A post which is mainly about dealing with the death of someone close, a post which has been prompted by the first footnote 1 on the first page of the paper by Freud at reference 1, snapped above. With perusal of this paper being a spin-off from the post at reference 2.
An excursion which was prompted by wondering whether it mattered that we use the same word ‘mourning’ for both the inner grief and the outer show? Does it tell us anything? An excursion which did not, at least has not yet, come to a tidy end.
First stop was picking up, more or less by chance, on the Jewish practise of sitting shiva, for which there is extensive online support. See, for example, references 3 and 4. A practise, which it seemed to me, that many people might find helpful – with the proviso that simply aping someone else’s ritual was unlikely to be helpful. The ritual had to be fully part of your own community to work.
Second stop was associating to the escapement mechanism of mechanical clocks; the delicate two way interaction between the bit of machinery giving time (the pendulum or the hair spring) and the bit of machinery giving power (the weights or the main spring). With, in this analogy, the pendulum being the outer show or the ritual and with the weights being the inner grief. Some evidence of my ongoing interest in escapements is to be found at reference 10.
From where I had a further excursion into the Jewish holy books, not relevant here but new to me. Another into kinship in China, rather more elaborately organised there than is usual here in the UK. Then another around bereavement and mourning more generally, resulting, inter alia, in an annotated list of relevant words.
This last excursion also turned up lots of material about the increased mortality and morbidity associated with bereavement. With the sense that one ought to be doing something about it; that mourning should be a process that comes to an end within a year or so and that the bereaved person might sometimes need a bit of help for this to happen. A reasonably recent summary of all this is to be found at reference 5. While I wonder whether there is a danger that we are trying too hard to stop the bereaved being miserable – and associate to Aldous Huxley’s ‘Brave New World’, where being miserable is bad form.
But I have failed so far to find anything about the problem with which I started, the interaction of the inner experience of grief with the outer expression in the form of mourning customs and rituals. So work in progress.
Using outer show to generate inner feelings
It is certainly true that we can induce all kinds of feelings in people with symbols, with images, with rituals and with ceremonies. We don’t need to have a real death to feel something of what it is like to lose a loved one. We can be moved by a Mass which enacts, which re-enacts, which symbolises the Passion of Christ. We don’t need to go to the actual crucifixion.
Another example of such induction comes from watching a film, in which the film director is able to take us on an emotional journey. A journey in which the emotions are driven by a visual but imagined story rather than by real world events, emotions which are, nevertheless, quite real and a journey after which we end up outside on the pavement, more or less in the same state as we went in. Except for those people, typically but not always ladies, who have trouble separating the fiction of a film from real life. That aside, the audience have indeed been taken on an emotional journey, perhaps providing a bit of emotional to colour otherwise rather drab lives. Or perhaps, as Huxley suggested, providing all the psychological benefit of violent emotions without the costs.
Bearing in mind that we might be moved to tears by the performance of an actor, who is able to evoke tears by his outward behaviour, quite possibly without having any feelings of his own at all. Maybe while you are crying, he is wondering about what to have for dinner. While I believe that for Catholics, the performance of the rite is the important thing. The feelings or not of the celebrant are not important, do not take away from the value of the rite.
Another example comes from a dishonest politician whipping up a crowd about something or other, but a something which been made up by the orator. Certainly not something present in the here and now. Perhaps whipping up to the extent of inciting violence. Or to anger which might well survive the speech by hours, days or even longer. Not the more fleeting emotions of a film.
And coming back to mourning, one does not actually need to see the body to mourn. It is enough to be told. And it would be easy enough, if cruel and callous, to trick someone into mourning for someone who is actually still alive and well. My point here being that the link between an event and our knowledge of it can easily be compromised or corrupted. We have to take plenty on trust.
Another example comes from the way that many people experience ceremonies of various kinds as moving. Some men, for example, might be roused to an emotional patriotism by the sound of a military band. Napoleon’s infantry used to march into battle, whipped up by the drum beat called the ‘pas de charge’.
So in the present case, maybe the shiva would serve to moderate the grief of an emotional person and, contrariwise, would serve to facilitate the expression of grief of a more restrained person. While the more or less fixed and known structure of the shiva would be a comfort in its own right: the known of ritual rather than the unknown of death.
Sitting Shiva
Aninut is the first part of the four part mourning process in the Jewish tradition; the short period of most intense mourning, possibly involving shock, anger, denial and disbelief.
Sitting shiva is the second part. A process which, when applied customarily as part of a living community, strikes me as potentially helpful. A process in which those involved can position and manage their bereavement, and start the transition back to something like normal life.
As I understand it, shiva is the seven day period following a funeral in which the those close to the deceased – parents, siblings, spouse and children – sit together for seven days. A time to mourn, to share memories of the deceased and a time to take condolence visits from those less close.
There is lots of material out on the Internet about how this should be done, with references 3 and 4 being just two examples. These days, the seven days is often reduced to three days and I imagine the process is slowly being diluted. Possibly also not a process for the poor who cannot afford this sort of a time-out.
I might add that while the focus in the material that I have seen is about providing a context in which to mourn, in which wealth and social position do not have a role, I dare say in practise that both make an appearance. In, for example, the quality of the clothes worn, the quality of the memorial candle and the quality of the meal of condolence.
As I understand it, out in the (western) world of support for the bereaved more generally, while some have tried for stages and tasks, have tried for some structure, this has not generally found favour and is, in practise, not much used, even in a therapeutic context.
Other processes
Most evolutionists point to a young human’s long dependence on its mother – or primary carer – as the foundation for the strong attachments formed by humans. And the negative feelings – of sadness or grief – feelings which are both felt and expressed – arising from the breaking of those attachments.
Some point to the fights about status (the pecking order mentioned in the previous post at reference 11) which are common among social animals. Fights which predate, in evolutionary terms, strong attachments to others. Fights which tended to be ritualised, not usually resulting in damage or death, which would weaken the group as a whole. With the suggestion being that the need for losers to acknowledge and then to cope with losing is the ultimate point of origin of the feelings that come with bereavement – a word not originally restricted to the loss of close kin. Any kind of robbery or loss would do. So we can be sad about the loss of anything important, an anything which does not need to be anyone.
Some students of emotion look for a single root for all the emotions, as suggested in the figure from Randolph Nesse above. For whom, see references 8 and 9. Others like to map emotions onto a two dimensional space, arousal (from quiescent, passive through to very aroused, very alert) by valence (from very bad through to very good, from pain through to pleasure), perhaps on a circle, sometimes called the circumplex model. Others think it more reasonable that each of the basic emotions, preferably a magic seven of them, is built from different machinery. Others again argue about the list of basic emotions, basic emotions rooted in physiology and expressed by face and by posture – along the lines suggested by Darwin near 150 years ago – and pointing to the communicating function of emotions – and to which extent they are not private and personal. A list which might go something like anger, surprise, disgust, enjoyment, fear and sadness. Maybe adding in interest to make up the seven, that is to say something interests me and I am inclined to explore it further; a positive emotion. With all the other emotions being some cocktail of these basic emotions.
While I am not sure how knowing about the evolutionary origins of sadness arising from loss of an important person helps here. The fact that we can be sad, we can be too sad, is enough for now.
Anthropologists talk of the need to moderate grief. A seriously depressed person is a liability to a nomadic group and is apt to be eliminated in one way or another.
Many cultures regulate grieving and mourning according to the degree of kinship, in some cultures defined with considerable precision, as, for example, in Imperial China.
Freudians talk of undoing the attachments to the person who has died, an undoing which takes time. The grief work.
Other psychologists talk of an oscillation between good and bad feelings during mourning, an oscillation which gradually dies away with time, with the bereaved settling down to something approaching normality. An oscillation which is both healthy and necessary. Some have even built mathematical models based on the oscillations of a damped pendulum.
Words
We started with mourning, mourning for something that has been lost. In the case that someone has died and we are mourning the loss of that person, we have both inner mourning – more or less private feelings and emotions set in train by that loss – and outer mourning – the more or less public performance of the rites of mourning. Rites which might include things like the wearing of mourning clothes, the draping of mirrors and the lighting of special candles.
Grieving is inner mourning. A word which does not carry the ritual baggage of mourning.
Bereavement used to be losing anything that was important. Nowadays, the word is usually restricted to the death of a spouse or other close relative.
Mourning rites are often modulated by the degree of kinship between the mourner and the person who has died. Kinship in some societies can be a complicated business, perhaps the subject of elaborate tables and diagrams. Or the subject of the elaborate prose of Lévi-Strauss.
Shiva is a mourning rite from the Jewish tradition, covering the seven days from the funeral. Just the first step in the long transition of close kin back to normal life.
Sadness is often an important part of mourning. Like mourning, a word which once had a much wider scope, with OED taking five columns to cover adjectival, adverbial and verbal uses, in which actions and things could be sad as well as people. One could, for example, sadden a colour, that is to say make it darker. With a person being sad about something occupying a modest couple of column inches; meaning A.I.5.
Stronger forms of sadness include grief and despair. Most of the short lists of basic emotions, the building bricks of our sometimes complex feelings, include sadness. And looking further afield, our close relatives in the animal world, monkeys and apes, sometimes appear to be sad and probably are then sad.
Sometimes the mourning process does not work, does not come to an end. The bereaved person may become a melancholic, or the vocabulary of today, depressed. In any event, it does seem to be the case that the bereaved, other things being equal, suffer more death, physical disorder and mental disorder than those who have not been bereaved.
We sometimes say that someone is upset by the death of a relative, with upset being a vaguer word than sad. Being sad is reasonably well defined, but being upset can come in various flavours. We are also apt to be upset by all kinds of disturbances in our lives: mostly we are sad about a person or a pet, while we can be upset by all kinds of things.
We used to say that some people who had lost a loved one – by death or otherwise – died of a broken heart. Or perhaps just pined away. A usage perhaps now confined to romantic novels, to Mills & Boon.
Other matters
Death records, in this country at least, include marital status at death, that is to say with widows and widowers who have not remarried being readily identifiable. To that extent it is easy enough to investigate mortality by marital status, to compare the mortality of widows and widowers with that of the married. There is probably quite a lot of similar data available about morbidity. But for a more nuanced picture, interviews are needed and longitudinal data is still better – and this is much more difficult. Not only because of the difficulty of getting people to talk to interviewers several times over a period of months or years but also because investigating emotional states is hard enough at the best of times, and that much harder in the case of the bereaved, particularly the recently bereaved. Getting good samples and good data is difficult.
The excursion into Chinese affairs, in particular into reference 6, suggests that things might be rather different in Imperial China, particularly among the leisured classes of old who had the time and literacy for such things, with mourning complicated by elaborate kin structures and grades of mourning – and grades of mourning attire. Mourning there seems to be more a social than a personal matter, more about asserting the primacy of the group rather than an expression of feeling. While an attempt on Lévi-Strauss’s account in reference 7 of Chinese kinship failed, doing no more than remind me of the sometimes forbidding, not to say impenetrable, prose of French academic writers of his generation. Probably not helped by translation, but I dare say heavy enough going even for the French.
There is also a large amount of stuff out there about the funeral customs that have prevailed in various places, at various times. With the existence of funerals of one sort or another being one of the markers of humans, one of the things which separates us from other primates. With special places perhaps coming with the more settled lifestyles involving crops and herds.
In Simenon’s France, respectable funerals include the undertaker setting up a ‘chapelle ardente’ in a room in the deceased’s house. An opportunity for family, friends and others to pay their respects to both the deceased and his or her family. A room from which the then closed coffin is taken to the church for the funeral service, possibly quite short. With the example above being that for Princess Christina of the Netherlands in 2019.
Funerals sometimes include a wake, this still being the custom in peripheral parts of the UK and in Ireland. And, I dare say, in other parts of the world.
Funerals are sometimes completed by reading the will, dealing with the property of the deceased and settling the succession. Perhaps appropriate, given that the acquisition of a wife was once more a property than a sentimental transaction – probably still was until quite recently in more remote parts of the world. With widows sometimes losing their house as well as their husband. With surprises on such occasions being the stuff of many dramas, both in books and on television.
I associate to people clinging to the superficials of daily life when the substantials are under threat. We hang onto the rituals in an attempt to convince ourselves that the substance is still there. So the country might be falling apart, the flood water might be lapping at the door, but we still get the porridge ready for 07:30 sharp because that is when we always have breakfast. And breakfast without napkins and napkin rings would be almost indecent.
Conclusions
An excursion which has been interesting, but which has failed to answer the question.
That is to say, many people experience bereavement and most of them recover and return to something like normal life, usually with the support of their families, but without needing professional help. There does not seem to be much appetite for reinstating the rituals of old and even the once strongly entrenched role of the established church in funerals here in the UK is probably slowly winding down.
And where a bereaved person does seek help, usually long after the funeral, here in the west at least, we have preferred to have resort to the medical model to deal with mourning that gets out of hand, be that pharmaceutical, psychotherapeutic or both, rather than the ritual model. So there does not seem to be much interest in the interaction of feeling with ritual.
References
Reference 1: Mourning and melancholia – Freud – 1917. In my case a photocopy taken from the Strachey/Hogarth edition of the collected works. Pages 243-258.
Reference 2: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2022/06/a-cure-for-darkness.html.
Reference 3: https://www.chabad.org/library/article_cdo/aid/291135/jewish/Shiva-and-Other-Mourning-Observances.htm.
Reference 4: https://www.joincake.com/blog/sitting-shiva/. From Erin Coriell, an end-of-life care educator and grief worker.
Reference 5: Health outcomes of bereavement – Margaret Stroebe, Henk Schut, Wolfgang Stroebe – 2007 .
Reference 6: Chinese kinship reconsidered: Anthropological perspectives on historical research – James L. Watson – 1982.
Reference 7: The elementary structures of kinship – Lévi-Strauss – 1949 and 1969.
Reference 8: https://www.randolphnesse.com/articles/emotions. An entry point for Randolph Nesse on the evolution of emotions. The source of the emotional tree above.
Reference 9: Evolution, Emotions, and Emotional Disorders – Randolph M. Nesse and Phoebe C. Ellsworth – 2009.
Reference 10: http://psmv4.blogspot.com/2019/04/antiquarian-researches.html.
Reference 11: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2022/07/odds-and-ends.html.
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