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George Hagman’s book, New Models of Bereavement Theory and Treatment: New Mourning, is an important and thought-provoking collection of papers written by Hagman and other experienced practitioners and scholars, and a lovely integration of psychoanalytic theories and perspectives on grief and mourning. In this volume Hagman first grounds the reader in Freud’s perspectives on grief and mourning and then moves forward, expanding and modifying our analytic understanding of grief and mourning well beyond the early classical perspective. In his Preface Hagman contextualizes the book, and his interest in the topic, within his own developmental history of parental loss. This has the effect of engaging the reader emotionally and empathically, as well as intellectually, and enhanced my experience of reading this book.
One of the many strengths of this volume is the thread of continuity in Hagman’s voice throughout the volume, as he is the author of six of the twelve chapters. His Preface, and an Introduction by Robert Neimeyer, ground us in definitions of grief, bereavement, and mourning and introduce the reader to the importance of meaning making as part of the mourning process. Hagman offers the reader a narrative framework as well as a psychoanalytic one through which to understand mourning, a “meaning reconstruction model of bereavement” (p. xvii). The addition of papers by expert clinicians and authors, Shane and Shane, Slochower, Shelby, Gaines, and Kernberg, add depth and dimension to the psychoanalytic understanding of mourning. The authors provide many clinical case examples of their work with diverse populations, in diverse settings such as mourning in children who’ve lost a parent, working with seropositive adults, and the role of ritual in mourning.
The first chapter, “Mourning, a Review and Reconsideration”, is a previously published paper by Hagman. In it he reviews one of Freud’s most famous works, Mourning and Melancholia, and the progression of psychoanalytic t