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I think the central point that Ian Craib is trying to make is the danger of losing sight of both the individuality, the pain, and the depth of the process of mourning. Put like that the point is valid.
The trouble is that his views are so extreme. The article reads as if he believes this criticism applies to all psychotherapy, including psychoanalysis, which obviously is not true. If he spelled out more clearly that he is concerned with a trend in certain areas of society and psychotherapy, the article would be much more acceptable.
There is also a faintly paranoid atmosphere to what he says. Thus he accuses Abraham, who merely pointed out that internalisation of the loved one was part of normal mourning, of trying to ‘establish the mourning process as an area of professional expertise and control’. Freud, Abraham, and Klein ‘illustrate a process of a profession carving out an area of power for itself,’… the psychiatric profession and then the therapy and counselling professions have attempted to establish control over mourning' - not that they are trying to extend the use of their skills to help a group of people in need. When Parkes writes of trying to deal with emotions (rather than the patient's inner world), Craib says, ‘We are moving closer to quasi-behaviourism’ - surely the one thing behaviourism does not deal with is emotions. He quotes a recent handbook which states the aims of bereavement counselling as (1) to help resolve bereavement, (2) to prevent ‘malresolution’, and (3) to resolve malresolution if it has happened, and then writes contemptuously, ‘The job becomes getting the machine back on the road’. I would have thought that these three aims were absolutely impeccable, and that most severely depressed people would come to a therapist with the hope of becoming able to live a normal life again - rather than have their own lives and those of everyone close to them disrupted or destroyed. Craib is also contemptuous of searching for effective methods of th