Singing Mother Home: A Psychologist's Journey through Anticipatory Grief

Anticipatory Grief

P 114 To love . . . is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give it to no one . . . C. S. Lewis The precursor to grief is always connection. We do not grieve that which we have merely appreciated or admired. The gorgeous sunset fades, the charismatic speaker draws her talk to a close, the flute sonata on the CD gives way to a new piece. The moment passes through us—or we pass through the moment—and we experience the passing with little pain. Contrast such experiences to the outpouring of grief: O my son Absolom, My son, my son Absolom! Would God I had died for thee Oh Absolom, my son, my son. Anticipatory Grief p ANTICIPATORY GRIEF p 115 The heartbreak in King David’s cry when hearing of the death of his estranged son soars far above those sweet twinges we feel in relinquishing small lovely moments. Grief is the name we give to that pain experienced when we are wrenched away from a closely held connection, especially from one loved over time. Freud used the term “cathexis” to explain human attachments, a term from the Greek word meaning “holding.” One becomes “cathected to love objects” when one invests emotional energy in them, when, in effect, one holds them close. Anytime we let someone or something mean something to us, we are cathected, and the loss of that love object may be agonizing. Those people and things that we bond to are what define us as individuals. So grief raises the question: Who are we when they are no longer in our life? How do we then define ourselves? A new understanding of anticipatory grief Grief, according to Freud (1917/1957), has a purpose: Mourners must learn to detach their feelings and attachments from the deceased, so that they can become free to reinvest in new relationships. The reality of the loss must be accepted as final and they must “decathect”; pathological grief is that which has reached no closure or resolution. As much as psychoanalysis has evolved since Freud, contemporary psychoanalytic thought is still consistent with this early conceptualization (Baker, 2001) . My training as a psychologist in the 1970s was not psychoanalytic , but the implications of Freud’s theory of mourning were pervasive . Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s (1969) original research on dying patients similarly reinforced Freud’s message, at least in my graduate student mind. Acceptance of death was the goal, the final stage of growth; anything less represented an incomplete process. Eventually other writers on grief went on to suggest that Kübler-Ross’s stages of death—denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance—generalized to the grief process following any loss. Acceptance was the goal. This seemed to me another way of saying that “decathexis” needed SINGING MOTHER HOME P 116 to occur. Acceptance meant one had quit hoping, the pain was over, one had moved on. Following in a similar “cut the ties” vein was one of Freud’s bestknown followers, Erik Erikson (1950). His focus was not on grief, but about how individuals move through developmental stages to reach adulthood. He assumed beginning complete dependency on parents, with the infant unable or fearful of distinguishing himself or herself from parents. If all went well, Erikson posited that the child matured to the point where dependency was replaced by “individuation.” After outgrowing their dependency on their parents for support and approval—after full “separation/individuation” had transpired— then, and only then, was the appropriate adult development attained. It is hard to overestimate the impact of this way of thinking. For decades, psychologists and other mental health professionals were taught that dependency was unhealthy, or at least a immature stage of development. Clearly, the healthy thing to do was to attain complete autonomy from all parent figures, including mentors (Levinson, 1978) and possibly religion. “Enmeshment” with the family or other loved ones was seen as symbiotic and destructive and was an indication that an individual had stopped short of the detachment necessary to form an autonomous identity. An interesting term, used by both Freud and Erikson, was “fixation .” Individuals who got stuck or fixated at a certain stage were likely to remain bound by neurotic and conflicting needs until they could somehow be liberated to move on, probably through years of psychoanalysis. It...