Grief by Svend Brinkmann

Grief by Svend Brinkmann

Author:Svend Brinkmann [Brinkmann, Svend]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781509541256
Publisher: Wiley
Published: 2020-06-08T00:00:00+00:00


The grieving body

In contemporary grief theory, the body is usually addressed in one of two ways. On the one hand, a substantial number of writers look at grief as a risk factor in somatic health. Popular culture is full of narratives on and studies of ‘how grief weakens the body’2 (often with a focus on ‘broken heart syndrome’), and how grief allegedly makes us vulnerable to diseases such as the common cold, sore throats, infection, rheumatoid arthritis, asthma, cardiovascular disease and cancer.3 There is also a body of literature on how different physical practices can help heal the grieving body, as well as a receptive market for therapeutic interventions of this type. Mary-Frances O’Connor (2013) has summarised much of the research on the physiological mechanisms involved in complicated grief, research which appears to position the body as a dependent variable, causally affected by grief. In other words, the body is conceived of as a variable rather than a living, experiencing, grieving body, which is the focus of this chapter. I have no intention of criticising the physiological or health-oriented perspective as such, but I would prefer to emphasise a phenomenological perspective on the body in grief.

On the other hand, a (much smaller) number of scholars have addressed the embodied experience of grief. Whereas the first approach looks at the body from physiological and medical perspectives, the second adopts a phenomenological approach. In a short article, J. Todd DuBose examines grief specifically from the perspective of a phenomenology of the body, based on the work of Merleau-Ponty. He describes the body as ‘a relational matrix’ that connects bereavement, grief and mourning (DuBose 1997: p. 369). In her qualitative study of the grieving body, one of very few to have been conducted, Maria Guðmundsdóttir (2009) adopted an existential phenomenology perspective. The study consisted of interviews with seven families following the loss of a child. Several of the participants reported that their body began to feel strange and alien after the loss: ‘For some, this unfamiliar sense of their body included a strong sense of being different or as feeling heavy from carrying a heavy load. For others, their body physically hurt. For most, this change lasted only for a short period of time, while for others, their body continued to feel different and changed’ (Guðmundsdóttir 2009: 259). Guðmundsdóttir’s study is a very welcome empirical contribution, but it does not offer much in the way of theoretical reflection on emotions or the role of the body in grief. The fact that it restricts itself to presenting the participants’ oral accounts means that bodily reactions are conceived as something like symptoms of intense grief.

A more theoretical phenomenological analysis of grief appears in a recent article by Fuchs (2018), to whom I referred in the previous chapter. As a phenomenologist, Fuchs seeks the ‘core structure to the experience of grief’ (2018: 45), which has interpersonal, temporal and bodily aspects. Concerning the latter, Fuchs describes grief as an emotion that comes after the initial shock and



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