the twenty-first century, death is designed, staged and rendered spectacular to a greater extent than previously (Jacobsen 2016). Not in all cases, of course, but it can be identified as a significant historical shift away from the taboo that used to epitomise the modern era. Tony Walter has criticised the widespread notion of the death taboo, and in a new article speaks instead about the pervasive dead (Walter 2019). His contention is that the twenty-first century has witnessed the reintegration of death into everyday life. He bases this on a wide range of trends, including grief theories that emphasise continued bonds with the dead, digital memorials on social media, renewed interest in angels and the afterlife, and new funeral practices. He presents plenty of evidence to suggest that the widespread thesis of death as the last great taboo was at best oversimplified, and possibly even completely wrong.

Just as I began this chapter by referring to a series of cultural representations of grief, I could have done the same with regard to death. There are films and TV programmes about death, death cafés, and death features prominently as a theme in novels and visual art. The history of death is, at its core, a story of what the focus has been in the management of the transition from life to death.⁵ That focus shifted from the medieval concern for the soul and its salvation to early modernity’s interest in the corpse (it was only slowly and gradually that scientists were allowed to examine dead bodies at all) (Walter 1999: 135). In modern times, the focus switches again, to interest in the bereaved. Grief practices are no longer primarily for the sake of the deceased – to ensure a good journey to the hereafter – but for the sake of the bereaved, to ensure a good psychological journey through the rest of their lives. This is probably most true in Protestant societies, which do not subscribe to a particular funerary theology (in the form of a sacrament or ritual to help the dead on their way to heaven) (Walter 1999: 33). In simple terms, we have moved from a religious culture to a psychological one; from care for the soul of the deceased, to care for the psychological well-being of the bereaved. This perspective is consistent with cultural analyses highlighting the fact that psychology has in many ways replaced religion for the individualised human being. In effect, psychologists are becoming more and more like the new priesthood, offering advice, relieving symptoms and aiding the development of the individual (Brinkmann 2014b).

Despite the background outlined above, this book will not explore the theme of death in depth, as it serves merely as a backdrop for an analysis of grief, for which death is a necessary precondition. However, it is valid – if unsurprising – to note that there are parallels between the developments over time in relation to both death and grief. In short, both show signs of increasing individualisation – away from fixed rituals and templates, to individual choices regarding death, burial and grieving practices. In extension of this, Tony Walter (1999: 207) has summarised the recent history of grief and divided it into three epochs:

 1800–1950 (approx.): Early industrial society and Romantic culture. The Victorian era’s aesthetic cultivation of grief, with a range of practices to maintain the memory of the dead.

 1950–1980 (approx.): Complete modernity and technical rationality. Focus on ‘grief work’, standardised stage and phase theories and increasing medicalisation.

 1980–present (approx.): Late capitalism and consumer society. Individualisation and subjectification of grief (‘the customer is always right’), underlining that everybody grieves differently.

For Walter, the current conception of grief is torn between, on the one hand, a ‘modern’ understanding, where grief is framed by standardised theories about phases, and in which health systems are on hand with diagnoses and treatments for those who fall outside the normative frameworks; and on the other, a ‘post-modern’ understanding, in which grief is seen as an individual experience of suffering, which must be allowed to proceed free from the judgement of others. The post-modern understanding also includes the possibility of ‘post-traumatic growth’, i.e. that the experience of loss may give rise to existential reorientation and personal development. The problem with the former (the ‘modern’ understanding) is that it can be experienced as intrusive or even insulting when others relate normatively to our personal experience of loss and grief. The problem with the latter (the ‘post-modern’ understanding) is that it can entail a risk of the individual being abandoned, without fixed cultural templates and rituals to shape their 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.