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This book is a development of Dr Parkes' already published () formulations of a biological theory of grief and is an attempt to describe stressor-specific reactions to bereavement as distinct from the more complex subject-specific reactions which are left to other researchers. Analysts?
It is based on three research studies covering a period of twelve years: the Bethlem study, which was set up to investigate atypical reactions to bereavement, consisted of interviews with twenty-one patients, all of whom had developed a mental illness within six months of losing a spouse or close relative; the London study, which was designed to establish a picture of typical grief from a series of interviews with twenty-two widows under the age of sixty-five referred by their general practitioners and seen at the third, sixth, ninth and thirteenth month after bereavement; and the Harvard Study which focused attention on a group of sixty-eight widows and widowers under the age of forty-five. This last group were visited three weeks, six weeks and fourteen months after their bereavement in an effort to validate predictions, made on the evidence of the first interviews, as to how the subjects would be feeling and behaving a year later.
The author, who reached, quite independently, many of the conclusions arrived at by John Bowlby in his studies of grieving () joined Dr Bowlby's research staff at the Tavistock Institute of Human Relations in 1962. This attempt at a profile of bereavement is, therefore, naturally closely linked to Bowlby's work on attachment behaviour, for example, the episodic pangs of grief followed by pining in bereavement are seen as the emotional equivalents of the protest and searching sequence observed in the attachment behaviour of infants and animals. Its main application is also, like that of Bowlby's work, envisaged in the field of preventive psychiatry and community mental health.
Dr Parkes has used as his theoretical starting point Darwin's ‘Expressions of t