An Intersubjective Hermeneutic of Grief—Multifactorial Perspectives on Loss ()
1. Introduction
Since the dawn of humanity, coping with loss has been something truly subjective, singular and multifactorial, relativizing its reaction to the act directly linked to a phenomenological and biopsychosocial condition. The most varied ways of dealing with the life-death binomial and its myths and sociocultural rites for this purpose, whether in the religious, anthropological, philosophical or psychological field, the totemic social structuring of managing the feeling of loss has remained for millennia. To paraphrase Freud in his classic work Totem and Taboo (Freud, 1913), society needs moral and emotional acceptance in the face of trauma, embodying certain behaviors and protocols well defined by society, through a morally accepted envelope, notwithstanding, to all the other primitive desires that arise from emotional fragility or socially reproached prohibitions.
Even though it is an imminent stage and inherently belongs to basic existence, the fear of facing the finitude of life and the interdiction of something that was once real, echoes in every human being, awakening a series of dubious or paradoxical digressions, perennially seeking a way out, either through purely liturgical acceptance or optionally through the scientific eventuality of dying. By better outlining this theme, this paper aims to address some elements that are not only conceptual, but also inexorably structural with regard to the complex understanding of the phenomenon of grief. After all, according to Antigone, the third play in Sophocles’ (496 B.C.) trilogy, death reveals its own laws to us.
2. Methodology
This research was methodologically under the qualitative aspect of bibliographic nature in psychology, we took discourses and documents as a product of society and the relations of forces that manufacture it (Lemos, 2002), considering a wide collection of technical, religious, philosophical, and scientific notes, structured by the descriptive aspect, through argumentation and review of several works by authors who directly or indirectly influenced the proposed theme.
We organize a significant archive of diverse elements in their multiple relationships and seek to explain their interpenetrations and regularities in order to relate supposedly parallel lines and series, explaining the points at which they touch in our problematic field. With this, we seek to establish explanatory series that correlate the paradigm of bereaved suffering and its variables, while at the same time seeking in parallel fragments and discourses that are interrelated with the discussion of the theme, in its interpretative aspect, in a totally singular, multifactorial and intersubjective scenario.
Finally, we pose in advance the question of how to analyze, what to take into account when studying the conditions of possibility of practices, discourses and discursive formations on the way each individual deals with and articulates with the phenomenon of mourning, with its reverberations in the sociocultural field of society.
In any investigation in the scientific field that includes mental health, it is important to have a set of guidelines that allow data to be treated objectively, reliably, and validly within the scope of the research. To interpret and analyze the collected data, the content analysis technique will be used, which according to Barelson (1984) cited by Vala (1986) consists of a research technique that allows “the objective, systematic and quantitative description of the manifest content of the communication” (p. 103). Krippendorf (2004), cited by the same author, refers to content analysis as a “research technique that allows valid and replicable inferences to be made from the data to their context” (Ketele & De Roegiers, 1999: p. 103). It is, essentially, a technique that allows the “manifest content” of the most diverse types of communication to be “arranged” in a set of categories of meaning (Amado, 2000).
Therefore, according to this technique, the researcher must decide which documents will be analyzed and to which the content analysis technique will be applied. These documents refer to the documentary corpus (Vala, 1986). In the definition of the documentary corpus, it is essential to ensure some characteristics: exhaustiveness, representativeness, homogeneity and adequacy (Amado, 2000).
After defining the body of documents, several successive and increasingly rigorous readings of the documents are carried out, with the aim of resulting in an enumeration of the most relevant themes (Amado, 2000).
3. Religious, Philosophical and Sociocultural Aspects
Among all the historical and representative moments of the scenario of humanity, from scientific inventions to philosophical discoveries, the rites and concepts proposed by the Catholic Church remain in vogue to this day. According to John Stott, British writer and theologian, and his work Authentic Christianity (Stott, 1995), the Seventh-day Mass and the Wake, for example, are considered funereal ritualistic liturgical activities widely disseminated by the Orthodox Catholic society and one of the most widespread in the world to this day. Whether by the act of watching over the lifeless body before burial or cremation, or even by the spiritual trajectory a week after the individual’s death; they are collective events based on a structure based on moral and religious values to make everyone face death, bringing a certain comfort and encouragement to those involved.
The concept of acceptance of death is something that has been widely discussed and analyzed by different cultures and eras over the centuries. In the Mayan culture, a Mesoamerican civilization of 1800 B.C., it was believed that death was only a stage of passage to the next life, where a divine entity based on astrological conditions and criteria awaited the soul of the deceased, with the veneration of bodies and funerary rituals celebrating such a feat. In another great civilization, this time years later, around 100 B.C., Greco-Roman society graced the dead with a gold coin in each eye, believing in the possible payment to the ferryman Charon, who transported the soul to the afterlife across the River Styx, emblematically cited in Dante Alighieri’s classic work in The Divine Comedy (Alighieri, 1304). Both of the above-mentioned conducts are based on a ritual wrapped in a phenomenological and liturgical structure, which leads us to a digression about how such societies faced loss naturally, because after all there was no cessation of the finitude of life, considering that the deceased individual did not end his life, but only entered another spiritual plane. That is, etiologically speaking, death was treated not as a process of cessation of life, but as an ephemeral condition that would be reconnected to another ethereal sphere: the search for perennial life. Will there be grief in a sample, where the understanding of loss is merely diffuse? Or a conceptual adaptation of something that inherently hurts us, for the sake of convenience?
The most widely read and disseminated work in the world, having been translated into more than 3000 languages and dialects, The Bible, intended especially for liturgy and pastoral care, represents one of the greatest phenomena of transfer of written knowledge in the world. The latter term is sometimes understood exclusively in the sense of pedagogy, explanation or even simplification of translation. Without denying the value of such pedagogical efforts, it is good to remember that in this case it is a question of an official translation, a reference, and precisely this is its specific pastoral value. “Officialism” is also a pastoral function. Something that biblical scholars easily forget is that the Bible originally served, and continues to serve today, for the liturgy. It is with this segment in mind that the Bible received its form as a book, composed of various writings from the narrative and celebratory tradition of the community. Without the concern to gather together the scattered texts of Israel’s tradition for praise in the Temple and reading in the synagogue, we would not have the Tanak (Hebrew Bible), and the same must be said of the Christian scriptures of the New Testament. For the purpose of digressing on the topic, here is an excerpt from a notorious verse from the Holy Bible, Thessalonians:
We do not want you brothers to be ignorant of those who sleep, lest you suffer like others who have no hope. For if we believe that Jesus died and rose again, so also God will bring with him those who sleep in Jesus. Therefore, we say this to you in the word of the Lord that we who are alive and abide will not go before those who are asleep. For the Lord Himself will descend from heaven with a loud cry, with the voice of the archangel and with the trumpet of God, and the dead in Christ will rise first. Then we, who are still alive and remaining, will be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air, and so we will be with the Lord forever. (p. 1310)
In this passage, the Christian ideology on the perception of the finitude of life is clarified and structurally well delineated under the evasive aspect. As if death were something to be avoided at all costs, and if it did, it would not be orthodoxly accepted by the Christian community legitimately faithful to Christ’s teachings, but adapted as a punitive device. The cessation of life is not classified as natural, but rather a retrogression that would be reversed by a savior, whose empirical technicality could evaluate the individual and, based on his own criteria, decree salvation through the resurrection and subsequent rapture of righteous souls faithful to categorically Christian principles. Death is seen ideologically and culturally as something to be faced and feared, as an event negotiated by attitudes throughout life, that is, a product that can be acquired or not. Therefore, the hermeneutic proposed here is not to criticize the Christian work, nor to evaluate the verisimilitude of the rapture criteria, but rather to look at the theme that presents a parallel between the orthodox worldly conception of the interdiction of a cycle now seen as natural, and its reverberations for humanity. In short, the articulated reflection is: do societies with certain different religious structural ideological concepts cry in the same way?
Philosophically speaking, some authors of the classical school of Stoicism, for example, call our attention from an interpretative point of view, with regard to the intercoporeity (philosophical term for the connection between bodies and structures) and intersubjectivity of the subject, and its relations with emotions. The emotional context is today referred to as a symbolic aspect of the human psyche, and its physical and practical reverberations in life in society. Epictetus or Epictetus, who died in 135 A.D. in the Greek city of Nicopolis, was a Greek Stoic philosopher who lived most of his life in Rome, as a slave in the service of Epaphroditus, Nero’s cruel secretary who, according to tradition, once broke his leg. Despite his condition, he was able to attend lectures by the famous Stoic Gaius Musonius Rufus. One of his major works remains the so-called Encheiridion, a Greek term for what is at hand, being equivalent to the Latin term, “manual” in our language. It also means “dagger” or “dagger”, equivalent to the Latin pugio, a portable weapon used by Roman soldiers tied to the waist according to Boter (1999). Simplicius, in his Commentary on Epictetus’ Encheiridiion, tells us that Arrian “[…] synthesized the most important and necessary things in philosophy from the words of Epictetus, so that they would be visible and at hand”.
Thus, the Encheirídion serves not as an introduction for those who are ignorant of Stoic philosophy, but rather for those who are already familiar with the principles of Stoicism, so that they have a synthesis that they can always take with them and use. Returning to the light of the discussion on the theme of mourning and coping with death, according to Epictetus, the losses in our lives should be considered a causal event, of pure naturalness, a suffering resulting from such loss should not be worshipped, because we would be facing a battle against the irrevocable, against the so-called fortune (Epictetus, 125 A.D.), still in this same work, in its chapter III, digressing on the subject:
“About any objects that delight the mind, remember that they are of nature, beginning with the smallest: if you have a favorite glass, remember that it is only a glass that you like—for then, if it breaks, you can bear it. If you hug your child or your wife, remember that you are embracing a mortal being, and therefore, if one of them dies, you can bear it”. (p. 15)
Epictetus supposes what he said above at the beginning of the first chapter of the Encheiridium:
Of the things that exist, some are our responsibility; others don’t. Our responsibilities are judgment, impulse, desire, repulse—in short, everything that is our action. Our body, possessions, reputation, death, public offices are not our responsibility—in short: everything that is not our action. (I: pp. 1-2)
Aspects which men regard as good or evil are not under our control (or, as we translate, are not our responsibility), but which, as we have seen, are neither goods nor evils. Such things that do not depend on us are slaves, for they have no will of their own or any power over themselves, for they are subject to the laws of the cosmos or the will of others. Thus, whoever considers these situations his own will necessarily become a slave like them, for it is impossible to control them, and, desiring them, will submit to the same necessity or the same will to which they are subjected. Among the things that are not in our control, we count the opinions of others and events that do not depend on us. Regarding the opinions of others, Epictetus suggests various reasonings and rules of conduct to understand the nature of opinions and how to deal with them. In V, he notes that things are not good or bad, but opinions judge them that way.
Let us move on to events that do not depend on us. In II.2, Epictetus refers to the error of thinking that it is in our control to avoid disease, death, and poverty. In III, XI, XII, and XIV, he notes that it is necessary for us to understand the contingent nature of all that we love. In IV, he warns us that we need to keep in mind things that may occur outside of our control in the course of a task so that we are prepared to face them. In X, developing this theme, he says that we need to reflect on what quality it is up to us to use in each eventuality. In VII, he advises us to always keep death in mind so that we can live fully and sensibly. In VIII and XXI, he states that we must accept and endure fate. In IX, he notes that sickness is not a hindrance to our will. In XV, he talks about how we make use of the things that come to us. In XVI, he addresses the question of how to console those who suffer loss and despair. In XVII, he points out that, to a large extent, we cannot choose what we are, but that it is within our control to fulfill the role given to us with dignity. Finally, in eighteenth and xxxii, he emphasizes that there are more important things than simply preserving health and life.
In the XXI, according to Epictetus (125 A.D.), when the theme is again discussed:
Let death and exile, and all things that seem terrible, be daily before your eyes, but especially death; and you will never think an abject thought, nor covet anything with much greed. (p. 23)
The creator of Cartesian thought, the philosophical system that originated the model of thought in modern philosophy, René Descates (1596-1650), in his work Discourse on Method (Descartes, 1637), develops a consideration similar to the Epitetian principles already mentioned, and when looking at this issue:
My third maxim was always to seek to defeat myself instead of fortune, and to modify my desires instead of the order of the world; and, in general, to accustom ourselves to believe that there is nothing that is entirely in our power except our thought. (p. 119)
Like the theme of alterity and the experience of subjective meaning, the horizon is undeniably a fundamental theme for the configuration of meaning. Being a central concern of phenomenology, meaning must therefore be understood as one of the points of articulation of all these elements. According to Husserl (1954):
I am, factually, in a co-human presence and in an open horizon of humanity, I know myself factually in a generative context, in a chain of unity, of a historicity in which this present is, of humanity and of the world that is conscious of it, the present history of a historical past and a historical future. (p. 264)
4. DSM-V Psychoanalytic Etiological Definition
From the denotative definition of the word “mourning”, a feeling generated by losses such as separation, departure or rupture according to Ferreira (2010), in the psychopathological context it develops as a physiological emotional state of pain and ephemeral suffering, in the face of its loss. It is worth mentioning that this lack or absence can be attributed to any rupture in an object relationship, not necessarily linked to a human being, but to any other object that represents the loving connection with the subject, according to Freud (1917) in Mourning and Melancholy. However, obviously respecting the subject’s identity as a thinking being and creator of his own decisions, the affective grieving process can move from a state of physiological and expected rupture of the object to a psychic pathology.
When explaining the concept in Mourning and Melancholy, Freud (1917) understands it as a reaction to the loss, not necessarily of a loved one, but also something that takes the same proportions, therefore, a natural and constant mental phenomenon during human development. For the author, in grief, there is nothing unconscious about the loss, that is, the bereaved know exactly what they have lost. In addition, grief is a natural process installed to deal with loss, which can be overcome after some time and, even though it has a pathological nature, it is not considered a disease, so interference becomes harmful. Grief is a slow and painful process, characterized by deep sadness, withdrawal from any activity that is not linked to thoughts about the lost object, loss of interest in the external world, and inability to replace it with the adoption of a new love object (Freud, 1917). During development, the individual goes through constant experiences of loss that constitute models of psychic states that are incorporated into the mind and can be experienced in similar situations later. Freud (1917) observes that the first traumatic experiences constitute the prototype of affective states, which are incorporated into the mind and, when a similar situation occurs, are relived as mnemic symbols. For Freud (1923), in The Ego and the ID, the act of being born is the first great state of anxiety, which occurs on the occasion of separation from the mother, in the face of a danger of psychic helplessness, thus becoming the source and prototype of the state of anxiety. Initially, the child’s image of memory of the person he misses is intensely catechized; in its undeveloped state, this image of memory is probably in a hallucinatory form, and the child, not knowing how to deal with his cathexis of longing, gives rise to anxiety as an expression of disorientation.
In order to complement Freud’s (1917) concepts, Melanie Klein considered mourning as an object loss of the desiring being, resuming its vital foundations in the period of psychic development of the individual during childhood. Klein understands that in this process there will be a reactivation (Klein, 1940) of what he called the archaic “depressive position”. Thus, what is added in Klein is that mourning does not refer only to a loss of a real object, but also a symbolic one.
For Klein, the configuration of the confrontation of finitude had a documentary corpus that was much more dynamic than structural. This human dynamic—of introjection and projection—consists, therefore, of an internal (psychic) world that is built from relationships established between objects (things or people) and that also influences and is influenced by the external world. The concept of position (paranoid-schizoid position and depressive position) guides all human development as well as psychosexual development, accompanying the individual throughout life. This Kleinian theory (Klein, 1935) became known as the “theory of object relations”.
To better understand this theory, we need to return to the fundamental concept of the Kleinian split process, and the first point that triggers the anxiety of the being, located in its developmental phase between the mother-child bond. During breastfeeding and contact with the breast, the child, through positive reinforcement, introjects a good potential, which feeds and gratifies him, the good breast. On the other hand, the other breast articulates a relationship of competition for space and food, which the child considers a bad breast, the breast that does not provide food that does not provide any benefit. In his fantasies, the baby has the desire to incorporate the good breast (object of love), and destroy the bad breast, with mistreatment, damming it, chewing it, damaging it, with its sadistic-oral impulses. Such merely primitive instincts, drawing a parallel with Freudian concepts (Freud, 1917), are in vogue at this stage of child development, in a basic principle of survival, because in its conceptual introjection of an object, the bad breast aims to destroy it, just as the good breast will feed it; making him an object of persecution.
5. Elizabeth Kubler-Ross Methodology
According to Elisabeth Kubler-Ross, grief has five stages of development: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance (Kubler-Ross, 1969).
Such phases are complex and timeless, that is, they do not have a behavioral or developmental pattern on the part of the subject. In addition, they may not necessarily be subsequent and interdependent, and may vary in position and alternation according to a number of factors, such as age, traumatic event, moral and cultural values, etc.
According to the “Kubler-Ross Method”, the first stage of grief is denial. When the subject is faced with the experience of rupture of the object—defined by Melanie Klein in The Development of a Child (Klein, 1923)—he is denying the fact and resisting it, saying “this cannot be true”, or even “it is not happening” (Kubler-Ross, 1969).
The second moment is taken by the feeling of anger, paraphrasing Kubler-Ross (1969), they point out that anger does not have much logic and can easily be directed at anything, person or object that the bereaved wants. A classic example is the displacement of anger toward God, with the question “Why God?”.
The third phase is bargaining. In a meta psychology’s context, the legitimate idyll that religion cherishes here crumbles. The subject, when faced with the imminent loss of the object he loves, establishes an egoic guilt that will follow a negotiation with the divine. Phrases such as “Please give me just one more chance”, or “I promise to do it differently next time”, refer to the incipience of the psyche and the inexorable narcissistic complex that exists in us, for only wanting to repair something after losing it, quoting Freud in Introduction to Narcissism (Freud, 1923).
Continuing the depression, as the fourth moment of the grieving phase, the impotence in the face of human frailty and its imminent finitude provides the bereaved individual with a feeling of deep melancholy and anguish, which in theory psychosomatizes in a depressive event.
The fifth phase, following the model established by Kubler-Ross, is acceptance. Theoretically, it would be the stage in which the process of accepting the rupture of the object occurs, facing reality with a more confident and prognostically positive perspective.
Returning to the conceptual pattern stipulated by the DSM-5 (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, American Psychological Association, 2014), the diagnosis of complicated grief or Persistent Complex Grief Disorder is characterized in two major spheres: symptomatological and chronological. Regarding the nosological aspect and its respective psychosomatization, the subject presents a melancholic picture associated with excessive concern for the deceased and frequent crying, as long as it persists for more than 12 months in adults and for more than 6 months in children (American Psychological Association, 2014: p. 790).
Based on the above-mentioned aspects, it is necessary to analyze the context that permeates the chronological factor involved in this issue. There is a range of variables that are linked to the “time” of human finitude, such as medicalization of death, contemporary death, palliative care, and interpretive subjectivation, religious and philosophical bases, among others. The understanding of the subjectivity of the death-life binomial generates a framework for the development of human conduct, whether in the context of mourning or in its preparation. And it is exactly in this context that grief is inserted. According to the Weberian concept of the “ideal type”:
“In our time, … Psychology, in the form of a model of the psychological individual, has been the basis of similar attempts to unify the conduct of life around a single model of what constitutes appropriate subjectivity. But the unification of subjectivation must be seen as a goal of specific programs, or as a presupposition of certain styles of thought, not as a characteristic of human cultures”. (Weber, 1949)
The debate that this study proposes categorically aims to carry out a technical-scientific discussion clarifying the structural characteristics of mourning, in its anthropological, cultural, philosophical, physiological and psychological aspects. Relativize a parallel with normal grief, promoting a more concise and robust distinction between the two situations.
6. Coping with the Finitude of Life
To paraphrase the Austrian writer and psychiatrist Victor Frankl (1905-1997), who had a conceptualization despite the meaning of life in parallel with its finitude. Frankl established a close and interdependent relationship between these two elements, the development of which promotes the advent of the other. In general terms, in addition to suffering, it will present itself in a singular way in the subject through the advent of the finitude of life, relativizing it to the moment and to the individual. According to Frankl (1959), in his work In Search of Meaning, the origin of suffering arises from questioning and the emptying of meaning. However, as these senses are questioned or emptied, suffering, pain, and anguish are generated (Frankl, 1959).
This awareness of the finitude of life is well outlined by Heidegger in his work Being and Time (Heidegger, 1927), determining that anguish and melancholy are the result of this exacerbated and anticipated psychic suffering, in the face of an imminently inexorable trauma.
Heidegger calls this dichotomous friction between suffering and not suffering, being and being-there. What happens in the face of the psychic reverberations of the individual in the face of the interpretation and assimilation of the loss.
Therefore, the definition of human suffering extends to a range of variables, which are, in general, facets of the plurality of the individual in terms of his or her way of seeing the world. Sickness and death have always been a part of humanity and have been sources of human suffering. The inference made here about the different ways of facing the meaning of life and death, which refers to suffering of an existential and spiritual nature, among other elements related to this theme.
Building an interesting philosophical parallel on the dogmatic concept of the fear of death, it is worth mentioning one of the main Hellenistic schools of the pre-Socratic era, Stoicism. Classically represented by Marcus Aurelius (121-128 A.D.), called one of the last “good emperors of Rome”, in his classic Stoic work Meditations (Aurelius, 421 A.D.), he defends the doctrine of courage, because we only need to invest our physical and emotional energy in events over which we have total governability. In other words, suffering is due to certain situations over which we have no control and should not be considered. This search is called ataraxia, which would be the perennial search for imperturbability.
7. Discussion and Conclusion
The literature review gathered and studied in this project allows us to clearly infer the singular and very subjective nature of the individual, with regard to the discussion of the representativeness of mourning and its binomial relativization-interpretation with the ideal-self or the ideal of the self itself.
A reductionist statement or clinical picture could be considered frivolous and tenuously simplistic, based only on the nosological premise of the fact, indiscriminating any other factors naturally elementary to the construction of the analytical, pain or perception of object loss scenario, now materially consolidated. It is essential that we delve into and debate other substantial factors for the creation of this perception, addressing aspects of intercorporeality, phenomenology, religion and philosophy as fundamental elements for the development of a more credible understanding of the finitude of life.
It is necessary to highlight this observation and its parallel in contemporaneity, and the way in which we conduct daily life through the demands of society and the modern world, expressing the efemerity of ideals producing as a corollary, juxtaposed perceptions in which the superego does not act as it should, instead of taking the self as an object of psychic symbolism (due to its ideal of the self). It directs and catalyzes its psychic energy to the desiring element of the symbolic in an urgent way. By depriving, as an Oedipal link to the emergence of the realization of jouissance by the ideal of the self, rejecting the determinations of the primary object of desire, therefore, paraphrasing Klein (1940), the pain of loss will be deconstructed and replaced by another object of love, bringing a new connotation to mourning.
Thus, this work aims at an analytical reflection on loss and its characteristics, proposing an elemental catharsis enabling new perspectives of interpretation for the concept of mourning, promoting an unequivocal benefit to society and the scientific community, by redefining new standards for the bereaved population. Such an achievement would promote a magnanimous technical-scientific collaboration in the clinical and propaedeutic spheres, contributing to a new way of thinking and treating psychopathologies correlated with the process of assimilation of loss. By proposing a resignification of the scrupulously nosological perspective on pathologies and their modes of presentation, taking the discussion on the multifactorial aspect presented and intersubjectivity beyond the diagnostic manuals, considering the dyad of freedom and non-freedom as a criterion for determining the nature of the diagnosis, and no longer exclusively the reductionist and generalist understanding of the problem. The main point of the research is to highlight the real need to analyze the being as a singular element characterized by its subjectivity in all aspects, moral, ethical, social, philosophical and religious. Treating this subject with specificity and technical criticality would structure a more coherent pattern of situational analysis of grief, since the panoramas involved in this phenomenon are intrinsically unique in all aspects. Notwithstanding the serenity of Stoic philosophy in search of ataraxia (total state of unperturbability), the joyful ideation of Epicurus, or the ethereal comfort of the Bible, the individual is constituted of a broad multifactorial sphere endowed with a singular and inseparable intersubjectivity. This research does not end the discussion on the subject, nor its clinical categorization, in this sense, a greater number of studies and cases by researchers are necessary.