Continuing Bonds: New Understandings of Grief

This important new book gives voice to an emerging consensus among bereavement scholars that our understanding of the grief process needs to be expanded. The dominant twentieth-century model holds that the function of grief and mourning is to cut bonds with the deceased, thereby freeing the survivor to reinvest in new relationships in the present. Pathological grief has been defined in terms of holding on to the deceased. Close examination reveals that this model is based more on the cultural values of modernity than on any substantial data of what people actually do.