Abstract
In this chapter we argue that grief or mourning is not simply an interior or intrapsychic process, although that is how it has been defined for most of the past century. Instead we describe grief in terms of the processes by which meanings are found, appropriated or assembled at least as fully between people as within them. In this view, mourning is an interaction between interior, interpersonal, communal, and cultural narratives. We argue, then, that mourning is a situated interpretive and communicative activity charged with establishing the meaning of the deceased’s life and death at three levels. First, we look at psychological research on individual self-narratives that organize life experience into plot structures with some level of consistency over time. Second, we explore public communication, including eulogies, grief accounts in popular literature, and elegies. All these discourses construct the identity of the deceased as they were, and as they are now in the individual and communal continuation of bonds with the dead. Third, we consider different cultural contexts in order to understand the rules of grieving and to see how grief is policed. Individuals, in their grief, conform to or actively challenge the dominant cultural narratives that script the “proper” performance of grief in a manner that is coherent with the prevailing social order. That is, the meanings people find through the situated interpretive and communicative activity of mourners must either be congruent with the meanings that undergird the larger context or represent an active form of resistance against them.
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Notes
- 1.
By “situated,” we mean to emphasize that mourning is a function of a given social, historical and cultural context; by “interpretive,” we draw attention to the meaning-making processes it entails; by “communicative” we stress the essential embeddedness of such processes in written, spoken, and nonverbally performed exchanges with others, and by “activity” we underscore that grieving and mourning are active verbs, not merely states to be endured. In sum, “the work of grief,” in our view, involves reaffirmation or reconstruction of a world of meaning that has been challenged by loss, at social as well as individual levels, in a specific cultural and historical frame.
- 2.
Further consideration of these results suggests that a defining feature of violent death bereavement was its senselessness; it has no justification, purpose or explanation in the eyes of the bereaved. It seemed to be this assault on meaning, more than the grotesqueness, suddenness or human agency implicated in these losses to suicide, homicide or fatal accident that accounted for the intensity and complication of grief in the aftermath of such bereavement.
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Neimeyer, R.A., Klass, D., Dennis, M.R. (2014). Mourning, Meaning, and Memory: Individual, Communal, and Cultural Narration of Grief. In: Batthyany, A., Russo-Netzer, P. (eds) Meaning in Positive and Existential Psychology. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4939-0308-5_19
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