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The Public and Private Management of Grief

Recovering Normal

  • Book
  • © 2019

Overview

Authors:
  1. Caroline Pearce

    1. King’s College London, London, UK

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  • Illuminates the social construction of grief in contemporary UK using empirical study and a Foucauldian approach
  • Analyses how grief is managed, through the example of bereavement counselling
  • Problematises the notion of recovery and related discourses in terms of the norms and values promoted by neo-liberalism

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Table of contents (7 chapters)

  1. Front Matter

    Pages i-xi
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  2. Introduction: Recovering Normal

    • Caroline Pearce
    Pages 1-22

  3. Grief as a Psychological Object of Study

    • Caroline Pearce
    Pages 23-59

  4. Making Sense of Grief

    • Caroline Pearce
    Pages 61-101

  5. Affective Practices: Managing Grief

    • Caroline Pearce
    Pages 103-143

  6. Emotions, Bodies, Practices

    • Caroline Pearce
    Pages 145-178

  7. Inhabiting and Resisting Identities

    • Caroline Pearce
    Pages 179-208

  8. The Other Side of Recovery

    • Caroline Pearce
    Pages 209-223

  9. Back Matter

    Pages 225-233
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Keywords

About this book

Through a critical analysis of theory, policy and practice, The Public and Private Management of Grief looks at how 'recovery' is the prevailing discourse that measures and frames how people grieve, and considers what happens when people 'fail' to recover. 


Pearce draws on in-depth interviews with bereaved people and a range of bereavement professionals, to contemplate how ‘failures’ to recover are socially perceived and acted upon. Grounded in Foucauldian theory, this book problematises the notion of recovery, and instead argues for the acknowledgment of the experience of ‘non-recovery,’ highlighting how recovery is a socially and historically constructed notion linked to the individualised vision of health and happiness promoted by neo-liberal governmentality. 


This book will be of interest to students and scholars across sociology, anthropology, social work and psychology with a focus on death, dying and bereavement, grief studies, health and social care, as well as counsellors, clinical psychologists and social workers.  


Reviews

“A reading of The Public and Private Management of Grief: Recovering Normal pays off for those who are interested in the normalisation of emotions and want to learn more about the social containment of repressed and pathologised emotions. ... Especially for sociologists who deal with grief, mourning, and bereavement, this book should become a part of the required reading. And also for the practitioners in the area of grief recovery, a reading would be worthwhile … .” (Ekkehard Knopke, Emotions and Society, Vol. 1 (2), 2019) “Drawing majestically on insights from the humanities and critical theory, psychology and the social sciences, Pearce demonstrates both the promises and the pitfalls of the ideal of recovering normal. This is the most interesting and important book on grief and bereavement to have appeared for many years. It will be read and cited for a long time to come.” (Arnar Árnason, Senior Lecturer, University of Aberdeen, UK, and co-editor of Mortality)

“Pearce problematises psychological theories of recovery to break new ground in arguing for ‘non-recovery’ as a valid position for bereaved people to inhabit. Drawing on the sociology of emotions, she applies the concept of ‘affective practices’ to theorise grief as embodied, relational, shifting and ambivalent. From this perspective non-recovery no longer represents an unproductive place of stuckness but one of dynamic movement.” (Christine Valentine, Research Fellow and member of the Centre for Death and Society, University of Bath, UK)

Authors and Affiliations

  • King’s College London, London, UK

    Caroline Pearce

About the author

Caroline Pearce is a research associate within the School of Population Health and Environmental Sciences at King’s College London, UK


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