1 Introduction 9mourning in a scholarly manner. He observed that we can mourn for things,
values, and statuses, not only as a response to a death. He also assures that
grief and mourning are “not pathological,” even when psychotic thoughts,
feelings, and behaviors occur as an understandable (and usually normal) reac-
tion to loss.
Freud proposed a “task-based theory,” predicated on the idea that the
mourner must decathect from the lost entity. Freud’s theory of behavior states
that the psyche cathects people and loved entities with libidinal energy and
that that same libido must be withdrawn in order for a mourner to heal after
loss. He believed people experiencing melancholia (what we might now
call dysthymia or depression) had not successfully withdrawn the libidinal
energy (decathexis) and needed help to do this. In Freud’s understanding, the
next task was to transfer libido to a new love object via cathexis. He asserted
(Freud, 1957) that mourning is only completed when the ego becomes free by
virtue of decathecting libido from the lost love object. He suggested a year as
the customary time necessary for this to occur. (As a person of Jewish heritage,
despite his religious skepticism, he may have adopted the traditional year of
mourning accepted and ritualized in Jewish faith.)
Freud’s was the primary theoretical paradigm for early grief work.
Usually couched in the language of “letting go,” counselors have long held to
the idea that a mourner must separate from their attachment to the lost entity,
even if they did not necessarily view this through Freud’s theory of deca-
thexis. Though simplistic, this task-based model for grief work has periodi-
cally re-emerged as a template for grief work in other forms. Indeed, this task
of decathexis, separation or “letting go” continues to inform practice wisdom
despite the development of new understandings of loss and grief. Freud him-
self set the context for some of the modern re-interpretations of grief work. He
wrote to a friend who experienced the death of a child (as Freud himself had):
[A]lthough we know that after such a loss the acute state of mourning
will subside, we also know we shall remain inconsolable and will never
find a substitute. No matter what may fill the gap, even if it be filled
completely, it nevertheless remains something else. It is the only way of
perpetuating that love which we do not want to relinquish. (Translated
letters, Freud, 1961)He implies that decathexis may occur but that recathexis is not likely to fill
the gap, that it “remains something else” that mourners do not relinquish eas-
ily. We will return to this idea as we address the theories of meaning-making
(Neimeyer, 2001) and continuing bonds (Klass, Silverman, & Nickman, 1996).
Some of the first empirical work to explore the grieving process was done
by Erich Lindemann (1944), who studied the responses of grievers following
the Cocoanut Grove nightclub fire in Boston in November 1942. He designed
the study in advance to be fielded immediately after a tragedy so that there
would be no anticipatory grief, but a sudden loss. He believed this would allow
him to assess mourners’ responses more accurately. He theorized that grief
normally includes somatic distress, preoccupation with the deceased, guilt,
and sometimes, hostile reactions. He asserted that eight to ten sessions with