Grief, Bereavement, and Mourning in Historical Perspective

The common root of the words bereavement and grief is derived from the Old English word reafian—to plunder, spoil, or rob—which gave name to the reavers, bands of murdering bandits who terrified the uncertain lands between England and Scotland. Thus the root of the words bereavement and grief designates abrupt, violent deprivation with the resultant loss typically involving the soothing or cheering reaction of the soul. These two aspects of loss by death—the sense of [Page 534]personal violation and the heaviness of the soul—are thus enclosed in the language itself.

The clinical study of reactions to loss began in the early years of the 20th century with the publication of Sigmund Freud's 1917 classic essay “Mourning and Melancholia,” in which Freud includes the behavioral and emotional changes that are set in motion after a significant death under the single term mourning. The term has been used to cover the wide variety of reactions to loss and later to affirm that there is a difference between grief and mourning. Thus mourning is described as a public act of expressing grief that is culturally determined and distinguishable from individual spontaneous responses.

Another important theoretical approach acknowledges that both grief and mourning are subject to considerable modification, depending on the history and circumstances of the bereaved. Thus mourning is the conventional behavior, determined by the habits and customs of the society, whereas grief is a set of stereotyped responses, psychological and physiological, of biological origin. In contemporary thinking, this distinction continues to be assumed.

Finally, brief definitions of the key concepts can be offered: bereavement, the loss of a significant person in one's life, which characteristically generates a reaction we call grief, which is evident in a set of behaviors we call mourning. Grief has been described as mental pain, distress, and deep or violent sorrow associated with bitter feelings of regret for something lost. Mourning, on the other hand, has two aspects: one subjective and rooted in anxiety, fastening, remembrance, dying, and withering, and the other in the public expression of grief and the exhibiting of conventional or ceremonial signs of grief such as wearing the appropriate garments or respecting pertinent social traditions. Many theorists, then, have indicated that while loss and grief are universal in humans and present, to some extent, in certain other species, mourning is culturally determined.

The Early History of Grief, Mourning, and Bereavement

Although a sense of loss, and therefore grief, may extend back at least to the time when the first anthropoids were recognizable as human, it is only in relatively recent years and in some societies that entire industries have grown up around death and its aftermath. Many primordial myths contain the idea of a golden age before the existence of death, and suggest that it was called into being by some mistake or to keep humankind from challenging the gods. Ancient stories and legends also speak of the struggle humankind has long been engaged in to come to terms with the finality of death and to deal with its aftermath in individuals and societies.

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