Grief. Svend Brinkmann
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Название: Grief

Автор: Svend Brinkmann

Издательство: John Wiley & Sons Limited

Жанр: Социология

Серия:

isbn: 9781509541256

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СКАЧАТЬ ‘The Culture of Grief’ project for discussing the themes covered in the book: Ester Holte Kofod, Ditte Winther-Lindqvist, Allan Køster, Brady Wagoner, Ignacio Brescó, Luca Tateo, Anne Suhr, Mikkel Krause Frantzen, Peter Clement Lund, Alfred Bordado Sköld and Anders Petersen – Ester, Allan and Anders in particular for their help in reviewing the manuscript. I am grateful to the whole team at Polity for all their help with the English version of the book. Finally, I would like to thank the Obel Family Foundation for so generously funding the five-year ‘Culture of Grief’ project, especially Britta Graae, with whom I enjoy an excellent working relationship in my capacity as head of research.

      The theoretical ideas in this book were first explored in articles in the journals Mortality (‘The body in grief’), Culture & Psychology (‘Grief as an extended emotion’, co-authored by Ester Holte Kofod), Theory & Psychology (‘The grieving animal: Grief as a foundational emotion’), Nordic Psychology (‘Could grief be a mental disorder?’), Qualitative Inquiry (‘The presence of grief’, co-authored by nine other scientists from ‘The Culture of Grief’) and Integrative Psychological and Behavioral Science (‘General psychological implications of the human capacity for grief’). I would like to take this opportunity to thank the journal editors and peer reviewers for all of their work.

      Grief has taken centre stage in how we reflect on life – not just in private, enclosed spaces, but also in public debate. The evidence is unavoidable. In the cultural sphere, interest in the phenomenon is reflected by the preponderance of grief-based memoirs and television documentaries. Musicians including Nick Cave, Arcade Fire, Mount Eerie, Leonard Cohen and David Bowie have all released albums and songs on the subject – the latter two almost literally sang their way to their graves. Bereavement discussion groups, cafés, operas and plays have emerged, and social media has created new spaces for sharing experiences of loss, grief and absence.

      The philosopher Simon Critchley expresses a similar thought when he writes that the death of a loved one puts us in a position of ‘radical impossibility’ (2010: 40). It is an event over which we have no control. It is impossible to will the other’s death away. There is nothing we can do. According to Critchley, the grief we feel invades and structures our subjectivity. He believes that humans can ultimately be categorised by our ability to grieve, and I concur (see especially Chapter 2). Grief tells us that we can never completely master life. We are forever doomed to fall short due to our dependency on others, who vanish from our lives. This may render us impotent, existentially speaking, but according to Critchley it is precisely this impotence, this fundamental fragility, that creates the ethical demand in our interactions with others. In that sense, grief and ethical life are interlinked.

      This book takes as its starting point the need to adopt a phenomenological approach in order to identify the nature of grief. Ever since Edmund Husserl, more than a century ago, phenomenology’s watchword has been ‘back to the things themselves!’ In other words, the aim is to shed light on how people experience the world before forming scientific theories about it (for example, about grief as an illness or about its neurological basis). The book also contends that being able to describe grief’s essential nature would help us to identify what is special about human beings, what distinguishes us from other living creatures. In this way, phenomenology is a philosophical and scientific (in this case, psychological) study of how a phenomenon manifests itself in our experience. The goal is to describe the essential structure of a phenomenon, also referred to as the invariant – in other words, that which remains constant throughout its manifestations.