A Brief Glimpse Into How Grief Theories Have Changed

As a new widow, you will likely soon be reading or hearing about various “theories and models” of grief. The most famous theory is “the five stages of grief,” which became embedded in the national psyche after Elisabeth Kubler-Ross was profiled in LIFE magazine and readers subsequently responded by making her just-published book, On Death and Dying, a bestseller in 1969.

Although Kubler-Ross’s theory may be the most widely known, it is just one of many theories the “experts” have put forth in the past one hundred-plus years.

The intention of this post is not to overwhelm you with a laundry list of grief theories and their merits (or lack thereof). Rather, I want to give you a chronological framework that illustrates the trends that have taken place since Sigmund Freud started talking about “grief work” in 1917.

• Grief Work – In simple terms this meant detaching from the deceased, readjusting to a new reality, developing new relationships, and doing it all as quickly as possible. Like Freud, Harvard psychiatrist Erich Lindemann (1944) believed in “grief work.”
• Phases and Stages – From the 1960s to the early 1990s, a number of psychologists and psychiatrists began asserting that grief took place in a linear fashion. A griever had to go through certain steps in a certain timeframe to “recover” from grief and then move on. (Among these theorists were John Bowlby, Colin Murray Parkes, J. William Worden, Therese A. Rando and, of course, Elisabeth Kubler-Ross.)
• Rethinking Old Theories – In the 1990s a few experts began pushing back on what had been previously accepted. Thomas Attig said there were no phases or stages, emphasized the individuality of the griever, and claimed there was no “end point.” In addition, Dennis Klass refuted the idea that “letting go” was necessary; instead, he said continuing a bond with the deceased was healthy after all.
• Meaning Reconstruction and Narrative as Meaning – In the late 1990s and early 2000s, Robert Neimeyer said a griever should try to find or create meaning in the death of their loved one and their own life going forward, which may include telling their stories.
• Shifting Focus to the Individual Griever – In the mid-2000s there seems to have been a move from coming up with theories of grief to coming up with theories about grievers themselves. In 2004 George Bonnano presented his “multiple trajectories” theory. He said grievers most often followed one of three paths: resilience, recovery, or chronic grieving. (For example, resilient grievers’ acute grief symptoms subsided in a shorter time period.) Kenneth Doka’s labeling of intuitive, instrumental, or blended grievers is another example of the focus shifting to the griever.

There are additional grief theories and models that are not included in this brief post (such as the “Dual Process Model,” which I think is deserving of a separate blog post), but I hope this gives you an idea of how the study of grief has evolved—and continues to evolve. Currently, much attention is being paid to how grief affects the brain. Will this ongoing research underscore the individual nature of grief? Time will tell.

Early in your grief journey, you may be overwhelmed by all the people who are eager to share what they “know” about how grief works. As you can see, however, even the experts have never reached a consensus about the nature and course of grief.

We are all still learning.

Copyright ©2023 S. Larkin, SeattleWidowResources