ABSTRACT
Confusion about the nature of grief, the impact of different ways of coping with it, and its resolution, have continued to this day. Shand sought to chart a way out of the confusion by setting out ‘the laws of sorrow’, a series of empirically verifiable statements about the process of grief, derived from the literary sources available at the time. These were largely ignored by later researchers and theorists writing about grief in favour of Freud’s speculations, published at about the same time, which were based on psychoanalytically framed interpretations of case studies. Rather than being put to the test by later empirical research, they became entrenched as the orthodox way of understanding grief, an approach which was later expanded to encompass other concepts, such as the stages of grief.
