The Sociality of Grief

- en sociologisk kommentar til psykologiseringen og medikaliseringen af menneskelige følelser

Abstract

Sigmund Freud’s ground-breaking work 100 years ago marked the entrance to the 20th century’s psychologised approach to grief. Grief research has changed a lot since Freud. However, the development has not shrunk away from the dominant position of psychology in the research on grief. Instead, one can say that psychology has expanded its territory and colonised much of the understanding of grief, which has decimated other languages of grief significantly. Even the realm of religion, which previously offered people comfort and guidance in understanding and dealing with grief, has apparently become “the servant of psychology” (Walter 1996: 123). In this article, we offer a sociological corrective to this development, where we focus on the sociality of grief. We do this by criticising the psychologisation of grief and by unfolding a variety of facets of a sociological/emotional-sociological understanding of grief’s sociality, which offers itself as a corrective or supplement to the psychologisation of grief.