I'm someone who believes Elizabeth Kubler-Ross did as much damage to grieving people as her writings were a breakthrough for exposing the important subject of grief, grieving and, dying. Kubler-Ross defended her seminal work (1969) "On Death and Dying" as having "taken up where Freud left off in his study of grief" in many of her public appearances. Yet in fact Freud's unfinished work was not on the subject of grief but on the subject of melancholia. Melancholia's description was closest to what we currently know as Depression.
Freud's interest was to observe how it was that people who were told a diagnosis of impending death acted out their attempts to 'ready' themselves to die. Kubler-Ross's work turned Freud's attempts on it's side: Responses to interviews with the dying about their experience of moving toward death were labeled as grieving. In other words, a new term was attributed to the process of the interviewees experiences of dying. The notion of 'Stages of Grieving' were then attributed to and through a small sample of the people who exhibited the stages.
The year is 2009 and those of us who serve the grieving and the bereaved also still see people who come to grief support specifically because they hear from clients: "I know I feel this way because I've missed a stage".
In my many years of service to the bereaved I can assure you many people suffer this delusion. What tyranny!
The hold on the American population of Kubler-Ross's "Stages" is so strong and widespread that we at Oak Tree Bereavement Center speak to a wide range of groups and answer calls and emails regularly throughout each year.
Subsequent posts to this blog will address:
* What is grief?
* What can I expect while I grieve?
* Current research in Death and Dying
* What's to know about how to self-care during grief ?
