You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
It is impossible to think that I shall never sit with you again and hear your laugh. That everyday for the rest of my life you will be away. No one to talk to about my pleasures. No one to call me for walks, to go ‘to the terrace’. I write in an empty book. I cry in an empty room. And there can never be any comfort again.
CARRINGTON1
In the preceding chapters I have reviewed the many variables that influence the course of mourning, including certain personality characteristics of the bereaved and the types of childhood experience that evidence suggests contribute to their development. Here and there the psychological processes through which the variables appear to act have been indicated, but no systematic attention has yet been given them. This deficiency I now attempt to make good.
Every situation we meet with in life is construed in terms of the representational models we have of the world about us and of ourselves. Information reaching us through our sense organs is selected and interpreted in terms of those models, its significance for us and for those we care for is evaluated in terms of them, and plans of action conceived and executed with those models in mind. On how we interpret and evaluate each situation, moreover, turns also how we feel.
When a situation occurs which we evaluate as damaging to our interests or to those of persons we care for, our first impulse is to try to rectify the situation. In making any such attempt we analyse what seems to have caused the situation and plan our actions accordingly. Naturally, our analysis of causation is in terms of whatever representational models we may have of the objects and persons who are playing a part in the situation; and our plans of action