Mourning And Meaning

American Behavioral Scientist
http://abs.sagepub.com Mourning and Meaning
ROBERT A. NEIMEYER, HOLLY G. PRIGERSON and BETTY DAVIES American Behavioral Scientist 2002; 46; 235 DOI: 10.1177/000276402236676 The online version of this article can be found at: http://abs.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/46/2/235

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Mourning and Meaning
ROBERT A. NEIMEYER
University of Memphis

HOLLY G. PRIGERSON
Yale University

BETTY DAVIES
University of California, San Francisco

Viewed in an expanded frame, the phenomena of grief and bereavement call for analysis in sociological, psychological, and psychiatric terms.In this article, the authors argue that a common theme in these accounts is that of the meaning of loss as expressed in both individual and collective attempts at adaptation. At a societal level, communal rituals, discursive practices, and local cultures provide resources for integrating the significance of loss for survivors and regulating the emotional chaos of bereavement. At an individual andinterpersonal level, survivors struggle to assimilate the loss into their existing self-narratives, which are sometimes profoundly challenged by traumatic bereavement. Complicated grief can therefore be viewed as the inability to reconstruct a meaningful personal reality, an outcome to which individuals with insecure working models of self and relationships are especially vulnerable. Nonetheless,evidence suggests that grief can prompt personal growth as well as despair, augmenting rather than only reducing the survivor’s sense of meaning.

Grief as a human experience is both a natural and constructed event. On one hand, core features of our response to loss reflect our evolution as biological and social beings, rooted in the disruption of attachment bonds required for our verysurvival. On the other hand, we respond to bereavement at symbolic as well as biological levels, imputing significance to the symptoms of separation that we experience as well as the changes in personal and collective identity that accompany the death of a member of the family or broader community. In this article, we will reflect on these various levels of response to loss, situating grief sociologicallywithin encompassing communal and cultural frames of reference, psychologically as a response to the disruption of personal assumptions and relationships that sustain a sense of self, and psychiatrically as a process with complications that can forecast deleterious health and mental health outcomes possibly calling for intervention. A guiding theme in the analysis that follows is that human beingsseek meaning in mourning and do so by struggling to construct a coherent account of their bereavement that preserves a sense of
AMERICAN BEHAVIORAL SCIENTIST, Vol. 46 No. 2, October 2002 235-251 DOI: 10.1177/000276402236676 © 2002 Sage Publications

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AMERICAN BEHAVIORAL SCIENTIST

continuity with who theyhave been while also integrating the reality of a changed world into their conception of who they must now be. Writing from our respective vantage points as a clinical psychologist with constructivist and social constructionist leanings, a psychiatric epidemiologist, and a nurse researcher, we hope that this pluralistic perspective will invite interdisciplinary investigation on a topic that...