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Parental Discourse and Activism as a Response to Bereavement of Fallen Sons and Civilian Terrorist Victims
Abstract
This study is a phenomenological exploration of bereavement among a population of Israeli parents who became demonstratively activist following the death of their offspring either as soldiers in the line of duty or as victims of terrorism. It illuminates how an anger-forgiveness continuum gives a politically charged significance to the bereavement experience regardless of party or ideological orientation. Strong nationalist identification with the armed forces is overlaid with intense personal emotions of guilt and blame assignment. Mourning as a career may follow pathological or normative courses. Political leaders emerge who mobilize similarly situated mourners to protest against military and civilian policy related to the perceived nexus between security matters and the personal loss. The dynamic between factors which assuage personal needs and simultaneously endanger national consensus regarding the performance of leading state institutions–the government and the defense establishment—is underlined in the conditions which both facilitate and impair any transition from anger to reconciliation.
... Within the bereavement literature, the majority of studies explore emotional support to the bereaved (see, e.g., Bellamy, Gott, Waterworth, McLean, & Kerse, 2014;Lundberg, Olsson, & Fürst, 2013;Nikkola, Kaunonen, & Aho, 2013). The primacy of psychological support to those bereaved through military death is evident in both U.S.-based papers (see, e.g., Cohen, Goodman, Campbell, Carroll, & Campagna, 2009;Cozza, Chun, & Polo, 2005;Dixon, 2010;Provost, 1989;Scott, 2010;Wilson & Supiano, 2011), and the majority of the Israeli-based literature (see, e.g., Geron, Ginzburg, & Solomon, 2003;Hamama-Raz, Rosenfeld, & Buchbinder, 2010;Lebel & Ronel, 2005;Malkinson & Bar-Tur, 2000). Organizational responses to death in the U.S. military have also been considered (Bartone & Ender, 1994). ...
This paper, drawing on data from a wider study, describes the impact that UK bereaved military parents ascribe to the practical support (help with home and garden maintenance) that they received following the death of their son. The type of practical support offered to parents has had a wide-ranging and significant impact on them. In addition to helping them find meaning and maintain continuing bonds, this form of support contributed to their capacity to engage in restoration-focused coping. As a symbolic resource, this type of practical support may be a significant moderator of distress in the psychosocial transition of bereavement.
... These voices adopt the global anti-war discourse to which the dominant groups are attentive and reflect the overall change in the bereavement discourse. 32 (d) A mnemonic community develops around the fallen and the mourners. The ceremony defines the boundaries of the remembering and mourning group, and emphasizes that remembering the fallen is one of the most important elements defining the school community. ...
Since the 1973 War, the secular Ashkenazi middle-class groups, which traditionally had constituted the military's "backbone", have displayed a lack of enthusiasm to continue to bear the military burden, a phenomenon that was publicly portrayed as a "motivation crisis." We conceptualize this process as a shift from a "subjected militarism" that perceived military service as an unconditioned, mandatory national duty to a "contractual militarism," according to which military service is stipulated by the fulfillment of the individual's ambitions and interests, although it remained a formal obligation. Two sites of socializations-school memorial ceremonies and preparation for the military service-serve as mediating mechanisms between the structural, social change and the social agency. Both have been utilized by the dominant groups to re-shape the canon, military ethos in a manner that redefines their relations vis-à-vis the military in contractual terms.
... Against this background, one can understand why the military casualties did not spawn a protest movement similar to the Lebanon War's Four Mothers movement, despite the growing public feeling that the victims were being sacrificed for no good purpose. Not only did the fallen fail to arouse massive protest among the elite groups, which were only marginally affected, but the peripheral groups that were highly affected did not protest either, instead accepting their loss (on the bereavement discourse, see Lebel & Ronel, 2005;Levy, 2005). ...
With the outbreak of the al-Aqsa Intifada in 2000 and in contrast to past wars, the Israeli state impressively regained its relative autonomous capacity in managing a prolonged military operation without significant internal opposition. Arguably, the state's autonomy increased in light of the alteration of the social composition of the army, from relying on the Ashkenazi middle class to drawing on peripheral and religious social groups. Specifically, this change was reflected in the composition of casualties that reshaped the bereavement ethos from protest to an acceptance of the sacrifice. Concurrently, the field forces exhibited much greater enthusiasm than they had for aggressive missions through which the religious and peripheral groups hoped to prove themselves worthy of status both inside and outside the army.
... All the victims' relatives in this group provided a heroic significance to their loved ones' death and emphasized the hardships they went through (often without any support by the government), yet they felt proud for having a hero in the family. The predominant feelings of bitterness and resentment, however, were not related exclusively to the loss of their loved ones (see Lebel and Ronel 2005). As was also shown in Maria's case, such feelings seemed to be reinforced by pre-existing political and ideological views about the Other (see Sitas, Latif, and Loizou 2007). ...
This paper is grounded in a phenomenological‐interpretive exploration of how mourning is experienced and understood by the victim’s nuclear family – the victims are Greek‐Cypriot missing persons whose remains have been recovered, identified and properly buried, after exhumations of mass graves in the aftermath of war. Particularly, the focus is on the pedagogical openings that are created for educators and students who seek to engage in learning about mourning and/or how to mourn in schools. Two in‐depth mourning narratives are analyzed and the pedagogical implications of the nationalization of mourning are discussed. A careful critique of the nationalization of mourning formulates a critical discourse from which it becomes possible to launch a renewal of an affective community, that is, a restructuring of affective spaces in schools and the public arena so that new affective connections with the Other are created. The analysis shows the complexities involved in attempts to formulate public and school pedagogies of mourning.
This chapter deals with Gender, religion and nationalism in the grieving process, treats the grieving process experienced by Palestinian parents in terms of the interplay of gender, religion and national feeling. Examining this intersection of religion, politics and gender, we can learn more about how the interplay of values, norms and social and religious beliefs shapes the character of Palestinian bereavement. The gender differences between the coping patterns of fathers and those of mothers are very apparent here. Mothers used different strategies to meet and deal with the pain of their loss, including mysticism and redirecting their anger inward, whereas the men tended to use rationalization as a way of coping and directed their anger outward. Palestinian mothers spoke in a different voice than did Palestinian fathers about the way they understood death. Notably, the voice of the grieving mothers drew its content from religious faith and from social and traditional beliefs, yet managed to remain distinct from the expression of grief on the part of Palestinian fathers. The fathers’ voice was clear, rational, less uncertain and better formulated, and involved less of an internal struggle regarding the death of a child, compared with Palestinian mothers whose voice was more uncertain, less confident and with a more tenuous connection to reality.
It is commonly recognized that ending a connection with a loved one, especially a loved one from one’s immediate family is a very difficult experience. People react to such trauma in differing ways. When such a relationship ends because of death, the loss is final and the shock commensurately greater. The unique responses of the bereaved are shaped by a number of factors, including the closeness of the relationship, the quality of the connection, the nature of the culture, and the stage of life at which this trauma occurs.
To round out the discussion, Part Five addresses the politics of memory and commemoration—personal loss, public commemoration. The culture of commemoration created by Palestinian society during the second Intifada has imparted a unique national-group character to the loss of Palestinian children. The memorialization of the shaheeds is part of a covert mission to raise the level of awareness around the death of the children for a national political purpose of the first order. In this chapter, I try to show how the act of commemoration establishes a collective national identity in Palestinian society and transforms the personal sacrifice of Palestinian parents into a sacrifice for the collective and the homeland. I address the connection between memory, gender and culture, and the reciprocal interaction among them in relation to loss and trauma in Palestinian society. I concentrate on the question of how these interrelationships have led to the shaping of a national awareness and a national identity in relation to loss and trauma in Palestinian society, and how this is manifest in the Palestinian private and public space. I scrutinize the connection between commemoration, memory and gender, in an attempt to understand how the gender component manifests itself in Palestinian commemorative space and how the social power dynamics translate into the act of memorialization and influence its nature and content.
Part Three, Coping with bereavement in the religious, cultural and societal contexts, deals further with the connection between the cultural, religious and social component and the phenomenon of bereavement in Palestinian society. I examine the influence of a combination of religious, social and cultural attitudes in shaping the content and dynamic of coping among Palestinian bereaved parents. The discussion addresses the development of the idea of sacrifice in Palestinian society and the influence of this idea on the construction of the Palestinian ethos of sacrifice. Both fathers and mothers reported that their religious faith served as a resource in shaping the way they felt about, and dealt with, the loss of their child, on both the individual and collective level. Most of the Palestinian parents cited the power of their belief in God as significantly helpful to them in coping with their loss and with the pain in accepting their child’s death as part of God’s plan: “Let it be as God has willed it.” The chapter goes on to address the religious meaning of the shaheed (martyr) as understood by these parents. The death of a child defined as a shaheed is seen as uniquely meaningful. For the parents, this categorization attaches special significance and purpose to the child’s death, guarantees the child himself eternal life, and promises automatic entry to paradise for the shaheed and his entire family. The faith, and the feeling, that the child is eternally alive and not dead is an important component for Palestinian parents in coping with their loss. The discussion proceeds to address the matter of social support and the way the notion of “parent of a shaheed” is cultivated. Their new role as bereaved parents, parents of a shaheed, places these Palestinian parents at the center of the Palestinian national and social map and affords them special status and a certain social aura that in many cases improves their social status generally within the community.
This article presents the spectrum of the bereavement discourse, namely, how various social groups interpret the loss of their children’s lives or the potential risk to their lives posed by their military service and translate it into public discourse, as a spectrum of attitudes. It is argued that this spectrum ranges from subversive to submissive approaches. Furthermore, within the confines of the declining casualty tolerance, two variables cumulatively determine the actors’ choice of discourse: the level of enforcement of recruitment, ranging from conscription to voluntary recruitment, and the social position of the group to which the agents belong. Given that conscription brings powerful, high-status groups into the ranks who may be unwilling to make sacrifices for war, subversive responses are more likely to occur in conscript militaries than in volunteer forces and vice versa. This article maps this spectrum and hypothesizes about its determinants.
Many studies have examined the trauma bereaved parents experience. The current study focuses on the role that the Holocaust's memory plays in the bereavement experience of parents who have lost a child in a terrorist attack in Israel.
Forty bereaved parents were interviewed, using semi-structured in-depth interviews. Bereaved parents related to the Holocaust memory as a meaningful experience in their private bereavement. The parents expressed dialectic feelings concerning their loss, personal victimization on the one hand and personal strength, and growth on the other hand. It seems that memory reconstruction of the Holocaust can be used as a coping resource.
In this article I examine the possibilities that exist within mourning and mourning narratives for coming to terms with the pain and suffering of the oppositional Other. This implies that rather than taking official discourses as structured and predictable, research with citizens of Cyprus, who had lost loved ones through war, demonstrates pedagogical and political possibilities for counter- narratives and counter-mourning based on the recognition of common suffering.
Whose life is worth more? That is the question that states inevitably face during wartime. Which troops are thrown to the first lines of battle and which ones remain relatively intact? How can various categories of civilian populations be protected? And when front and rear are porous, whose life should receive priority, those of soldiers or those of civilians? In Israel's Death Hierarchy, Yagil Levy uses Israel as a compelling case study to explore the global dynamics and security implications of casualty sensitivity. Israel, Levy argues, originally chose to risk soldiers mobilized from privileged classes, more than civilians and other soldiers. However, with the mounting of casualty sensitivity, the state gradually restructured what Levy calls its "death hierarchy" to favor privileged soldiers over soldiers drawn from lower classes and civilians, and later to place enemy civilians at the bottom of the hierarchy by the use of heavy firepower. The state thus shifted risk from soldiers to civilians. As the Gaza offensive of 2009 demonstrates, this new death hierarchy has opened Israel to global criticism.
The study provides a view of ideological meaning-making processes of 10 Israelis who lost a child examining the parents' perspectives and written public documents. The texts and interviews were analyzed using Gadamer's hermeneutic philosophy. Findings indicate that bereaved parents construct conflicting ideologically oriented viewpoints: doubting and affirming the Zionist ideology; ascribing sense and senselessness to the loss; and joining the ethos but keeping personal meanings. Our conclusion is consistent with theorists who reject the notion that the human narrative should be coherently unified. We point to potential links between relational dialectics and meaning-making theory and outline implications for practice.
This qualitative research study is based on in-depth interviews with 12 grandparents who had a grandchild killed in a terror attack in Israel. Two main categories that emerged from the data analysis were (a) loss in the personal context and (b) loss in the collective context. Each category was subdivided into two groups: first, grandparents whose grief centered on specific aspects of the painful loss of an intimate connection with the grandchild and grandparents who were directly exposed to the terror attack and whose narrative focused on the traumatic memory, and, second, grandparents who constructed their loss as part of the history of anti-Semitism and grandparents who constructed their loss as part of the Israeli narrative of the struggle for the land and the state of Israel. The article demonstrates how each type highlights a different aspect of grandparental bereavement as a result of a terror attack. Clinical implications of the findings are presented.
From its inception and throughout the military sovereignty era, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) were endowed with a religious status. In Israeli society, bereaved parents of fallen soldiers enjoyed a special relationship with the army, and their bereavement afforded them a unique place in the shaping of public opinion about security policy. However, as this paper shows, after the first Lebanon War (1982) cracks began to appear in this special union. From the early 1990s, bereaved parents supported by new social movements and a symbiosis of the judicial arena and the media challenged the security-defense-military arena and its policies of commemoration of the dead, treatment of soldiers, accident prevention, secrecy, and even appointments. Using the High Court and the media to directly influence defense and security policy, civil society succeeded in changing the IDF's tactics, the treatment of Palestinian detainees, and thus elevated human rights and international law over security considerations.
With the outbreak of the Al-Aqsa Intifada (2000), the Israeli state impressively regained its relative autonomous capacity in managing a prolonged military undertaking without significant internal opposition, in contrast to the erosion in autonomy during the Lebanon War (1982–2000) and the first Intifada (1987–1993). Arguably, the state's relative autonomy increased in light of the changes in the social composition of the military's casualties in combat in the territories. While in the first week of the Lebanon War, about 55% of the fallen belonged to peripheral social groups, which previously held marginal military roles, in the Al-Aqsa Intifada the percentage rose to about 75%. This social change was reflected in the re-shaping of the bereavement ethos from protest to an acceptance of the sacrifice. Hence, the absence of effective political organization during the Al-Aqsa Intifada that could have challenged the military thought and limited its professional autonomy.
Since the 1973 War, the secular Ashkenazi middle-class groups, which traditionally had constituted the military's "backbone", have displayed a lack of enthusiasm to continue to bear the military burden, a phenomenon that was publicly portrayed as a "motivation crisis." We conceptualize this process as a shift from a "subjected militarism" that perceived military service as an unconditioned, mandatory national duty to a "contractual militarism," according to which military service is stipulated by the fulfillment of the individual's ambitions and interests, although it remained a formal obligation. Two sites of socializations—school memorial ceremonies and preparation for the military service—serve as mediating mechanisms between the structural, social change and the social agency. Both have been utilized by the dominant groups to re-shape the canon, military ethos in a manner that redefines their relations vis-Ã -vis the military in contractual terms.
The paper examines two discourses of bereavement that crystallized simultaneously in Israel as the third millennium began. One is “the economic discourse of bereavement,” with which official organizations dealing with bereavement sought to “free themselves” from the state's directives on entitlement to compensation. Army widows argued that compensation should not depend on their refraining from remarriage, while bereaved parents demanded it would not be contingent on a means test. They urge for liberation from “role demands” and for presenting entitlement to compensation as entitlement to personal rehabilitation, without using it to support pro-establishment behavior or unending interactions with establishment supervision. Those claims express the linkage of bereavement to globalization and individuation, and the desire to rebel against the republican equation conditioning entitlement to welfare on “proper” establishment-compliant behavior. A second discourse is the “hierarchy of bereavement discourse” – which was placed on the agenda together with the first one, and by the same organizations. Unlike the economic discourse, this one acted to replicate the monopoly held by families of IDF dead in the Israeli pantheon, with attempts to bring into it a group of families of civilian bereavement (families of terror victims). The discourse relies on purely republican underpinnings, complying with the spirit of the local–national period. Exploring the two discourses, that were promoted simultaneously by the same agents, assists an analysis of the Israeli discourse of bereavement that results in its definition as “glocal.” This transpires from a review of the literature showing that – even in the face of globalization processes – national–local foundations remained stable. The paper first engages with the concept of glocalization, the ethos of republican citizenship, and, as a facet of it, the identification of social policy as an agent of the social hierarchy, as well as changes in citizenship during globalization. The second section reviews the status of bereaved families, and the central discourses they have promoted in Israeli society. The third and major part contains an analysis of both discourses – the economic discourse of bereavement, and the hierarchy of bereavement discourse. Finally, we attempt to analyze and explain how apparently antithetical discourses took shape in tandem, drawing on the term “glocalism” and the impact of citizenship models.
This article delineates three models of public behavior exhibited by parents of fallen soldiers in Israel: the "hegemonic bereavement model" that emerged after the War of Independence (1948);the "political bereavement model" that appeared in the wake of the Yom Kippur War (1973);the "no confidence model" that materialized following major accidents and revelations of negligence during the 1990s.
These paradigmatic behaviors emerge in the wake of crisis situations that took a heavy toll in military dead and wounded. The article traces the public initiatives of those bereaved parents who, following their personal tragedy, became social and media activists and formulators of public consciousness. It opens with a review of relevant theoretical literature in the field of culture and state pertaining to cultural codes and the impact of crises on them. The initial model exhibits a conformist code that reproduces state sanctioned behavior for representative mourners in national commemorative endeavors. This is followed by two behavioral codes that are essentially counter establishment, one directing its critique towards incompetent military implementation and the second charging the formulators of government policy for the tragedies of the fallen. The concluding section presents some generalizations on the topic of time and bereavement in Israel.
Israeli society has changed its attitude to the sacrifice of life in war, a change that is reflected in the bereavement discourse.
Attitudes have shifted from the unquestioned justification of military losses prior to the First Lebanon War (1982) to the
emergence of an antiwar bereavement discourse after the war and during the South Lebanon war of attrition that followed it.
More recently, following the Al-Aqsa Intifada and the Second Lebanon War (2006), a discourse that accepts losses has emerged.
While the retreat from the hegemonic discourse prior to the First Lebanon War is explained by the changing attitudes to military
sacrifice among the social elites, the latter shift took place in parallel with the alteration of the social composition of
the Israeli Defence Force. It is argued that the social composition of the military affects the level of sensitivity to losses.
While secular upper-middle class groups tend to show a high level of sensitivity to war losses, which they then translate
into a subversive bereavement discourse, religious and peripheral groups with a hawkish agenda are more tolerant of military
losses, or, alternatively, may seek to avoid excessive casualties by improving the military’s performance or the quality of
the political directives.
This paper describes a qualitative study aimed at exploring the meanings that are given by parents to the loss of their children in terror attacks in Israel and examining how specific aspects of these meanings help or hinder them in coping with the loss. This paper focuses the collective context of loss, a theme that emerged from in-depth interviews with 16 bereaved parents who lost their children in different terror attacks. The collective context of loss includes three subthemes: (a) the loss in the context of Jewish and Israeli history; (b) assigning responsibility for the loss; and (c) using the collective meaning in the process of coping. Overall, the findings highlight the role of the sociocultural context in the bereavement process. The discussion raises possible explanations for the significance of this role, focusing on the reciprocal processes between the bereaved parents and society, which are functional and effective for both.
The Two-track Model of Bereavement suggests that response to loss can be more effectively assessed when both the behavioral-psychological functioning and the internalized relationship to the deceased are considered [1–4]. Research based on this paradigm examined the experiences of 102 Israeli parents bereaved of sons four and thirteen earlier and a comparison group of seventy-three non-bereaved parents. All parents completed measures of functioning, anxiety, evaluation of self and son, written description of the son, and measures of the current life situation. Results indicated that the bereaved parents manifested difficulties in functioning and in their covert relationship to the deceased son. Differences between and within the bereaved groups by time and sex are considered. Regression documented an association between functioning and relationship to the deceased, and lent support to the assumptions underlying the Two-track Model of Bereavement. This discussion addresses the course of bereavement for adult sons with some implications for bereavement research and intervention.
This chapter examines long-term parental grief of soldiers within the context of the Israeli society. Parental grief is discussed along the life span, commencing at the immediate phase following the loss through the bereavement process in middle to late adulthood and its manifestations in aging. Interviews with a group of elderly bereaved parents whose sons were killed during military service give further support to previous findings regarding the notion that the passage of time has no diminishing effect on their grief nor does it relinquish their attachment to the deceased. With aging, there appears to be an increase in internalized involvement with the long-lost child, fears of fading memories, and the need to eternalize the deceased. In reviewing the past, parents reevaluate their coping with the loss and their relationship with the surviving children. The parents' preoccupation is twofold: On one hand, the strong attachment seems to continue in inner representations of the lost child, and, on the other, this preoccupation is enhanced externally owing to Israeli society's attitude toward dead soldiers. An intersection is therefore established between society and bereaved families. Grief is apparently a central theme in aging parents who are preoccupied with the “aging” of their grief rather than their own aging.
focuses on major theoretical perspectives [psychoanalytic and attachment theories] that might aid in defining or understanding pathological grief / a historical overview is provided, and questions are raised regarding the overlap between grief and [personality disorders] / focuses on the problem that research to date has not clearly identified areas of psychopathology that are grief-specific / this reflects in part a lack of operationalized criteria for pathological grief (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
We live in a world fraught with hostility and alienation at both interpersonal and societal levels. The media barrage us with reports of ethnic wars growing out of centuries of hatred and distrust, political terrorism, random violence in the streets, domestic violence, child abuse of various sorts—the list seems endless. Clearly, there is a tremendous amount of hurt in our lives—both personal and cultural. What is the impact of injury on our lives? How can we heal from it?
Forgiving promotes continuity in interpersonal relationships by mending the inevitable injuries and transgressions that occur in social interaction. This article presents a conceptual model positing that forgiveness is prosocial change in the motivations to avoid or to seek revenge against a transgressor. Social-psychological factors that are correlates and determinants of forgiving are reviewed. Also reviewed is the current measurement technology for assessing forgiveness constructs at the offense-specific level, the relationship-specific level, and the dispositional level. The links between forgiveness and human health and well-being are also explored. The article concludes with recommendations for future research on forgiving.
A 3 R's of Forgiveness model is presented in which forgiveness is seen as a complex therapeutic process involving both situational and personal variables. Forgivers are seen to utilize the cognitive processes of dialectical reasoning and reframing, modulated by the emotional experiences of empathy, guilt, and shame. Personality style and self-esteem significantly influence the process as well. Distinctions are maintained among various kinds of forgiveness. Divine forgiveness, seen as a partial component of a spiritual encounter with one's God, may be a valid experience for people of faith, but is not something that psychologists are equipped to experimentally analyze. Interpersonal and intrapsychic varieties of forgiveness are more accessible to therapists and deserve empirical investigation. Important differences are highlighted between conjunctive forgiveness (where the third “R” in the forgiveness sequence is reconciliation) and disjunctive forgiveness )where the third “R” is release). Pastors are reminded that, depending on the circumstances, “forgiveness” can be either good or bad.
This article explores aspects of the relation between language, meaning, and method in human science research. Phenomenology poses two distinct challenges: the thematic and the expressive dimensions of inquiry, which have implications for semantic and mantic, discursive and nondiscursive understanding. When we turn from thematic meaning to expressive meaning, then the question we ask turns from "What does the text speak about?" to "How does the text speak?" Bachelard, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, and Wittgenstein in different ways have employed the idea of mantic meaning to refer to that imagery of language that can bring about, in the reader, a phenomenological reverberation. The formative power of phenomenological texts lies precisely in this resonance that the word can effect. Research literature has focused primarily on the thematic aspects of human science method. Here, guiding principles of human science method will be explored that aim at strengthening the expressive-mantic dimension of phenomenology.
Media discourse and public opinion are treated as two parallel systems of constructing meaning. This paper explores their relationship by analyzing the discourse on nuclear power in four general audience media: television news coverage, newsmagazine accounts, editorial cartoons, and syndicated opinion columns. The analysis traces the careers of different interpretive packages on nuclear power from 1945 to the present. This media discourse, it is argued, is an essential context for understanding the formation of public opinion on nuclear power. More specifically, it helps to account for such survey results as the decline in support for nuclear power before Three Mile Island, a rebound after a burst of media publicity has died out, the gap between general support for nuclear power and support for a plant in one's own community, and the changed relationship of age to support for nuclear power from 1950 to the present.
Unforgiveness and forgiveness are distinct. One cannot forgive unless unforgiveness has occurred, but one might reduce unforgiveness by many ways-only one of which is forgiveness. We present a model intended to further assist and guide subsequent empirical exploration. The model explains the personal, relationship, and environmental factors that lead people to either unforgiveness or forgiveness. Related areas are reviewed to stimulate as yet unexplored research and clinical efforts related to forgiveness. Clinical protocols for promoting forgiveness in enrichment, preventative, and therapeutic contexts are described.
phenomenological philosophy / psychological research on consciousness / descriptive and qualitative research / doing psychological research from a phenomenological perspective
data gathering / data from self-reflection / data gathered from participants / selection of subjects / interview / data from previously developed descriptions / results of data collection
data analysis / essential structures as findings / a search for lived-structures of essences / steps in the analysis / transformation and synthesis of the data
expressions of the findings / the research report / issues of validity / usefulness of phenomenological research (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
Some forty years ago Edmund Husserl spoke publicly for the first time of a new phenomenological psychology. He saw this new psychology as a discipline that was destined to play an important role in the already established empirical psychology as well as in philosophy. Subsequently under the influence of his ideas an extensive phenomenological psychological movement began to spread through various European countries. When a careful analysis of this phenomenological movement is made, one becomes aware of a number of clearly distinguishable currents and schools, all of which claim Husserl as their origin. The truth is, however, that only a very few psychologists actually use Husserl’s concepts without making major modifications. Furthermore, many psychologists talk about phenomenology without stipulating precisely what is meant by the term. To compound the difficulties there is noticeable in phenomenological literature a frequent failure to make a clear distinction between Husserl’s thought and that of other phenomenologists such as Scheler, Heidegger, Jaspers, Merleau-Ponty, Sartre and Binswanger.
Relationships whose loss triggers grief are termed “relationships of attachment.” These relationships are pair-bond relationships, parental attachments to children, transference relationships to helpers, and persisting childlike attachments to parents. Because these relationships share significant characteristics, it is proposed that they are developments of a single socio-emotional system—the attachment system of children. This point of view permits a unified treatment of a number of topics, including the threats that elicit attachment emotions and behaviors, the impact of loss, the nature and course of recovery from loss, impediments to recovery, and the forms taken by failures to recover.
The recently increasing interest in the Holocaust is not only the result of historical or literary endeavors or the expression of changing attitudes in the new generation of observers, but arises from a clinical necessity, due to the measurable psychopathological distress of defined groups of survivors and offspring when compared to controls. The present paper enumerates factors related to the renewed interest in the Holocaust and points out seven target groups that may need psychosocial support or are of special concern. Israeli research papers, mainly of controlled studies, for three of these groups are reviewed: first-generation aging survivors; first-generation erstwhile child-survivors; and second generation exposed to further stress. The main conclusion from work done in Israel is that there is still a risk to mental health, even 40 years after the Holocaust, and that special services for survivors seem to be necessary.
Forgiveness is a concept with deep religious roots. It is also a basic social and psychological phenomenon. In this article, we explore the links between forgiveness and religion by surveying how they are linked in the major monotheistic world religions, and how they appear to be linked empirically. In attempting to account for the current body of empirical findings, we propose four potential substantive and methodological explanations that should be explored in future studies. Because the concept of forgiveness is (a) both spiritual and social-psychological in nature, and (b) possibly linked to some measures of human health and well-being (concerns that have traditionally been of interest to both reseachers in personality and researchers in religion), the concept of forgiveness could be an important common ground for future research on the interface of religion and personality.
Studies on forgiveness have only recently emerged in the psychological literature. Despite evidence that forgiveness is associated with positive therapeutic outcomes, the concept has received little theoretical consideration in mainstream psychology. Existing definitions and models of forgiveness differ widely, and little attempt has been made to integrate these diverse approaches. Based on a review of the Medline and Psychlit databases, the present article evaluates current conceptualizations of forgiveness in the psychological literature. The values and limitations of each approach are discussed with reference to two case studies: a close interpersonal relationship and a human rights violation presented to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa. A new theoretical model, integrating the most valuable aspects of existing approaches, is proposed.