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The inspiration for the beginning reformulation of mourning theory presented in this chapter came from two sources. The first was a research endeavor designed to reconstruct the experiences of gay men whose long-term partners contracted and died from acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (Shelby, 1992). The second was the considerable reformulation of clinical theory: the psychology of the self and long-overdue efforts to reexamine analytic theory in light of cognitive and linguistic theories.
The study design consisted of a series of open-ended interviews with well partners, ill partners, and surviving partners in long-term relationships impacted by AIDS. Individuals and couples were interviewed over a 9- to-12-month period. The interviews were then coded and analyzed according to the grounded theory method of Glaser and Strauss (1967) and Glaser (1975). This relatively open-ended interview approach, in which the study participants were asked to tell me what was going on in their lives versus answering my questions about their experience, yielded data not previously elucidated in the analytic literature on mourning: The first topic is the integral role other people play in facilitating the survivors' mourning process; the second concerns the impact on the mourning process of a surviving partner when he too is infected with the same agent that resulted in his partner's death.
Clinical theory has evolved considerably since the work of Pollock (1961) in which mourning was conceptualized as a realignment and