Grief. Svend Brinkmann
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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.
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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