Journal ArticleDOI
A social constructionist account of grief: loss and the narration of meaning.
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The authors argue that grief or mourning is not primarily an interior process, but rather one that is intricately social, as the bereaved commonly seek meaning in this unsought transition in not only personal and familial, but also broader community and even cultural spheres.Abstract:
In contrast to dominant Western conceptions of bereavement in largely intrapsychic terms, the authors argue that grief or mourning is not primarily an interior process, but rather one that is intricately social, as the bereaved commonly seek meaning in this unsought transition in not only personal and familial, but also broader community and even cultural spheres. The authors therefore advocate a social constructionist model of grieving in which the narrative processes by which meanings are found, appropriated, or assembled occur at least as fully between people as within them. In this view, mourning is a situated interpretive and communicative activity charged with establishing the meaning of the deceased's life and death, as well as the postdeath status of the bereaved within the broader community concerned with the loss. They describe this multilevel phenomenon drawing first on psychological research on individual self-narratives that organize life experience into plot structures that display some level of consistency over time, whose viability is then negotiated in the intimate interpersonal domain of family and close associates. Second, they explore public communication, including eulogies, grief accounts in popular literature, and elegies. All of these discourses construct the identity of the deceased as he or she was, and as she or he is now in the individual and communal continuing bonds with the deceased. Finally, they consider different cultural contexts to see how expressions of grief are policed to ensure their coherence with the prevailing social and political order. That is, the meanings people find through the situated interpretive and communicative activity that is grieving must either be congruent with the meanings that undergird the larger context or represent an active form of resistance against them.read more
Citations
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Journal ArticleDOI
Meaning reconstruction and the experience of loss. Edited by R.A. Neimeyer. American Psychological Association, Washington, DC, 2001. 368pp, ISBN: 1557987424.
Journal ArticleDOI
Grief and mourning in cross-cultural perspective
TL;DR: In this article, the authors present a kind of precious book written by an experienced author, which is called "Grief and Mourning in cross-cultural perspective" and recommend it to readers.
Journal ArticleDOI
Meaning reconstruction in bereavement: Development of a research program
TL;DR: One program of research focused on this attempt at meaning reconstruction is reviewed, recently developed measures of meaning in mourning are described, and several therapeutic techniques for helping clients make sense of the death and rework their attachment relationship to the deceased are discussed.
Journal ArticleDOI
Meaning reconstruction in the wake of loss: Evolution of a research program.
TL;DR: A recent review of programmatic research grounded in a conceptualisation of grieving as an attempt to reaffirm or reconstruct a world of meaning challenged by loss can be found in this article.
References
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Journal ArticleDOI
Mourning and Melancholia
TL;DR: Freud, S. as discussed by the authors, The Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XIV (1914-1916): On the History of the Psycho-Analytic Movement, Papers on Metapsychology and Other Works, 237-258 Mourning and Melancholia, 237.
Book
Narrative Means to Therapeutic Ends
Michael White,David Epston +1 more
TL;DR: White and Epston as mentioned in this paper assume that people experience problems when the stories of their lives, as they or others have invented them, do not sufficiently represent their lived experience, and therapy then becomes a process of storying or restorying the lives and experiences of these people.
Journal ArticleDOI
Making Sense of the Meaning Literature: An Integrative Review of Meaning Making and Its Effects on Adjustment to Stressful Life Events.
TL;DR: An integrated model of meaning making is presented, which distinguishes between the constructs of global and situational meaning and between "meaning-making efforts" and "meaning made," and it elaborates subconstructs within these constructs.
BookDOI
Continuing Bonds : New Understandings of Grief
TL;DR: Grief and the Role of the Inner Representation of the Deceased and the Birth Origin Fantasies of Adopted Women, Susan Miller-Havens, Meanings and Implications.
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