The Experience of Grief and Bereavement

In the Beginning: The Seminal Contribution of Sigmund Freud

The scientific attempt to understand the responses of bereaved people dates to Sigmund Freud's ([1917] 1957) frequently cited paper, Mourning and Melancholia. In keeping with the objectives of psychoanalytic theory to provide a comprehensive interpretation of human behavior, Freud posited that, just as death was a universal if unconsciously threatening fact of life, there were also universal dynamics involved in grieving the death of a loved one. His explication of these dynamics provided the accepted point of departure for the majority of influential grief theories to follow and in many respects came to shape and inform common lay conceptualizations of the psychology of bereavement, especially in Western countries.

Freud defined mourning as the nonpathological response to the death of a loved one (or the loss of some abstraction such as one's country, one's liberty, or an ideal). Its distinguishing features include painful dejection, withdrawal of interest in the outside world, loss of the capacity to love, and inhibition of all activity. The work of mourning is accomplished gradually as the mourner's psychic energy orlibido once invested in the attachment to the lost “object” is systematically recalled, reexperienced, and then released, resulting in detachment from the lost object. Freud's concept of emotional detachment ordecathexis as the natural end point of mourning has had an enduring impact on both professional and public understandings of bereavement.

Freud's second major contribution was his effort to delineate how processes of mourning can go awry and become unhealthy.Melancholia was defined as a pathological outcome marked by an insistent narcissistic identification with the lost object, in effect, a refusal to “let go.” Instead, the mourner's self orego incorporates the lost object into itself as a way of warding off the loss. Particularly when the premorbid attachment to the deceased was characterized by ambivalence, suchidentification is inherently conflictual as love and hate impulses struggle against each other. As will be seen later, this suspicion about the pathological implications of identification and “holding on” to the lost love object was carried over by many subsequent theories, as was the presumably problematic consequences of relational ambivalence prior to the loss.

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