Mourning Throughout the Life Cycle

The clinical and theoretical literature on bereavement has stressed the importance of the “developmental variable.” However, detailed discussions of specific developmental issues and how they affect, and are affected by, the mourning process are rare. Most research has concerned itself with the other three major “variables” in mourning, i.e., type of death, relationship between deceased and bereaved, and the bereaved's pre-morbid personality. The more commonly recognized developmental issues, especially those of early developmental phases, have already been relatively well understood in regard to mourning.1,2 I will attempt to describe and unfold several practical and theoretical features of mourning throughout the life cycle which have been neglected in the literature.

An appreciation of developmental issues forces the clinician to focus on the individuality of the bereaved person. For example, a 25 year old man presented himself for therapy with attacks of free-floating anxiety. He was unable to pinpoint any specific situation which consistantly produced his symptoms. Seven months before beginning treatment, his mother had died. He wondered if her death had something to do with his difficulties. During the history, he reported that his father had been killed in an automobile accident when he was 13 years old. As it is for adolescents in general, this was a period when he desperately needed a father to model himself after and tangle with. Suddenly, with his father's death, he found himself in charge of his mother's well-being and sanity. His mother was unable to share her mourning and, in essence, she left the management of her mourning process to my patient and his two older siblings. Hence, the patient was unable to mourn his father because all his energies went into the management of his mother's grief.

As the therapy progressed, it became clear that during his waking hours