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Nineteen ninety three might have been labeled the year of books on bereavement, loss, mourning, and grief. The large number of essays, reports, treatises on these intricately related areas of human responses to death and loss contrasts with the few papers and reports appearing a decade or two ago. Aside from Freud's (1917/1919) monumental “Mourning and Melancholia,” there was a hiatus in research in the area Freud so creatively opened up for further study. Although mourning and bereavement follow both normative and catastrophic events, usually the death of a significant other, the focus has been on psychological pathology. Now, using the approaches of other disciplines, including immunology and endocrinology, we are studying normal mourning processes following losses other than death—the meaning and significance, internally and externally, of what is lost; follow-up and outcome investigations after loss and change; the development of the mourning-liberation process ontogenetically and phylogenetically.
We are now addressing such issues as reactions to unemployment, divorce, and loss resulting from criminal acts. We are also studying the intricate biological mechanisms involved in the mourning process and a subclass of this process, bereavement, or the specific reaction to death. We recognize that grief is not the only affect state associated with mourning. For example, we pay