Grief. Svend Brinkmann

when he writes that the death of a loved one puts us in a position of ‘radical impossibility’ (2010: 40). It is an event over which we have no control. It is impossible to will the other’s death away. There is nothing we can do. According to Critchley, the grief we feel invades and structures our subjectivity. He believes that humans can ultimately be categorised by our ability to grieve, and I concur (see especially Chapter 2). Grief tells us that we can never completely master life. We are forever doomed to fall short due to our dependency on others, who vanish from our lives. This may render us impotent, existentially speaking, but according to Critchley it is precisely this impotence, this fundamental fragility, that creates the ethical demand in our interactions with others. In that sense, grief and ethical life are interlinked.

This realisation – that grief is not just a simple pain to be cured, like a headache, but a meaningful experience following a loss – is reflected in popular culture. It is increasingly recognised that the goal is not to erase grief, to ‘move on’ and leave the dead behind, but to continue living with them. This is entirely consistent with recent grief theories, which emphasise continuing bonds (Klass, Silverman and Nickman 1996), whereas Freud, for example, believed that we should sever ties with the dead and reinvest our mental energy in new relationships (Freud 2005). New relationships can, of course, be significant and life-giving, but, thankfully, few would now argue that they should be at the expense of emotional bonds to the dead. If I may allow myself to be normative here, at the beginning of the book, it is a central part of my thesis that we should incorporate the dead into our lives, not shut them out. But what does this mean in a day-to-day context?

Back to the things themselves

      This book takes as its starting point the need to adopt a phenomenological approach in order to identify the nature of grief. Ever since Edmund Husserl, more than a century ago, phenomenology’s watchword has been ‘back to the things themselves!’ In other words, the aim is to shed light on how people experience the world before forming scientific theories about it (for example, about grief as an illness or about its neurological basis). The book also contends that being able to describe grief’s essential nature would help us to identify what is special about human beings, what distinguishes us from other living creatures. In this way, phenomenology is a philosophical and scientific (in this case, psychological) study of how a phenomenon manifests itself in our experience. The goal is to describe the essential structure of a phenomenon, also referred to as the invariant – in other words, that which remains constant throughout its manifestations.

At this point, it is worth pausing to outline the history of the phenomenological project that underpins this book. Phenomenology differs from the dominant theories in psychology, which seek to shed light on causal relationships and communicate them to the public. In a way, phenomenology goes back to ancient philosophy, including Aristotle (according to Nussbaum 1986), who believed that every study should start with an in-depth description of the phenomenon in question. The description of the phenomenon should precede any explanation of why it occurred and how it works. Aristotle argued that the scientific method had to be adapted to the phenomenon being studied, rather than the phenomenon being forced into pre-established scientific templates. Phenomena in mathematics require different methods than those in ethics.

      The idea that the phenomenon takes precedence is an essential precondition for the phenomenological project. Husserl founded modern phenomenology around 1900. Martin Heidegger refined it as an existential philosophy, and Jean-Paul Sartre and Maurice Merleau-Ponty later steered it in an existential-dialectical direction (for more detail on the history of phenomenology see Brinkmann and Kvale 2015). The goal was to describe not only the phenomena in and of themselves, but in particular the underlying experience structures that make it possible for something to have its own special character. At first, under Husserl, phenomenology’s primary focus was consciousness and life as it is experienced. This was later extended to encompass human experience as a whole, and Merleau-Ponty and Sartre also incorporated the body and human action in historical contexts into their thinking. Generally speaking, the goal of phenomenological research is to understand social and psychological phenomena from the actors’ own perspectives, and to describe the world as experienced by individuals. Put simply, it is based on the assumption that what is important about reality is how people perceive it.

In psychology, it was Amedeo Giorgi in particular who, from the 1970s onwards, developed a phenomenological method for ‘the study of the structure and the variations of structure of the consciousness to which any thing, event or person appears’ (Giorgi 1975: 83). According to Merleau-Ponty (2012), it is a matter of describing the phenomenon in question as accurately and completely as possible, rather than seeking to explain or analyse it. This entails remaining faithful to the phenomenon studied in order to reach an understanding of its essence – the phenomenon’s very being – by seeking out what is general about it. Husserl described one such method of doing so as ‘free variation in the imagination’. In other words, the phenomenologist freely envisages all of the potential variant forms of a given phenomenon, and whatever is constant in the different iterations is its being. This involves a phenomenological reduction, i.e. disregarding general views about whether a given experience exists or not. The process can be described as ‘putting in parentheses’, as it consists of setting aside both general and theoretically advanced knowledge about the phenomenon in order to reach an unbiased description of its being (see Brinkmann and Kvale 2015: 49). It is worth quoting from Merleau-Ponty’s programme for a phenomenology based on primary experiences of the world:

      Everything that I know about the world, even through science, I know from a perspective that is my own or from an experience of the world without which scientific symbols would be meaningless. The entire universe of science is constructed upon the lived world, and if we wish to think science rigorously, to appreciate precisely its sense and its scope, we must first awaken that experience of the world of which science is the second-order expression. (Merleau-Ponty 2012: p. lxxii)

In geography, a map is an abstraction of the landscape in which we first directly encountered forests, towns and fields. Similarly, according to the phenomenological approach, scientific studies are abstractions based on immediate experiences in the world, to which we must find our way back in order to describe them. What does our emotional, psychological and social ‘landscape’ look like before we map it out in the form of scientific theories? Our experiences of grief, for example, precede our scientific and theoretical knowledge of it.

Since the days of Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre and Merleau-Ponty (all of whom I will refer to later in this book), phenomenology has branched out even further, to include even ‘post-phenomenology’, which not only looks at the experiential structures of the subjects involved, but also incorporates the meaning of the whole material and technological world. It might also be argued that Wittgenstein’s philosophy of language, which has exerted a huge influence since the mid-twentieth century, is a kind of linguistic phenomenology that approaches philosophical questions by looking in detail at how language is used in certain contexts (Gier 1981). Wittgenstein is another starting point for this book – specifically, his contention that we can learn a great deal from scientific studies that describe the contexts in which we use linguistic concepts about emotions. Grief is not just a wordless state that we carry in our bodies, but a concept we learn to apply actively in certain situations. As such, gaining an awareness of how we acquire and use such concepts teaches us something important about the phenomenon. Viewed as an emotion, grief seems at once to be part of the human experience, an embodied state, an intersubjective form of communication and something deeply embedded in the social processes of culture. In my opinion, there is a need for a wide-ranging phenomenological approach to grief in order to understand both the depth and breadth of the phenomenon. This book presents a comprehensive proposal for such an approach.

Structure of the book

      This introductory chapter concludes below with an outline of the history of grief. I then argue in Chapter