ABSTRACT
In Chapter 3, Anne S. McKnight discusses an historical perspective on death from individual thinking to family systems theory. In 1918, Sigmund Freud theorized that the only way to overcome grief was to focus on the emotions triggered by the death of a loved one. Elizabeth Kubler-Ross elaborated on the idea. She proposed that an individual needed to go through five stages of grief. Through extensive research, George Bonanno found a natural resilience in people to carry on despite their loss. Murray Bowen proposed that the impact of a death varied according to the family’s capacity for managing changes in the interdependence around the loss.
