ABSTRACT
Grief is painful and conflicted, provoking impulses of nostalgia and escape that bring no lasting comfort to the present. Its moods of apathy and despair, of anger and social withdrawal, can seem pathological. In the past fifty years, the work of John Bowlby, Colin Murray Parkes, Robert Weiss, and many others has shown that grieving, far from being pathological, is an essential process of healing. Bowlby speculated that the attachment bond between mother and child had evolved as a survival trait in the prehistoric human environment. Social welfare in Britain, for instance, as it was designed after the Second World War, assumed that well-being, in so far as public policy could ensure it, depended on providing basic needs. Physiological needs for relief from hunger, cold, and sickness can be met in ways that are incompatible with psychological needs for identity, belonging, and meaning. Economists rarely talk to development psychologists; sociologists defend their intellectual territory from the encroachments of psychology.
