ABSTRACT
Bereavement is the reaction to the loss of a close relationship. Sometimes grief is also used to describe this reaction, but in this work grief will be used to refer to the emotional response to loss: the complex amalgam of painful affects including sadness, anger, helplessness, guilt, despair. Mourning will be used here to refer to the psychological mourning processes that occur in bereavement: the processes whereby the bereaved gradually undoes the psychological bonds that bound him to the deceased. The rituals of mourning, such as burial, are discussed separately. The concepts of bereavement discussed here have been developed from the valuable contribution of many workers including Freud, Lindemann, Parkes, and Bowlby whose individual contributions are cited throughout the chapter.
