Grieve with Me: Discussion of “Who Has the Right to Mourn?: Relational Deference and the Ranking of Grief”

Abstract

We tend to conceive of mourning primarily in intrapsychic terms. In this commentary I highlight how Harvey Peskin’s paper (this issue) helps us to appreciate that grief is not only the product of the individual mind but is also constituted relationally. Both what we experience in our grieving and how we express it is shaped by and through those around us whose grief we bear witness to, as we ourselves grieve and are witnessed by them.

I elaborate further on Peskin’s view of the role of witnessing during grieving and mine another profound implication in his discourse by pointing to the bidirectional influence between mourning and relationality. Not only is mourning fostered through relational engagement, but our grieving together can provide the mortar for the building and sustaining of community.

Notes

¹ The recent death of a colleague and friend is a case in point. As she lived her final days, she advised those who would mourn for her that while her death was very sad, it was not a tragedy, given that we all must die. She asked that on the anniversary of her death people gather at a four-star restaurant or dive bar and tell stories about their lives together.

² Elsewhere (Frommer, 2014) I have discussed the issue of the analyst’s unsupported grief in such situations and the need for analytic communities to plan for and establish relational holding environments available to grieving analysts as a necessary component of the self care and support we extend to one another as we navigate the uncharted waters of analytic work.

³ psalm 103 15–16.

⁴ Within the context of this brief commentary I am sidelining the psychic complexity involved in grappling with one’s own future death. See Frommer (2016) for a discussion of the secular mind’s struggle with mortality, the psychic challenges present in contemplating our eventual non-existence and the manner in which “mortality seeks relationality” (p. 373).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Martin Stephen Frommer

Martin Stephen Frommer, Ph.D., is affiliated with the Institute for Contemporary Psychotherapy in New York City where he has taught and supervised; Faculty at the Stephen Mitchell Relational Study Center in New York; Supervisor, The Institute for Relational Psychoanalysis of Philadelphia, and an Associate Editor of Psychoanalytic Dialogues. He is in private practice in Manhattan.