A recent read from The New Yorker on issues related to grief: how it can be considered clinically, it’s forms in private life and public ritual, why we experience it, and what we hope to get from it as human beings. Article here.
In “Mourning and Melancholia” (1917), Freud suggested that mourners had to reclaim energy that they had invested in the deceased loved one. Relationships take up energy; letting go of them, psychiatrists theorize, entails mental work. When you lose someone you were close to, you have to reassess your picture of the world and your place in it. The more your identity was wrapped up with the deceased, the more difficult the loss.
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