Grief and Mourning

Definitions and Distinctions

In general parlance, the terms grief and mourning are often used interchangeably. However, in thanatology (the study of dying, death, and bereavement), many writers make distinctions. Traditionally, grief has referred to the personal and subjective response to loss—particularly the emotional reactions—whereas mourning has referred to the cultural or public display of that grief (such as participating in a funeral ritual or wearing black clothes). This latter definition has broadened since the psychoanalytic era when mourning came to be associated with internal, psychological (and later also external, behavioral, and social) work undertaken to cope with that loss, not merely to express reactions to it outwardly or to identify oneself as having sustained a loss. Today, mourning is probably the single most inconsistently used term in thanatology.

The reader should be aware of two important points regarding terminology here. First, the reality is that many individuals do not make the distinctions made here, and use the term grieving to refer to what is discussed herein as mourning. Second, to say “grief and mourning” is technically redundant because grief is a part of mourning. Nevertheless, they are separated here for teaching purposes to distinguish the specific aspects of grief from those of mourning.