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OMEGA, Vol. 52(1) 37-52, 2005-2006
COMPLICATED GRIEF AND THE QUEST FOR MEANING:
A CONSTRUCTIVIST CONTRIBUTION
ROBERT A. NEIMEYER, PH.D.
University of Memphis, Tennessee
ABSTRACT
One of the more important results of the upwelling of research on bereave-
ment in recent decades has been the development of criteria for complicated
grief, a disorder whose coherence, correlates and consequences have been
subjected to increasing scrutiny. In this article I argue that clinical, con-
ceptual, and evidence-based considerations converge to support the further
refinement of such criteria, with a special emphasis on their connection to the
protracted and painful quest for meaning that characterizes a subset of the
bereaved. As further research supports and extends these current efforts,
there is reason to believe that an understanding of complicated grief can
make a significant contribution to research, theory, and practice concerning
adaptation in the wake of loss.
MARY’S MOURNING
In her first clinical consultation following the loss of her husband nine months
ago, Mary
1
describes John’s death as “the gut-ripper of her life,” the worst of a
cascade of losses that have clustered in the last year. Although John had been
troubled by vague and misdiagnosed symptoms for a few months, the actual
diagnosis of metastatic bone cancer preceded his death by a mere three weeks.
As a consequence, she felt “totally unprepared” for the loss of “the man who
had been everything to her—her best friend, her lover, her helpmate, her north,
37
Ó 2005, Baywood Publishing Co., Inc.
1
Although names and identifying information have been disguised, this case study in other
respects depicts the struggle of an actual client I am seeing in grief therapy.
her south, her east, and her west.” Most of all, Mary felt that with John’s death
she had lost her “anchor” in the world, and perhaps significantly in view of the
cause of his death, describes her ongoing grief as “bone-shattering.” She literally
counts the days since his death, and has never missed a single day of visitation
to his graveside in a cemetery over an hour from her home, even in forbidding
winter weather that made the drive a life-threatening proposition.
The special intimacy that Mary and John shared through 15 years of marriage
contrasted sharply with the “miserable” first marriages each had endured pre
-
viously. She describes John as a perfect partner—devoted, good-humored, an
excellent provider, and her “buffer” from a harsh world. Now, she feels a keen
sense of abandonment by the man who promised he would “always be there” at
a time of need—such as during the deaths of both her mother, who succumbed
to advanced Alzheimer’s, and her beloved aunt, who was lost to breast cancer
within three months of John’s death. As a consequence she feels vulnerable and
alone, a feeling that has heightened in the context of an angry legal battle with
family members over her husband’s estate. This dispute, as well as the general
pressure she feels “to be over it already,” leaves her embittered and distrustful
of the intentions of others.
Now, Mary only experiences any respite from her grief when she feels John’s
“presence.” Her desperate yearning for contact with him was reflected in her
hysterical attempt to climb into John’s open casket at the funeral, and her still
frequent calls to his answering machine “just to hear his voice.” Sometimes
this wished-for contact comes in dreams, as she responds to the sound of his
voice saying, “Honey, come snuggle up to me,” or at night when she clearly
feels his hand in hers, or patting her side. The most sustained sense of contact
came during one of her daily visits to his grave, when she felt surrounded by
signs of his heavenly existence in the sunset, a flock of birds, and the whispering
of his voice in the wind. Mary confesses that such moments accentuate the
loss when she “awakens” to the reality of his death, and that she feels that she
will never see him again, except in heaven. Accordingly, she ruminates frequently
about death as a release from pain and about the heavenly reunion it could
bring, but aside from the vague consideration of taking massive doses of the
sleeping pills and anti-anxiety medication she has been prescribed, has no clear
plans to suicide.
Mary goes on to say that she feels “so encased in grief that she doesn’t even
know who she is anymore.” She sees no vestiges of the outgoing person she used
to be, and feels enraged that “God would leave her here without any purpose
for being left behind.” Nothing about her present life makes sense to her—as
she sums it up, “the quality of my life is gone, and nothing is left but garbage.”
In her own words, she “can’t accept that John is gone,” and is left “in shock
after losing the foundation he provided.” In many ways she feels much like
she did nine days after his death, rather than how she had hoped to feel a full
nine months later.
38 / NEIMEYER
Despite these many problems, Mary does have some resources. She has
somehow managed to keep her sales job in the insurance industry, despite a
visible deterioration in her performance, and “keeps up appearances” despite
her 20 pound weight loss, frequent sleeplessness, and pervasive sadness and
anger. Her adult son and daughter from her previous marriage are as attentive as
possible, given their great geographic distance, although because of her absorption
in her marriage, she “gave up all her other friends.” She did show a spark of
pride, however, in producing a handsome laminated memorial card for John
that she designed, which she spoke hopefully of using as the starting point for
a book about him and about their relationship. As she noted in closing, she
didn’t want the memory of John to be “erased,” and she somehow hoped that
such a project would help her “get back some of the person she used to be.”
THREE WARRANTS FOR COMPLICATED GRIEF
Existing evidence suggests that most of the bereaved are resilient, ultimately
coping well with major loss (Bonanno, 2004; Center for the Advancement of
Health, 2004). However, between 10 and 20% of survivors, like Mary, experience
unremitting and intense grieving that substantially impairs the quality of their
lives (Bonanno, Wortman, & Nesse, 2004) and predicts long-term risks to physical
and mental health (Ott, 2003; Parkes, 1996; Prigerson & Jacobs, 2001). My goal
in this article is to reflect on three basic warrants for applying a diagnosis of
complicated grief in these cases, grounded in clinical, theoretical, and empirical
considerations, respectively. Because Prigerson and Maciejewski (2005) provide
a systematic overview of the evidence base regarding the etiology, course, and
correlates of this disorder and the distinctiveness and coherence of its core
symptomatology, I will concentrate here on underscoring its clinical features
as I have encountered them in my practice, and then consider a conceptualization
of complicated grief as an assault on the bereaved individual’s attachment bonds
and world of meaning. Finally, I will conclude with some brief description of the
accumulating evidence supporting such a conceptualization, with reference to
the ongoing work of my own research group. Thus, my intent is to argue that,
with appropriate caution regarding the iatrogenic or deleterious effects of this
(or any) psychiatric diagnosis, there is ample warrant for refining such criteria
on clinical, conceptual, and evidentiary grounds.
The Clinical Warrant
How do the proposed criteria presented by Prigerson and Macijewski (2005)
square with the clinical presentation of bereaved clients like Mary, who con
-
stitute a substantial subset of those who seek consultation with professionals
following their loss? My answer, in a phrase, is “remarkably well.” Clearly,
Mary meets Criterion A, with its emphasis on symptoms of attachment distress
COMPLICATED GRIEF AND THE QUEST FOR MEANING / 39
in the form of yearning and longing for the deceased (Bowlby, 1980), a nearly
constant craving for connection with John that finds expression in both waking
behaviors (e.g., daily trips to the cemetery, calling his answering machine) and
less conscious reveries (e.g., nighttime dreams, hypnagogic “contact”). Although
seeking and finding such comfort in connection with her loved one is not in
itself pathognomic (Datson & Marwit, 1997), the compulsiveness of this quest
and the difficulty in supplementing more concrete forms of bonding (through
particular objects or places) with more abstract ones (such as identification
with John’s life purposes or comforting memories) may be (FIeld, Nichols,
Holen, & Horowitz, 1999). Indeed, the riveting intensity of this broken attach
-
ment remains the focal clinical issue in Mary’s case, both in her self-assessment
and in my perspective as her therapist. As she notes, she has lost the anchor and
compass of her life with the disruption of the safe haven John provided, and
seems unable to navigate through life without him.
Likewise, Mary easily displays the majority of the symptom markers for
Criterion B. In her own words she finds John’s death impossible to accept, so
central was his presence in her life. Moreover, she reports a clear erosion of
trust in the social world, most notable in relation to family members with whom
she is in conflict over the estate, but also generalizing to those who support
them, or even those who “disenfranchise” her ongoing grief (Doka, 2002;
Neimeyer & Jordan, 2002). In session, her suspiciousness regarding others
frequently erupts into bitter anger, an emotion that seems at times to serve
a protective function in mitigating her contact with her deep grief. Mary
frankly acknowledges her inability to “move on” with her life, whether at the
level of opening to other relationships, even with friends, or performing fully
in her career. She continues to feel “shocked” by John’s death even nine
months later, and feels remote and detached from the majority of other people.
Most strikingly, Mary paints a vivid portrait of a life bleached of meaning;
cut off from a sustaining and comprehensible past, she seems unable to find
significance in the present, or project herself toward a purposeful future. The
reduced life she now must lead is for her simply “garbage,” the cruel joke
of an uncaring God. Perhaps the only symptom under Criterion B that is not
strongly in evidence for Mary is agitation, as her dominant affect alternates
between anger and abject despair, with correspondingly less diffuse anxiety or
hyperarousal. Finally, although she manages to function at at least a minimal
level in her work, the constriction of Mary’s life is strongly evident in her broader
social world.
Does the presence of these symptoms of complicated grief preclude other
relevant diagnoses in Mary’s case? By no means. For example, although she does
not meet full criteria for a major depressive disorder, Mary does display significant
symptoms of depressed mood, impaired appetite and sleep, and passive suicide
ideation that requires careful monitoring. Given this profile of hopelessness and
vegetative symptomatology, a referral for a trial of antidepressant medication
40 / NEIMEYER
could be indicated. For other patients of mine, like Sara, who struggled with the
horrendous death of her brother in the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center
(Neimeyer, 2005b), a basic profile of complicated grief also can be compounded
with symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder. But in both instances, central
attention to the unique features of complicated grief is called for if therapy is to be
helpful, insofar as treatments tangential to the core issues of attachment and loss
are less than fully effective even when they mitigate other significant symptoms,
as Prigerson and Maciejewski (2005) note.
In emphasizing formal psychiatric diagnoses in cases like Mary’s, I do not mean
to imply that I regard these as either necessary or sufficient guidelines for
treatment. On the one hand, I have often seen people who have struggled with
subtle but significant issues in the wake of loss who would meet few, if any of
the criteria for complicated grief (or major depressive disorder, anxiety dis
-
order, PTSD, or any other significant diagnosis). For instance, two other clients,
Sandra and Chris, both experienced tensions in their families in the wake of
parent loss—Sandra because others had difficulty accommodating her newfound
“take charge attitude” cultivated during the period of intensive caregiving to an
ailing mother, and Chris because she effectively resigned her role as the “family
communication satellite” in order to nurse her own grief over her father’s death
(Neimeyer, 2005a). Others, like Darla, who had lost her 20-year-old son Kyle to
an aggressive bile duct cancer some six months earlier, struggle with posthumous
relational complications with the deceased, such as her trying to hide her tears
because her stoic son “would not have wanted to see her cry” (Neimeyer, 2004a).
Thus, the interpersonal and intrapersonal conflicts that can follow significant
loss can be painfully real and clearly appropriate for therapy, whether or not
they satisfy formal psychiatric criteria (S. Rubin, 1999; Walsh & McGoldrick,
2004). I further believe that a diagnosis of complicated grief, while helpful in
providing a general orienting framework for treatment, is in itself insufficient to
direct therapeutic interventions, which require a delicate grafting onto the salient
issues emerging for a given client at a given moment of therapy (Neimeyer,
2001a). These limitations notwithstanding, the development of empirically sub
-
stantiated criteria for complication goes some distance toward identifying a subset
of bereaved persons who are likely to be responsive to grief therapy, which
evidence suggests is best reserved for those at risk for negative outcomes (Jordan
& Neimeyer, 2003).
The Theoretical Warrant
As the burgeoning literature on grief attests, the field of bereavement studies
is in ferment (Center for the Advancement of Health, 2004; Stroebe, Stroebe,
Hansson, & Schut, 2001). Much of this surge of activity originates from the
development of new models with which to conceptualize the sequelae of loss,
combined with the significant extension of older ones. In this section I will
COMPLICATED GRIEF AND THE QUEST FOR MEANING / 41
comment on some of these developments as they bear on the conceptualization of
complicated grief, with special emphasis on processes of meaning reconstruction
in the wake of loss.
As illustrated in Mary’s case, much of the core phenomenology of complicated
grief arises directly from the sundering of a security-enhancing attachment bond
with the deceased, making attachment theory (Bowlby, 1980; Parkes, 1996;
Prigerson & Jacobs, 2001; Stroebe, 2002)a highly relevant conceptual context
within which to interpret the separation distress that follows intimate loss.
Because attachment styles developed in relation to caregiving figures in child
-
hood form the basis for subsequent models of self (e.g., as worthy and competent
or unlovable and vulnerable) and others (e.g., as nurturing and available or
unresponsive and abandoning) (Guidano, 1991), experiences of childhood neglect
and abuse can predispose to various forms of insecure attachment, which can
in turn render subsequent experiences of loss of stabilizing relationships deeply
threatening to one’s basic sense of coherence, safety, and fulfillment. Accord-
ingly, the grief experienced in the aftermath of such loss can be complicated,
marked by just the sort of intense and protracted yearning and “brokenness”
captured in Prigerson and Maciejewski’s proposed criteria. In contrast, favorable
experiences of childhood caregiving can lead to the development of secure attach-
ment, which could serve as a buffer against complication in the face of later
loss, resulting in grief reactions which, while marked by sadness and distress,
do not radically undermine the bereaved person’s sense of personal integrity,
trust in others, or purpose in living (Neimeyer, Prigerson, & Davies, 2002).
Such a model of factors associated with risk and resilience is compatible
with recent evidence on the role of developmental and attachment factors in
predicting subsequent grief (Silverman, Johnson, & Prigerson, 2001; Uren &
Wastell, 2002).
Recent elaborations of attachment theory extend its relevance for an under
-
standing of grief responses, and suggest linkages to other current models of
bereavement. For example, several current writers, clinicians, and qualitative
researchers have conceptualized grieving in terms of establishing or reorganizing
a continuing bond with the deceased, in place of the predominant emphasis of
20th century theorists on breaking such bonds in order to invest in new relation
-
ships (Attig, 2000; Klass, Silverman, & Nickman, 1996; S. Rubin, 1999; Worden,
1991). From an attachment theory perspective, not all deaths trigger an effort to
retain or reformulate such bonds, but rather only those in which the attachment
behavioral system is activated (Field, Gao, & Paderna, 2005), that is, when the
bereaved sought to maintain physical or psychological proximity to the other
(e.g., a parent or spouse) as a “safe haven” from a threatening world, and a “secure
base” from which to venture into new challenges. From the related vantage point
of the caregiving behavioral system, the pursuit of a continuing bond can also
be intense when the bereaved was motivated to provide protection for another
(e.g., a child), and strives to reestablish such a bond psychologically or spiritually
42 / NEIMEYER
in the wake of his or her death (Field et al., 2005). Typically, then, complicated
grief in Prigerson and Maciejewski’s (2005) sense might be expected to occur
most frequently in contexts in which acute and persistent separation distress is
activated in the wake of loss of the critical relationship, and when the bereaved
struggles unsuccessfully to reestablish a continuing bond at more abstract levels.
A further implication of this analysis, however, is that some forms of insecure
attachment, such as those involving avoidance or dismissal of intimacy based on
“defensive exclusion” of vulnerable feelings of rejection, might actually militate
against the pursuit of a continuing bond with the deceased (Field et al., 2005),
thereby mitigating the core yearning and longing symptomatology suggested
in the criteria for complicated grief. For these and other reasons, the interface
between attachment histories and styles on the one hand and complicated versus
adaptive forms of grieving on the other deserves further exploration (M. Stroebe
& Schut, 2005).
A further theoretical framework of relevance to complicated grief focuses
on struggles with meaning reconstruction in the aftermath of bereavement
(Janoff-Bulman & Berger, 2000; Neimeyer, 2001b). From a constructivist
perspective (Neimeyer & Raskin, 2000) profound loss challenges the coherence
of the bereaved individual’s self-narrative, defined as “an overarching cognitive-
affective-behavioral structure that organizes the ‘micro-narratives’ of everyday
life into a ‘macro-narrative’ that consolidates our self-understanding, establishes
our characteristic range of emotions and goals, and guides our performance on
the stage of the social world” (Neimeyer, 2004b, pp. 53-54). In keeping with
both cognitive science (Barsalou, 1988) and neuropsychological (D. C. Rubin &
Greenberg, 2003) research on narrative processing, human beings are viewed as
“wired” to make sense of life in storied form, to integrate autobiographical events
into “story schemas” that impart order and meaning to experience (Neimeyer,
2000). Under ideal circumstances, self-narratives function as key resources in
assimilating bereavement related losses, “emplotting” them as part of a series
of significant life events and interpreting them within the broader personal,
cultural or spiritual themes that underpin the individual’s sense of self. When
this is impossible, however, as when the implications of the loss radically dis
-
organize the coherence of the bereaved person’s self-narrative or invalidate its
thematic substructure, he or she is forced to reconstruct or accommodate this
very framework to be adequate to present realities. In the latter case, the survivor
often faces a painful and protracted struggle to find new purpose and orientation
in a life that no longer makes sense, and perhaps even to find a larger signifi
-
cance in the suffering he or she must endure. Such a conceptualization of griev
-
ing in terms of the attempt to integrate the loss experience into a resilient or
revised self-narrative accords with recent prospective longitudinal research on
bereavement adaptation (Bonanno et al., 2004; Neimeyer, 2005c). It is also
consistent with fMRI studies of breaved women (Gundel, O’Conner, Littrell,
Fort, & Lane, 2003) that associate acute grief with activation of precisely those
COMPLICATED GRIEF AND THE QUEST FOR MEANING / 43
brain structures that subserve autobiographical memory
2
and visualization areas
that have been implicated in narrative reasoning (D. C. Rubin & Greenberg, 2003).
As Mary’s case suggests, an anguishing attempt to reconstruct a world of
meaning that has been shattered by loss is a central feature of complicated grief.
In fact, many of the Criterion B symptoms outlined as diagnostic of the disorder
can be viewed as direct or indirect reflections of the decimation of the bereaved
individual’s system of meaning consequent on the loss of a central participant
in his or her self-narrative (Neimeyer et al., 2002). For example, numbness and
trouble accepting the loss can be seen as expressions of the inability to assimilate
the death into one’s previous constructions of reality, and feeling that life is
empty or meaningless without the deceased and that it is impossible to move on
toward a purposeful future speak directly to the assault on the survivor’s sense of
significance and continuity. Finally, persistent anger can be seen as a suboptimal
means of adapting to the invalidation of existing meanings, by ‘hostilely’ attempt
-
ing to impose one’s constructions on events (Kelly, 1955/1991). Although the
formal criteria for complicated grief (like all psychiatric diagnoses) tend to
individualize distress, it is worth emphasizing that the processes entailed in
constructing and validating a (new) self-narrative are inherently social, insofar as
we necessarily rely on the intimate validation of our sense of self by particular
others, as well as communal and cultural discourses of identity that define our
social roles both before and after bereavement (Neimeyer, 2005c; Neimeyer et al.,
2002). Thus, a broadly narrative framework can provide a helpful heuristic for
identifying sources of invalidation that arise not only within the experience of
the bereaved person, but also in family, communal, and perhaps even larger
contexts of transcendent meanings (Neimeyer & Jordan, 2002).
The Empirical Warrant
Prigerson and Maciejewski (2005) have capably summarized the research
programs of the Yale group and those of other investigators that bear on the
coherence, correlates, and consequences of complicated grief. In this section I will
review some additional findings from our own evolving research program that
bear on the topic, with a special emphasis on the search for meaning in the
aftermath of devastating loss.
In one study we investigated the relationship between complicated grief
symptomatology and sleep-related problems in a group of over 500 bereaved
adults and 300 nonbereaved adults in the first two years following their loss of
a close friend or relative (Hardison, Neimeyer, & Lichstein, 2005). The sample
was diverse in both ethnicity (37% African American) and mode of death, with
a substantial subset of deaths resulting from traumatic causes (accident, suicide
44 / NEIMEYER
2
Interestingly, these very areas are deactivated in acute depression, providing further evidence
for the distinctiveness of depression and grief (Gundel et al., 2003).
and homicide). Administering both the Inventory of Complicated Grief (Prigerson
& Jacobs, 2001) and a detailed assessment of insomnia and associated sleep
symptoms, we documented the higher frequency of insomnia (and especially
middle insomnia) in the bereaved group, and its significant association with
complicated grief symptomatology. As predicted, scores on the ICG were also
higher for the traumatically rather than nontraumatically bereaved, just as they
were for those who had more intimate relationships with the deceased, and those
whose loved ones were younger at the time of death. Moreover, higher reports
of complicated grief symptoms displayed a worrisome association with measures
of daytime impairment and reliance on drugs and alcohol to induce sleep, sug
-
gesting a possible “downward spiral” between bereavement complications and
maladaptive means of coping with them. Finally, it was noteworthy that the two
strongest predictors of complicated grief symptoms were nighttime ruminations
about the deceased and waking from dreams regarding the loved one, hybrid
markers of both bereavement distress and insomnia that deserve greater attention
on the part of both clinicians and researchers.
A second study recruited a still larger sample of over 1,700 bereaved adults
to investigate the relationship between mode of death (natural or violent) on
the one hand, and complicated grief and meaning-making processes on the
other (Currier, Holland, Coleman, & Neimeyer, 2006). Again, participants
completed the ICG, along with the Core Bereavement Items scale designed
explicitly to assess symptoms of “normal” as opposed to “pathological” grief
(Burnett, Middleton, Raphael, & Martinek, 1997), and a series of ratings of
the degree of sense they had made of their loss experience, the degree of
benefit that they had found in it, despite the loss, and the degree and direction
of their identity reconstruction in the wake of their bereavement (Neimeyer
& Anderson, 2002).
Implicit in the conceptualization of complicated grief symptoms is that
they, by definition, should be reported less frequently than symptoms of normal
grieving; that is, relative to core bereavement phenomena that emphasize sadness,
listlessness, crying and thinking of the deceased, symptoms such as purpose
-
lessness, a fractured sense of trust and meaning or inability to move forward
with life would be expected to be less prominent in a large nonclinical sample of
bereaved persons. The size of the sample in the Currier et al. (2006) study permits
a test of this prediction in the form of comparing the shapes of the distributions
for ICG and CBI scores obtained by participants in our study. As Figure 1
indicates, although both distributions are positively skewed, suggesting a tapering
of extreme symptomatology in this sample as assessed by both scales, the distri
-
butions for the two sets of items differ appreciably. As expected, the majority
of these nonclinical respondents endorse a low frequency of symptoms of com
-
plicated grief, with the number reporting greater frequency of such symptoms
diminishing steadily across levels of severity. In contrast, the distribution of core
bereavement items is more symmetric, more nearly normal in shape, for this
COMPLICATED GRIEF AND THE QUEST FOR MEANING / 45
46 / NEIMEYER
COMPLICATED GRIEF AND THE QUEST FOR MEANING / 47
Figure 1. Distributions of scores on the Inventory of Complicated Grief (ICG) and Core Bereavement Items (CBI)
for a nonclinical sample of 1,723 bereaved adults.
same group, indicating that moderate levels of these typical grief symptoms are the
rule rather than the exception. This difference is compatible with the con
-
ceptualization of complicated grief symptoms as reflections of an atypical grief
process whose frequency differs notably from more common symptoms of
normal grieving.
Our primary interest in this study was assessing the ability of the various grief
and meaning-related measures to identify distinctive features of violent and
nonviolent (natural death) bereavement, inasmuch as nearly 500 participants in
the sample had been bereaved by homicide, suicide or accident. As expected, the
Inventory of Complicated Grief proved more robust in differentiating the violent
and natural death group than did the Core Bereavement Items, suggesting that it
better assesses those features distinctive to traumatic loss (see Figure 2). However,
the strongest factor distinguishing the two types of bereavement was sense-
making: those persons experiencing the violent death of loved ones (and espe
-
cially losses through suicide and homicide; see Currier et al. for details) were far
more likely to report an unsuccessful struggle to find sense or meaning in the
48 / NEIMEYER
Figure 2. Effect sizes for violent versus nonviolent death
on six dependent variables.
experience. Experiencing a shift in their own identity in a negative direction, and
an inability to find any benefit or “silver lining” in the dark cloud of their
bereavement also characterized those suffering traumatic as opposed to natural
bereavement. In contrast perceived social support was unrelated to cause of
death, with both groups of bereaved people reporting similar levels of support by
others. In summary, the study provided evidence that complicated grief, and
particularly a fracturing of sense or meaning, were hallmarks of bereavement
for those who lost loved ones by traumatic means.
CONCLUSION
Over the last 20 years, over 4,000 scholarly and scientific papers have been
published in the interdisciplinary field of death, dying and bereavement
(Neimeyer, 2004c), the majority of which are data-based studies. As a result, we
now know more than we once did about how human beings confront and adapt to
the reality of their own deaths and those of others. One result of such research has
been the development of a richer understanding of bereavement, as new models
and methods open the prospect of a more detailed view of how people cope with
loss (Center for the Advancement of Health, 2004).
The ongoing refinement of criteria for diagnosing complications in grieving
is one outcome of this scientific effort. In this article I have argued that the
work of Prigerson and her group helps identify criteria for complicated grief that
are readily discernable in clinical practice, that are distinguishable from other
difficulties and disorders (such as depression) with which many bereaved also
contend, and that can provide at least a preliminary orientation to the sort of
symptoms that should be taken as a target of clinical assessment and intervention.
I have also suggested that the refinement of such criteria is warranted by recent
theoretical elaboration, particularly in terms of conceptual models focusing on
suboptimal responses to the loss of a security-enhancing attachment relation
-
ship and the decimation of a world of meaning occasioned by profound loss.
Interestingly, a point of contact in both sets of models concerns the effort to
transform the continuing bond with the deceased in a way that preserves a
modicum of consistency in the self-narrative of the bereaved, a narrative
interwoven, often surprisingly closely, with the life story of another. And finally,
I have attempted to add to the mosaic of empirical findings on complicated
grief by drawing attention to its link with other worrisome symptomatology,
its distinguishable distribution of symptoms relative to those that characterize
normal grief, and its special relevance to more problematic forms of loss.
Although much more remains to be learned about the multiple sources of both
resilience and complication in the course of bereavement, clinical, theoretical
and empirical observations converge to suggest that the diagnosis of complicated
grief makes an important contribution to this effort.
COMPLICATED GRIEF AND THE QUEST FOR MEANING / 49
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Direct reprint requests to:
Robert A. Neimeyer, Ph.D.
Department of Psychology
University of Memphis
Memphis, TN 38152-6400
e-mail: neimeyer@memphis.edu
52 / NEIMEYER
