Processes of grieving: How bonds are continued.

Abstract

so completely." Indeed, a professional concern with bereavement-how survivors live on after the death-arose in the modem West at precisely the time that public concem with the afterlife-how the dead themselves live on-waned (AriPs, 1981;Walter, 1996a). It is perhaps not surprising that academic models of bereavement have focused on the bereaved individual rather than on the relations between bereaved people and those they have lost. That bereaved people maintain a bond with their dead has been recognized by twentieth-century bereavement theorists (Silverman & Klass, 1996), but until recently the phenomenon was generally seen as hypercathexis, an intensification of the bond as a prelude to breaking it (Fenichel, 1945;Raphael, 1983), as an introjection in the psyche that is by definition pathological (Dietrich

Positive Outcomes Following Bereavement: Paths to Posttraumatic Growth

“…People in these circumstances can be reluctant to talk about such things as belief in paranormal phenomena, continuing bonds (Klass & Walter, 2001), or unpredictable bouts of distress. The expert companion is constant as a non-judgmental listener to all these experiences.…”

The time course of grief reactions to spousal loss: Evidence from a national probability sample.

“…Continuing involvement via conversation with others and its impact on grief reactions are understudied (Klass & Walter, 2001). An exception is work by Bonanno et al (2004), who found that at 6 months postloss, the bereaved talked about their spouse from once a week to two or three times a week; at 18 months postloss, they talked about their spouse about once a week.…”

Spiritual and Religious Transformation in Women Who Were Parentally Bereaved as Adolescents

“…A number of writers (Baker, 2001;Klass & Walter, 2001;Normand, Silverman, & Nickman, 1996;Silverman et al, 1992) have discussed a variety of strategies that children, adolescents, and adults use to maintain connections with the deceased. These range from talking about and to the deceased, using the deceased as a moral referent to experiencing the deceased's presence, keeping objects of the deceased, and becoming a "living legacy."…”

“…Theories on maintaining attachments and "continuing bonds" with the deceased acknowledge the interconnected part of ourselves. Klass and Walter (2001) trace the religious movement from Catholicism to the Protestant reformation and with it "the rejection of human bonds that continued after death" (p. 434). Catholicism allowed for more direct contact between the deceased and the living.…”