ABSTRACT
One of the most famous pathological grief reactions in world literature is seen in Ophelia in Shakespeare's Hamlet. Ophelia goes mad and ends by drowning herself because her betrothed, Hamlet, has killed her beloved father. When a therapist is faced with an ‘Ophelia’ who has suffered a great loss, there are three parameters which it may be useful to apply in order to identify whether she should be given preventive help for her grief work. If a woman loses a breast, the grief is greater if she is young than if she is an older woman to whom physical appearance counts less. The main rule is that the more harmonious the relationship is to the person or thing lost, the less prone the mourner will be to a pathological course of grief. In England Parkes has done pioneering work in pinpointing those mourners who are particularly at risk.
