The sociological study of death which began in the mid-twentieth century spawned what for a long time was the dominant area of academic interest – the study of grief. Geoffrey Gorer’s classic work on death in modern Britain took as its starting point the observation that the restriction of public mourning and reduction in ritual which had come about in post-war Britain had deprived individuals of support in their grieving, and, moreover, created an atmosphere in which mourning was treated as ‘a weakness, a self-indulgence, a reprehensible bad habit, instead of as a psychological necessity’ (Gorer, 1965, p 113). In the death-denying societies of the mid-twentieth century, grief as a problematic phenomenon began to be theorised and interventions developed and refined on that basis. In fact, long before ‘modern death’ was discovered, Freud had been interested in the importance for psychoanalysis of loss of a love object, and the intra-psychic processes set in motion by significant loss. Thus, right from the start, attempts to better understand grief went hand-in-hand with attempts to help those whose grief looked problematic.
Guidance of those professionals who care for people who are dying and bereaved continues to be one of the chief stimulators of the study of bereavement. Yet the application of theoretical underpinnings has not been unproblematic and much of the more recent revision is concerned with the assertion of lay experience of bereavement over the professional discourse on grief. Tony Walter, using the term ‘policing grief ’, looks at the many ways in which the over-regulated use of models of grief by professionals has led to dissonance between their attempts to help and the actual and varied experiences of bereaved people (Walter, 1999).
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