Continuing Bonds in the Existential,Phenomenological,and Cultural Study of Grief: Prolegomena

Shared Bonds in a Bereaved Parents Self-Help Group

I was invited in 1979 to be the professional advisor to a newly-formed local chapter of a self-help group of parents whose children had died group (Klass & Shinners, 1983). In contemporary thinking the group would be regarded as a compassionate community (Breen et al., 2020; Kellhear, 2013). I used my role to do ethnographic research on how the parents in the group were coming to terms with their child’s death. I think of ethnographic research as applied phenomenology. Powdermaker’s (1966) description of the ethnographic researcher as a stranger and friend nicely describes my relationship with the local chapter.

The national organization had a policy that chapters “are and should be organized with bereaved parents responsible for programs and activities and with members of the helping professions serving in consulting roles.” In my two decades with the group I was always aware that I was an outsider. They were members of a club I hope never to join, and yet they allowed me to stay for 20 years. As my relationship with the group matured, I was invited to participate in several national board meetings.

The setting was an unusual one in bereavement research in that the self-help process is based in experiential knowledge, not in credentialed professional or academic expertise.

Experiential knowledge is truth learned from personal experience with a phenomenon rather than truth acquired by discursive reasoning, observation, or reflection on information provided by others. … It is a conviction that the insights learned from direct participation in a situation are truth. (Borkman, 1976, 446–447)

Most bereavement theory is based on ideas that come out of studies of other populations, not of bereaved people. Sigmund Freud’s model was built on the male child’s internalization of the father as the resolution of the Oedipal drama. John Bowlby’s attachment model was based on his study of children separated from their mothers, though not of mothers separated from their children. The idea of trauma came largely from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder which described symptoms in soldiers who had been in combat. The condition had earlier been called shell shock or combat fatigue. The study of the bereaved parents in the self-help group meant that my findings were based on the parents’ experiential knowledge, not ideas that were developed from other populations.

As I began trying to describe the dynamics in the group’s process I was immediately confronted with a problem. The parents did not withdraw energy from their bond with their children as the professional and scholarly theory of grief at that time said they should (Klass, 1988, 1999). Indeed, in those days maintaining the bond with the child was a diagnostic criterion of what was then called pathological grief. Some experts said that continuing a relationship with a dead person was the cause of pathological grief. I remember realizing that either I had a couple hundred pathological grievers as my subjects, or the definition of pathology was wrong. The parents did not feel pathological to me. Therefore, the theory must be wrong.

When I first tried to describe parents’ ongoing relationship with their dead children, I was still thinking of grief as an individual psychic process. I used the term “inner representation” (1993, 1997). It became quickly obvious, however, that the “inner” in inner representation did not describe the bereaved parents to whom I was listening. While their dead children were an important inner reality to the parents, they worked hard to make the bond with their children into a social reality first with other members of the group, and then within their extended families and other social networks.

The national board of the group adopted a “Credo” that described their process. It was printed in the group’s literature and recited together at appropriate times, especially at national and regional meetings. The closing words are:

But whatever pain we bring to this gathering of The Compassionate Friends, it is pain we will share, just as we share with each other our love for the children who have died. We are all seeking and struggling to build a future for ourselves, but we are committed to building a future together. We reach out to each other in love to share the pain as well as the joy, share the anger as well as the peace, share the faith as well as the doubts, and help each other to grieve as well as to grow. We Need Not Walk Alone. We Are The Compassionate Friends.

The parents were able to move forward in their grief by sharing their individual bonds with their children. “My child has died” became “our children have died.” Many of the unique aspects of the self-help group are expressions of the shared bond they have with each other’s children. As the bond with the child is made part of the parent’s membership, the continuing bond can be more fluid and thus can be transformed within the parent’s inner world.

We can see the relationships between parents and their children and with each other in a newsletter article written by the chair of the annual picnic. She says there will be good food and games, but

If our gathering is the center, our children lost are the heart and soul of our picnic. It is for and because of them that we have come, and it is for them that we have our cherished balloon released, a time set aside in our day to remember and include our special children.

The children are the heart and soul of the group because their shared bonds with their dead children bond the members to each other. The children are in the midst of the group, not simply within each of the individual parents. Yet the children are also wherever the balloon messages are carried. The ritual provides a means by which the parent can both reach out to the dead child and feel the presence of the child within. They “stand as one, but each involved in his own thoughts, prayer and emotion.” Because the bond with the child is shared within the group, the parents can be in touch privately with their child. Because the group shares in the strong bond with the child, there is tremendous strength within the group. Because there is such strength within the group, the bond with the child feels surer. One balloon sent into the sky would seem a lonely and fragile message. Hundreds of balloons, each addressed to an individual child, are sure to get through.

Sharing the Pain—Being There

Sharing the bond with the child begins with sharing the pain that the death of the child has brought. This sense of sharing pain is summed up by a phrase that reoccurs in members’ accounts of what they need from people: “just being there.” When parents first come to group meetings the sense that others are like them is a key part of their decision to affiliate. They often say the people who can really understand are other bereaved parents, because they have “been there.” Being there with the parent means sharing the reality of the child now dead in a way that the reality and the pain are not the parent’s alone.

It is common for parents to report that family and friends withdraw from them because, as some family members explained to me, they did not know what to say, and felt helpless about what they could do for the parents. It often falls to the parents themselves to teach family and friends how to relate to them. What they teach is what they have learned in the self-help group. A parent wrote a poem in the group’s newsletter addressed to those who would help her. She asks them to “be here with me,” and she connects being there with being comforted.

Please listen to me,

Hear what I'm saying.

Not just the words that come from my mouth.

For I can talk and not really say what I mean…

Listen with more than your ears…

If you rush me with good advice

and tell me not to worry, I’ll clam up.

I'll think you don’t understand…

So please,

Accept my problem and take a share…

Be here with me

And cry with me

And then I’ll know you've truly listened

And heard, and understood.

Then—I’ll be comforted.

Another word for comfort is consolation (see Klass, 2013; 2014). Swedish nurses Norberg et al. (2001) say that if we are to console someone, we must ourselves be open to the pain. One of their interviewees said being present and available means “to sink into somebody else’s hell and stay there…. that’s really the only thing one can do, then maybe one can speak about being present” (p. 549). Sinking into somebody else’s hell means experiencing the reality the bereaved are experiencing. Openness, presence, and availability create trust. “When the relationship is trusting there is room to uncover the wound” (p. 548). We will return to consolation in the next section.

The nurses are describing what the poem’s writer is asking from her friends and family members. “Accept my problem and take a share” means taking a share of the pain and staying there. In the self-help group the parents do not need to sink into somebody else’s hell. They are already there. The discovery that they are there together is the dynamic that makes the group’s process so powerful. Sharing their bonds with their children and sharing the pain of their grief, the nurses say is, in Martin Buber’s terms, I-thou. That is intersubjectivity, the space in which grief is located, and the space in which it is healed.

We see, then, that in the self-help process grief is a shared experience. Grief goes from individual and isolating to intersubjective. Bonds with the children are now part of bonds with other bereaved parents. A couple in the national leadership wrote a song with a refrain: “Our children live on in the love that we share.” It takes a complex hermeneutic to unpack that phrase. Yet parents who have been in the group for a while understand immediately.

Sharing the pain is also very practical because it means that the members can share ways to respond to some sources of the pain, especially in the parent’s social world. Often meeting time is devoted to the problems the parents find in their new lives, for example, what to say when someone asks how many children they have or how to include their child in the holidays. There are several ways these problems may be solved, but each answer is not a specific thing to do, but is really an existential stance, a way of being-in-the-world. When she hosted her extended family for Christmas, one mother made a holiday wreath for the front door with many colored ribbons, including a black one. “It is there,” she said. “If they want to see it and mention it, they can. It is not me that didn’t bring it up.” Using the same way of being-in-the world, the same stance, proves that the pain is shared, because the same strategies for solving problems work. It will be interesting to compare the idea of an existential stance with the way psychological scholars and clinicians use the term “coping.”

As the reality of the child’s death as well as the reality of the parent’s continuing bond with the child are made part of the socially shared reality, the continuing bond with the child can be transformed in the parent’s psychic life. The end of grief is not severing the bond with the dead child, but integrating the child into the parent’s life and into the parent’s social networks in a different way than when the child was alive. As I have written about grief in other cultures and in other historical periods, it has seemed to me that the social nature of continuing bonds that I first observed in the self-help group also plays out in larger contexts.

Difficult Continuing Bonds

There has been an assumption as continuing bonds have been integrated into psychological research and clinical practice that continuing a bond leads to positive grieving. Some literature cites me as saying that continuing bonds are an effective way to cope. If I implied that, I apologize. It is not true. Restless spirits, hungry ghosts, and other harmful dead are found throughout history and across cultures. Although it is true that in the contemporary West people have more freedom to leave or negotiate difficult interpersonal relationships than we find in most times and places, it is not unusual to find conflicted or dysfunctional patterns in the relationship that continue after death.

Some deaths bring their own complex issues into the continuing bond. In a local chapter of Parents of Murdered Children the desire for revenge was a frequent topic (see Peach & Klass, 1987). The parent’s power to protect their child had been challenged and they wanted to reassert that power in an often-violent act of vengeance. Many murders are committed by family members or people whom the victim and sometimes the parents knew. The difficulties in those relationships escalated the grief, so vengeance was very focused. The need for vengeance, however, is seldom satisfied, even when there is a guilty verdict in the legal system. But it is also very difficult for parents to let go of the desire.

My own experience as a psychologist doing grief counseling was that often the task is to focus on problems in the bond that continued after the death, as well as on the relationship between the survivors, and on the problems created when the larger social system cannot accommodate the survivors’ grief. The issues and therapeutic techniques are like those we would employ working with any individuals or families, although the death sometimes allows more flexibility than was there before.

Meaning is a Cultural Project

In their study of bereaved parents which was much like mine, Riches and Dawson (1996) note that only in the modern world has grief become a private matter. The deaths of children seldom have public meaning, so parents are left on their own as they try to make sense of their child’s death.

The search for meaning is, in part a personal project…. It is also a collective cultural project, shared by all bereaved parents who face the imbalance in world-view created by the child's death. This re-constructive project involves not only a reappraisal of the concept of mortality, but also asks other fundamental existential questions concerning the “fate” of the dead child, the point of a parenthood cut short and the purpose of life itself. (p. 144)

A bond’s meaning, then, is an interaction between interior, interpersonal, communal, and cultural narratives. In the self-help group, all those levels of narratives are in the question “Where was God when my child died?” The question is a meeting topic nearly every year. There are many possible answers, some easy, some complex. As the parents try to make sense of their child’s death, they must reassess how well the narratives in their culture or in their religion provide explanations for the death and ways of understanding as to how they should order their lives in light of the fact that their child died (see Klass, 1993).

The meanings people construct are an aspect of bereaved people’s membership in communities and social systems. As Karl Mannheim said (1936), group membership is ultimately not based in genetics, geographical proximity, or even economics, but rather, on a shared way of construing the world. Thus, when we ask people about the meanings they are making in their grief, their answers often begin with an account of what they were taught when they were growing up, or sometimes what they had decided in their late adolescence. Sometimes their accounts include changes in their religious affiliations either to a group with a different theology or by a deeper interpretation of the theology they brought to their child’s death.

Bonds – Values, Consolation, Membership

Shortly after we realized that the bonds were common and not an indicator of pathology, Samuel Marwit and I did a small research project asking how the bonds functioned in individual lives (1995). We asked a convenience sample of undergraduates to recall someone important to them who had died. We then asked them to describe who the deceased was to them when the person was alive, and who that person is to them now. We then did a qualitative analysis of the answers as well as a simple statistical analysis of the relationship of the answers to demographics.

Some colleagues warned us that people would not understand the questions. The first finding in the study was that all of the subjects understood. Continuing bonds might have been a new idea in the scholarly and clinical worlds, but it was not new in lay culture. If we ask in a non-judgmental way, we find that people are aware of their continuing bonds and have often thought about what the bonds mean to them.

With a high degree of inter-rater reliability, we were able to sort the answers about their continuing bonds into four categories.

(1). Role model, defined as global identification with the deceased. Example: “I remember him as the ideal dad; someone I would like to imitate as a parent.”

The first three are directly about how individuals find moral guidance and symbolize important values in their lives. That is, the continuing bond plays a role in internalizing cultural values, the ideals by which people define themselves and often define their families.

Reflecting on the experience of consolation takes us deep into our relationship with our social and physical environment (Klass, 2013, 2014). Psychiatrist Paul Horton (1981) noted that the sociopathic criminals whom he tried to treat seemed to have no sense of solace. The dynamics are more complex than we have space for in this short essay. Briefly, the bereaved are consoled when they find trustable realities and relationships outside themselves.

Sometimes solace comes in trusting person-to-person interactions. As we noted earlier in our discussion of bereaved parents using the term “being there,” consolation begins with sharing the pain. As we noted earlier, Norberg et al. (2001) say that “openness, presence and availability create trust. “When the relationship is trusting there is room to uncover the wound” (p. 548). Beyond interpersonal relationships, trustable realities, often religious, can range from Piaget’s concrete operational God as an ideal parent to the abstract architecture of a Bach fugue or a moment of unmediated experience of nature.

While he lived with his diagnosis of terminal cancer, Oliver Sachs described both interpersonal consolation and an experience in nature. He recalled a night sky on the Atacama plateau in Chile.

It was this celestial splendor that suddenly made me realize how little time, how little life, I had left. My sense of the heavens’ beauty, of eternity, was inseparably mixed for me with a sense of transience — and death.…

Shakespeare’s Consolation

Early in my attempt to understand the phenomena of parents finding solace by continuing their bonds with their children, I found some of Shakespeare’s sonnets helpful. While his way of continuing bonds may seem idiosyncratic, it has spoken to readers through four centuries. Shakespeare asks how the dead can live on. He settles on the immortality of his own art (Hubler, 1952). Art, in this formulation, is in the intersubjective communication between the poet and the readers. If he can join the reality of the deceased to the “eternal lines” of the poem, the dead person remains real and present:

And every fair from fair sometime declines,

By chance or nature’s changing course untrimm'd;

But thy eternal summer shall not fade

Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow’st;

Nor shall death brag thou wander'st in his shade,

When in eternal lines to time thou grow’st:

So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,

So long lives this, and this gives life to thee. (Sonnet 18)

For their parents, dead children do not lose possession of that fairness they embodied, nor do they wander only in Death’s shade. They have lived just a summer, but their summer does not fade; it remains real in the parent’s heart and mind, and in the social systems where the parent feels most at home. The parents find solace in linking objects which evoke the presence of the dead, in religious ideas and devotion which merge the child with other death-transcending realities in the parent’s life, and in memories by which time can drop away and the parent can return to the world when it was a better place. So long lives this in the inner and intersubjective worlds of bereaved parents, this gives life to their children who have died.

Such immortality is not the only trustable reality available. For example, Shakespeare recognizes:

 But were some child of yours alive at time,

 You should live twice; in it and in my rhyme. (Sonnet 17)

Human efforts to create permanent symbols of presence feel less sure than the intimate reality infused in the poem.

 Not marble nor the gilded monuments

 Of princes shall outlive this powerful rhyme,

 But you shall shine more bright in these contents

 Than unswept stone besmeared with sluttish time.

 ……………………………………….

 So, til the Judgement that yourself arise,

 You live in this, and dwell in lovers’ eyes. (Sonnet 55)

Challenges to Our Own Assumptions

The ways we formulate the ontological question that seem so natural to us are expressions of our own cultural narrative. Frederick Tappenden and Carly Daniel-Hughes say that the studies in their book on the boundaries between life and death in the ancient Mediterranean “cast doubt on the very categories that we moderns take as fixed and impermeable, categories such as human and god, heaven and earth, life and death, and past, present, and future” (2017. p. 4).

Continuing bonds, McCarthy and Prokhovnik (2014) say, are deeply unsettling in “two still-powerful precepts of western thought and culture … the boundedness and independence of autonomous ‘individuals’, and the pre-social bedrock of the ‘natural’ world in general, and of bodies in particular” (p. 1–2).

The mind/body split of western thinking sets up continuing bonds after death in such a way that the (dead) body becomes perplexing – if the body is dead, what happens to personhood? …. Either the dead person is wiped out of existence because without the living body there is nothing left apart from memories and (inanimate) mortal remains, or they are understood to exist outside of the material realm in some way, that is, as ghosts, spirits in the after-world, etc. (p. 10)

Navigating the issues in the ontological status of continuing bonds is above my pay grade. We find ourselves in a world where it is difficult to orient ourselves. Our own habitual and cultural way of knowing is just one among many. The explanations offered by the various parapsychologies like survival of consciousness or extrasensory perception only trade one false certainty for another.

Bodily Knowledge

The best I can do here, I think, is to sketch what appears to me to be an emerging direction that centers on the concept of bodily knowledge. If, as McCarthy and Prokhovnik say, personhood is no longer in the dead body, then perhaps personhood remains in the bodies of others with whom the dead are still bonded.

“Grief inscribes itself on the body.” writes Svend Brinkmann, it “is a cognitive emotion that informs the embodied person about something in the world, and it is a communicative emotion that conveys significant information to others” (2017, p. 2). Køster (2020), finds that the intimate knowing in continuing bonds is rooted in bodily memory that is, he says, the pre-reflective, nonverbal retention of past experience. Bodily memory, that undergirds representational memory, is:

primarily an enacted type of memory, meaning that it manifests in interactions and engagements with the world of some sort. This may both be in the sense that you need a piano (or something adequately similar) to enact a body memory of a particular piece of music etc. or in the sense that you need to be exposed to a particular smell, a place or a sound etc. to create a sense of resonance and familiarity with something enrooted in body memory. (p. 4)

In his nuanced phenomenology of grief Thomas Fuchs describes grief at the death of a spouse:

We may speak of a dyadic body memory which consists in the shared habitualities of interaction. … In the course of sharing their lives, both partners have become part of an intercorporeal sphere with its specific style of greeting, talking, smiling, walking together, etc. Bereavement means a separation of this intercorporeality. (2017, p. 5)

Continuing the bond means regaining intercorporeality in a new way. My wife and I were friends with a couple who had been married for 65 years. About a year after she died he told me, “I talk to her all the time.” I asked if he heard her voice. “Nah,” he said, “I just know what she would say.” He was not remembering something she said. He knew what she would say whatever the topic. As he shared a few instances, I agreed. That is what she would have said. When I felt the agreement, I had a fleeting sense of her presence.

Matthew Ratcliffe (2020) finds Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology is good place to begin an analysis of bodily knowing.

We encounter the experiences of others as inherent in their expressions, gestures, and goal-directed actions. He (Merleau-Ponty) maintains that we are able to do so because these activities always point to more than what is currently revealed to sensory perception. What they point to is not something currently hidden behind them, inside a head, the presence of which is inferred on the basis of what we do have access to. (p. 9)

Frans De Waal gives us detailed observations of bodily knowledge in populations who have limited verbal ability. De Waal is a leader among primatologists who say that we can learn about ourselves by closely observing and interacting with chimps, bonobos, and other primates with whom we share almost all our genetic code. “We involuntarily enter the bodies of those around us so that their movements and emotions echo within us as if they’re our own” (2009, p. 60). De Waal shows that chimps and bonobos communicate complex information and intricate future plans without words. They clearly understand another’s situation and mental/emotional states. He says that in their interactions with humans they are excellent mind readers. Chimps and bonobos sympathize and offer consolation to family members or those with whom they have a special friendship (2009, pp. 88 ff.). Chimps bring food and water to sick or injured troop members who cannot get it for themselves (2013, pp. 133–140).

In humans, words facilitate what appears to be a species-specific way of knowing and communicating. Our bodies, however, provide the same bodily knowing as other primates, although they can use the knowledge better than we do. Bodily knowing means, I think, that we do not need to posit a special or unusual ability in the ontology of our interactions with the dead.

Bodily Knowledge in Rituals

We might also think of bodily knowing in rituals. Paul Connerton (1989) says collective memory is maintained by ritual performance that is not so much abstract and mental, as it is bodily. The physicality of individual grief makes it a very good vehicle by which collective memory is performed and transmitted. Anastasia Scrutton (2018) explains:

Experiential cognition is at the heart of ritual’s power and importance. Because ritual is experiential, narratival, bodily and sensorily rich, it provides us with experiential cognition, which goes beyond the propositional cognition offered by truth claims. (p. 215)

In his study of ancient religious and modern secular ancestor rituals in China, Hubert Seiwert (2016) offers the felt sense of obligation.

Even those Confucian thinkers who denied the existence of ancestral spirits insisted on the obligation of performing the rituals of ancestor worship. The ancestors do not exist in any material sense but have to be respected. Just like one's living parents, the ancestors have the right of proper ritual treatment and the filial sons are obliged to it. The rights and obligations connected with ancestors exist objectively in the sense that they do not depend on the subjective views of individuals but are social facts. (p. 133)

Obligation, of course, plays a much smaller role in contemporary Western autonomous individualism than in cultures in which individual identity is more based in family membership. Since we feel our obligations to the dead less, we do not feel the reality of the dead as fully as people in some other cultures do.

Matthew Hamabata (1990) who studied ancestor rituals in a Japanese business family, found that he kept asking about the “real” existence of the dead. He was constantly frustrated because the replies were “It really doesn’t matter does it?” or, “I don’t know.” Hamabata finally realized that his questions were framed in Western scientific rationalism. His informants answered in the same framework, so none could say that they believed in the real presence of the dead in an unqualified way. “However, just because they could not claim belief under my scientifically oriented interrogation, it does not necessarily follow that they did not believe in the presence of the dead in the realm of the ritual” (p. 83).

Multiple Intelligences

If, as we move the study of grief further into phenomenological and existential philosophy, we would like to keep in dialogue with psychological studies, Gardner’s (1999) idea of multiple intelligences has found a large, receptive audience. Among the intelligences he has identified, only verbal-linguistic and logical-mathematical seem primarily mental. The others—music-rhythmic, visual-spatial, bodily-kinesthetic, interpersonal, intrapersonal, and naturalistic—seem to be more like what De Waal describes in other primates. Some people are better than others in each kind of intelligence.

In the festschrift for Gardner’s retirement, Seana Moran (2014) developed his idea that there might also be an existential intelligence that she says extends the information from the other intelligences, including the bodily intelligences.

Existential intelligence comes to the fore when contemplating one’s “place in the world” not only physically or socially but also cosmically or metaphysically; transcending the here-and-now of sensory perception. It does not seem directly dependent on the senses as other intelligences are. In some ways, existential intelligence extends information that is the output of the other intelligences, e.g., location and proprioception are components of spatial intelligence, and experiential—including emotional—information is the purview of the personal intelligences. (p. 177)

The ontology of continuing bonds, thus, offers a rich field of experience and reflection in the philosophical study of grief.

Ubiquitous Across Cultures and Historical Periods

Continuing bonds are ubiquitous across cultures and historical periods. In their comprehensive review of the archeological literature on mortuary practices in the British Isles, Inall and Lillie (2018) find that:

The memorialisation and remembrance of the dead has run as a constant thread through the social fabric of Britain from earlier prehistory, through the Iron Age to the early modern period, and beyond. While the strategies employed varied subtly, the overarching need to maintain a close relationship with the dead . . . and to keep them active within communities, ran deep, and formed bonds which continued beyond the grave. (p. 67)

Steadman et al. (1996) say that most anthropological study of bonds with the dead has focused on “ancestor worship” such as found in traditional Chinese or Japanese rituals, but that in narrowly defining “ancestor” and “ritual” anthropologists have tended to overlook the similarities among cultural patterns of continuing bonds. Palmer and Tilley say that their re-examination of older literature supports their claim that “ancestors can influence or be influenced by the living, even in those societies coded as lacking ancestor worship” (p. 65).

The cross-cultural study of the human response to significant deaths is in its infancy. To do justice to other cultural ways of responding to significant deaths, we need to recognize that psychological theories and therapeutic methods are really the contemporary West’s cultural narrative and may not be the central concepts that help us understand the response to significant deaths in other cultures. In their study in Senegal of families and individuals who have experienced a significant death, McCarthy et al. (2018) point out that Europeans are a minority among the world’s cultures but that the minority’s worldview still dominates studies of death and loss in African cultures. There is no cross-cultural evidence, they say, for a universal description of what the anglophone world calls grief. There is, on the other hand, evidence of wide cultural differences. For example, we know that in many cultures there are no equivalent terms for the words for grief in European languages (Evans et al., 2017).

Concept of Grief Exported From the Western World

At the same time we try not to make the psychological Western grief narrative normative, the attempt to include culture in the study of death and dying cannot be a simple enumeration of grief guidelines and the ways grief is experienced and expressed within different cultures. Cultures interact with each other and change in response to political and economic realities.

The rise of an international culture is apparent in the spread of fast food, T-shirts, and Bauhaus architecture. Part of that internationalization has been the spread of the Western definitions of mental health and illness. Ethan Watters (2010) has recently continued an argument that Thomas Szasz (1961) and Michel Foucault (2006) began. Szasz and Foucault argued that definitions of mental illness are cultural artifacts that reinforce the social arrangements of political and economic power. Watters shows that along with the spread of blue jeans, Western psychiatric definitions of aberrant behavior have been adopted and adapted by cultures around the world. That is, a repertoire of symptoms ranging from depression and post-traumatic stress disorder to anorexia are now found in cultures that previously had different definitions and symptoms that expressed inner and interpersonal disharmony.

Psychological Theory as Cultural Narrative

The idea that individual and family continuing bonds are experienced, expressed, and integrated differently in different cultural settings is becoming established in psychological theories of grief. The focus of psychological research, however, largely remains on individuals. Studies of how individuals or families interact with cultural narratives and customs are rare. Culture is often treated as a variable while the constant is the individual. The intersubjective relationships with other mourners, as we noted earlier, are often interpreted from the individual’s perspective and therefore labeled as “social support.”

A few psychologists are beginning to recognize the implications cross-cultural findings have for their theories. Nigel Field, for example, was a leader among the psychologists who believe we should understand continuing bonds exclusively in terms of an attachment instinct that has evolutionary survival value for the child, and thus for the species. Attachment theory, proponents say, has scientific validity because it claims a solid basis in evolutionary biology.

The attachment behavioral system is an organized set of biologically based behaviors that is activated at times of threat, leading the individual to maintain or re-establish proximity to an attachment figure. (Field et al., 2005, p. 277)

Because attachment is “a species-universal, biologically evolved neural program” (Mikulincer & Shaver, 2007, p. 10) it should be the same everywhere with minor random variations that would be the basis for evolutionary change.

Based on their studies in contemporary Western culture, Field and Filanosky (2009) echo Freud’s idea that the dead person no longer exists. They say grief is resolved

when the bereaved accepts the impossibility of finding him or her and reorganizes the working model of the relationship with the deceased such that the relationship is based exclusively on an internal connection. (p. 2)

That is, a continuing bond is an internal reality that is different from the external or social reality where the dead person is no longer available.

Field died of cancer in 2013. In a posthumously published article co-authored with Tsung-Hsing Liu (2019) they said that the Western descriptions of adaptive continuing bonds did not apply to their subjects in Cambodia.

[The] distinction between adaptive versus maladaptive continuing bond expressions is seen mainly from the Western individualized cultural perspective, in that the bereaved is the sole focus in this process of adaption to bereavement, and such a focus may be inadequate for capturing the nature of the continuing bonds in many non-Western societies … such as Cambodia, there is a general belief in a mutual influence between the dead and the living, and contact with the deceased is considered normative. Hence, certain kinds of continuing bond expressions involving this belief may not be maladaptive in non-Western societies. (pp. 1-2)

It is not clear why Field and Liu use the double negative, may not be maladaptive, rather than the positive, may be adaptive. It may be that their use of the double negative shows their reluctance to let go of the Western cultural narrative as normative.

Toward the end of his life, then, Field was beginning to formulate a more culturally relative idea of attachment and adaptiveness in grief. In doing so he was up against a very interesting question: How can attachment that is both biologically universal and culturally relative still be adaptive in the evolutionary survival of the species? Any cultural component in evolutionary fitness would mean different evolutionary lines, an idea that Darwin strenuously rejected. In their book on how Darwin’s opposition to slavery played an important role in his theory, Desmond and Moore (2009) say that Darwin believed all humans were descended in the same evolutionary line not, as pro-slavery advocates claimed, created as separate races with separate evolutionary lines. In The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872) Darwin says the universality of expressions of grief, like the expressions of other emotions, support the argument that there is only one species of human.

I have endeavoured to show in considerable detail that all the chief expressions exhibited by man are the same throughout the world. This fact is interesting, as it affords a new argument in favour of the several races being descended from a single parent-stock, which must have been almost completely human in structure, and to a large extent in mind, before the period at which the races diverged from each other. (pp. 359–360)

Regrettably Field did not live to work out the implications of a culturally relative attachment instinct. Perhaps some of his many colleagues will work on this problem in their theory (see Ho & Chan, 2017). They will find some help in the child development literature. For example, in studying mother-child bonding in Japan and the United States scholars found that the behaviors associated in the West with insecure attachment styles (that is, the behaviors activated in bereavement) might appear to be the same in both cultures, but caregivers interpret and evaluate and therefore respond to the behaviors differently (Rothbaum et al., 2002). The differing caregivers’ interpretation would over time result in favoring differing traits in evolutionary selection.

How the attachment theorists work out the problem will be interesting, but meanwhile, Field’s late realization can be a caution to scholars in other disciplines to not uncritically bring the intellectual, cultural, and political assumptions of a large portion of psychological research on grief into their bereavement studies (Duschinsky et al., 2015).

The Work of the Dead – Politically Powerful Cultural Narratives

When we go beyond the way individual and family grief interacts with cultural narratives, we can look at how continuing bonds function in larger historical and cultural dynamics. Historian Thomas Laqueur (2015; see my review, 2016) says the work of the dead is to create civilizations, his term for politically powerful cultural narratives. That is, memorializing the dead is part of the cultural narrative that legitimates political and economic power arrangements. He shows how medieval rules about who could be buried in the Church cemetery defined who were insiders and who were outsiders—strangers, Jews, suicides, and later Protestants. The creation of secular cemeteries with individual graves were part of the transition from religious to civil democratic governance, although the democracy was a hierarchy determined by who had the money to buy the best space or the most impressive stone or tomb. He shows how the war memorials featuring the names of soldiers in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries bond the nation together to create a national identity.

Robert Goss and I (2005) found some of the same issues in the legitimation of political power as Laqueur when we asked why at some historical periods continuing bonds were suppressed and at other times encouraged. A consistent theme we found in the scholarship was the relationship between the changed grief narratives and changing political power arrangements. The political question is who—family, clan, tribe, government—controls the performance by which the bonds with the dead continue. In the ancestral rituals the dead remain part of the family or, sometimes, the tribe, defining values and creating the shared identity of the living family or tribal members. When political power changes, the continuing bonds in ancestor rituals must be suppressed because ancestor bonds detract from loyalty to the new power arrangements.

We can see Laqueur’s thesis play out during a political change in historian Ramsay MacMullen’s (2014) study of ancestor rituals as the Roman Empire transitioned to Christianity. In the third and fourth centuries CE, ancestor rituals were the most important manifestation of religion. Memorial gatherings, usually at the grave, were family meals in which both the bereaved and the deceased were comforted in the presence of a trusted community. The dead shared in the meal, especially the wine, via libation tubes into the graves. Some graves had a seat too small for a living person, seemingly so the dead person could act as the gathering’s host.

Common empathy but also surviving evidence tell us that such times were occasions for crying and laughter alike, as the departed were recalled in anecdotes, and memory drew their surviving kinfolk and friends to the brink of believing they were in touch with the dead, and could give them pleasure and show them love. (p. 11)

Christian theologians did not believe that the dead could communicate with the living. Augustine thought the living were deluded. Tertullian argued the monotheistic God was different from ancestors in that He was by nature absolute, unlike ancestors who might have some powers they did not have when they were living. For Tertullian the dead were daemonia.

Still, continuing bonds with ancestors were too strong to be abolished. Instead, Christianity brought the dead into church doctrine and ritual. As cults of the saints developed, the bereaved could pray for the saints to intercede on behalf of the dead. Churches were built in or near cemeteries. Some prominent people had tombs within the churches and others were buried beneath church floors. Gifts to the church paid for masses for the dead. The power of individual and family bonds to the dead was thus appropriated by the Christians. With the appropriation complete, in the fifth century local bishops were authorized by the emperors to use force and severe punishments to force families to abandon the pagan family meals.

Continuing bonds can, of course, support the effort to undermine political power. In her study of Spiritualism, the nineteenth-century religion that centered around communication between the living and the dead, Ann Braude (1989) says that the movement’s founders were radical reformers who campaigned for women’s rights and the abolition of slavery. Continuing bonds supported the reforms that they hoped would change the culture by undermining white male power.

Continuing Bonds can be for Good or Ill

Mary Louise Kete (2000) shows how the sentimental attachments of shared grief and a strong sense of the continuity between the community of the living on earth and the community of the dead in heaven in early 19th century America created the middle-class identity for people who had migrated from somewhere else. She notes that Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address invoked the same sentimental attachments as he connected the bonds with the dead soldiers to his listeners’ bond with a nation “conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.” So that

It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us — that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion … that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

We noted above with individual continuing bonds, cultural bonds to the dead are not necessarily a good thing. Continuing bonds in some cultural narratives are part of unjust and violent social relationships. For example, in the American South, during and after the Civil War, the political narrative of the Confederacy was supported by the ideal of young war widows selflessly transferring their monogamous love for their dead husbands to the cause for which their husbands died. After the war, the widows remaining loyal to their gallant and heroic husbands was important in the South’s lost-cause narrative because nothing could be worse than to be remembered as “a hero in a broken cause” who was “pouring out his wasted life,” and leaving “the land he loved to darkness and defeat” (Elder, 2012, p. 7). The lost-cause narrative in which the widows’ grief was cast asserted white supremacy, supported the Ku Klux Klan’s terrorism that took away the rights of African Americans who had been freed by the war, and lay behind scholars with Southern sympathies rewriting American history to say the war had been fought over “states’ rights,” not equal rights.