ABSTRACT
At this stage of the book, it remains to bring together the major themes we have touched upon and to ask what they all aim to achieve. The title of this chapter begins to speak to this purpose. When Freud titled his 1917 article “Mourning and Melancholia”, he was concerned to separate grief responses from what was then called melancholia and is now more commonly referred to as depression. The reason for doing so was presumably because it was easy to mistake grief for melancholia. Perhaps it still is, as is reflected in the debate circling around the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition (DSM-V) and the removal of grief from descriptions of major depression. Regardless of the label, it is certainly possible to become mired in grief to the extent that life loses its sense of vitality and value.
