RECOVERY FOLLOWING BEREAVEMENT: AN EXAMINATION OF THE CONCEPT

Abstract

Herman Feifel noted that appropriate attention to one's mourning and grieving allowed the dead to die and the bereaved “to redefine and reintegrate oneself into life” (H. Feifel, 1977, p. 9). The author takes this central focus on bereavement outcomes as the springboard for an examination of the concept recovery following bereavement. He examines the meanings of the terms recover and bereavement and considers the centrality of concepts from life span human development, the life crisis literature, and existential phenomenology for defining the full possibilities of the concept of recovery following bereavement. Seminal ideas from Alexander Leighton and Thomas Attig are examined for their power to provide operational definitions for Feifel's idea about redefining and reintegrating oneself into life as the full meaning of the concept recovery following bereavement.

I appreciate feedback from the peer reviewers sent for this manuscript, from the members of the “Tuesday Morning Journal Club” in the Department of Nutritional Sciences at Oklahoma State University, and from Elaine Thompson.

Notes

¹I am not implying or asserting that Feifel used the phrase “recovery following bereavement.” I am extending that phrase to cover what he understood is possible in the experience of loss and grief.

² Corr et al. (2003) do see a place for the notion of recovery following bereavement when what is meant—in league with Stroebe and Schut's (1999) notion of restoration—is “a movement forward to a new way of living in the aftermath of loss” (p. 228).

³In all honesty, however, the reviewer may well be saying that a fatal misunderstanding of what recovery means is at the heart of this article.

⁴My focus is on recovery for persons. Attention has been paid in other circles to the interactive influences between bereavement and other systems such as family systems and social systems (Gilbert, 1996; Kete, 1999; N. L. Moos, 1995; Walter, 1999).