A Social Constructionist Account of Grief: Loss and the Narration of Meaning

Abstract

In contrast to dominant Western conceptions of bereavement in largely intrapsychic terms, the authors argue that grief or mourning is not primarily an interior process, but rather one that is intricately social, as the bereaved commonly seek meaning in this unsought transition in not only personal and familial, but also broader community and even cultural spheres. The authors therefore advocate a social constructionist model of grieving in which the narrative processes by which meanings are found, appropriated, or assembled occur at least as fully between people as within them. In this view, mourning is a situated interpretive and communicative activity charged with establishing the meaning of the deceased's life and death, as well as the postdeath status of the bereaved within the broader community concerned with the loss. They describe this multilevel phenomenon drawing first on psychological research on individual self-narratives that organize life experience into plot structures that display some level of consistency over time, whose viability is then negotiated in the intimate interpersonal domain of family and close associates. Second, they explore public communication, including eulogies, grief accounts in popular literature, and elegies. All of these discourses construct the identity of the deceased as he or she was, and as she or he is now in the individual and communal continuing bonds with the deceased. Finally, they consider different cultural contexts to see how expressions of grief are policed to ensure their coherence with the prevailing social and political order. That is, the meanings people find through the situated interpretive and communicative activity that is grieving must either be congruent with the meanings that undergird the larger context or represent an active form of resistance against them.

Notes

¹Like all client names in this chapter, those in this case study are altered to protect the identity of the family, and the details of the case are redacted to respect their confidentiality.

²By “situated,” we mean to emphasize that mourning is a function of a given social, historical and cultural context; by “interpretive,” we draw attention to the meaning-making processes it entails; by “communicative,” we stress the essential embeddedness of such processes in written, spoken, and nonverbally performed exchanges with others; and by “activity,” we underscore that grieving and mourning are active verbs, not merely states to be endured. In sum, “the work of grief,” in our view, involves reaffirmation or reconstruction of a world of meaning that has been challenged by loss, at social as well as individual levels, in a specific cultural and historical frame.

³Further consideration of these results suggested that a defining feature of violent death bereavement was their senselessness, their having no justification, purpose, or explanation in the eyes of the bereaved. It seemed to be this assault on meaning, more than the grotesqueness, suddenness, or human agency implicated in these losses to suicide, homicide, or fatal accident that accounted for the intensity and complication of grief in the aftermath of such bereavement.

⁴Of course, we recognize that this measure, devised for use in the specific cultural context of American Protestantism, has its focus on the spiritual struggles of Christians who view their faith in terms of a personal relationship with a caring God. Just how adequately it can be applied to other monotheistic, Abrahamic traditions (Judaism, Islam) remains to be tested, though there are surely spiritual frameworks (e.g., Buddhism, Hinduism) that are organized along different lines, which deserve evaluation for their role in bereavement adaptation using other approaches.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Dennis Klass

Dennis Klass is now retired from Webster University