ABSTRACT
Oscar Wilde realised that there was a connection between love and suffering. He saw it as the way in which the Creator was able to raise up the human soul to a higher level. This view of suffering assumes that it is necessarily ennobling, and that it is part of the Creator’s divine plan. Modern evolutionary-based accounts also view the suffering of grief as a consequence of love, but as a by-product of the way we build up a close relationship with the person concerned. One particularly influential biologically based perspective concerned with close relationships is attachment theory, which also has much to say about what happens when a relationship is ended either by separation or bereavement. I begin this chapter by examining grief from the perspective of attachment theory, concentrating on the issue of similarities and differences between separation reactions in children and responses to bereavement in adults, which were crucial for the early theoretical writings of John Bowlby. I then examine the evidence that grief is a universal human reaction, and whether there are similar processes in other animals. This leads to a biologically based theory of the grief process which originated from research on animals. Finally, I examine the puzzling issue of the evolutionary origin of grief, which was introduced in Chapter 1.
