ABSTRACT
The distinction between grief and depression following a serious loss such as bereavement has been a continuous challenge to clinical psychopathology. Attempts towards locating the difference in the severity, quality and duration of manifest symptoms have proven unsatisfactory. In order to ground the distinction on a deeper level, the chapter develops an existential phenomenology of grief, melancholy and depression, based on Heidegger’s notions of an “ontic” and an “ontological” level of existence.
Accordingly, (1) grief is characterized by a reaction to a specific loss (such as bereavement), implying that it means an intentionally directed emotional process on the ontic level. In contrast, (2) the mood of melancholy may be regarded as emerging from the general awareness of existential transience, thus referring to the ontological level. Finally, (3) depressive patients are characterized by an existential vulnerability, which makes them experience losses as “limit situations” in Karl Jaspers’s sense. For them, the loss of a loved one becomes an indicator of the inevitable transience and finitude of existence as such, in other words, a loss of shelter on a deeper, ontological level. These existential distinctions are mirrored in the different clinical presentations of grief reactions versus depression following bereavement.
