Abstract
This essay argues that elegiac poetry, the poetry of mourning, may be a resource for pastoral care with complicated grief. It builds on Freud’s distinction between mourning (normal grief) and melancholia (complicated grief), particularly as appropriated by French literary critic and psychoanalyst Julia Kristeva. It makes the case for elegy as a locus for externalizing a lost object which, in complicated grief, has been internalized as part of the bereaved person’s self and which is not only grieved but also treated ambivalently if it is not hated. Drawing on the “suffering God” motif in Christian theologies of the cross, theological reflections supplement psychological arguments.
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Cole, A.H. Elegiac Poetry: A Pastoral Resource with Complicated Grief. Pastoral Psychol 53, 189–206 (2005). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11089-004-0553-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11089-004-0553-6