The Public and Private Management of Grief: Recovering Normal PDF
Preview The Public and Private Management of Grief: Recovering Normal
The Public and Private Management of Grief Recovering Normal Caroline Pearce The Public and Private Management of Grief Caroline Pearce The Public and Private Management of Grief Recovering Normal Caroline Pearce King’s College London London, UK ISBN 978-3-030-17661-7 ISBN 978-3-030-17662-4 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-17662-4 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2019 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. 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Cover credit: © Alex Linch shutterstock.com This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland Preface On completing a research project, it can be difficult to recall the initial reasons that motivated one to pursue that particular area of study. In the course of carrying out the research that fills the pages of this book I was often faced with the question: Why did you choose to research this topic? This seemingly innocent question felt fraught and complex as my topic of choice was something which made many people feel uncom- fortable. Having spent at least ten years intellectually preoccupied with grief, bereavement, death, and illness, the question became a personal bugbear of mine. Answering such queries often opened up an inquiry into my personal motivations and private life in a way that made me feel exposed. It seemed that my interest in grief could be explained only by some traumatic event in my own life, as though my intellectual pre- occupations were directed by my emotional disposition; a demonstra- tion of my own unresolved mourning. In this process of speaking about grief, the grief became attached to me. Or, borrowing the words of Sara Ahmed, in speaking about a prob- lem, I became the problem. For me this caused considerable frustration, as though my scholarly work was a thinly disguised attempt to figure out my own problems. It made my choice of research topic feel small v vi Preface and individual, feminine even, in a way that felt negative, as though I was stuck within the realm of the domestic and intimate. Though my interest in the notion of recovery was to an extent borne out of my own grappling with it, this book moves out and beyond, to a place where I stopped taking it personally, yet remains indebted to those early experi- ences and perhaps initial misconceptions. In this book one of the key aims has been to extract grief from the internal, private, and personal to highlight the political and social shap- ing of grief, where grief is experienced not only in the individual psyche but factors into the political and economic running of society. By draw- ing out these links to the political and social this book can be seen as a response to the individualising and psychologising of grief, but equally it is a product of my perspective as a sociologist. The work of Lauren Berlant, Judith Butler and Sara Ahmed taught me a great deal about how emotions are central to social and cultural politics, from under- standing the processes of nation building and who gets to count as a citizen, to what makes a life worth living. Inspired by this work and other feminist scholarship this book seeks to challenge the boundaries between the public and private. In the process of producing the work in this book, I kept referring back to a passage written by Lauren Berlant in her blog Supervalent Thought: ‘Most of the writing we do is actually a performance of stuck- ness. It is a record of where we got stuck on a question for long enough to do some research and write out the whole knot until the original passion and curiosity that made us want to try to say something about something got so detailed, buried, encrypted, and diluted that the ener- getic and risk-taking impulse became sealed and delivered in the form of a defence against thinking any more about it’.1 For me this statement expresses a great deal about the process of writing a Ph.D. thesis, the passion and curiosity it involves to keep a one-pointed focus for three years on a question that becomes so detailed, diluted, buried, encrypted, until it emerges as the thesis. It also expresses how grief too can be compared to a performance of stuckness, of being in liminality, of seeking out meaning or ways to manage one’s emotions. And further how telling one’s story of grief is commonly assumed as mode of individ- ual healing, of recovery from grief, of not thinking any more about it. Preface vii This statement also underscores the end of the project, a knot that has been unravelled and sealed many times and is sealed again in the form of this book. Though my risk-taking impulses have indeed waned, I cannot say I will think no more about the questions raised within these pages. For as you will learn in this book, completion is an ongoing process. * * * I would like to acknowledge The Open University for funding the doc- toral research on which this book is based. I am greatly indebted to my two wonderful Ph.D. supervisors Carol Komaromy and Sam Murphy in the completion of this project. Special thanks to Carol for consistently going above and beyond in terms of support, mentorship and invalu- able advice. Thanks to Arnar Árnason, my Ph.D. examiner who sug- gested I turn the thesis into a book. A thanks to the multidisciplinary death studies community who have provided an intellectual home for me and for this book. Most important thanks to the participants whose accounts fill the pages of this book, for providing insight and sharing their experiences. London, UK Caroline Pearce Note 1. Berlant, Lauren. 2010. Sitting on an airplane, a mule. Supervalent Thought. https://supervalentthought.com/2010/09/18/sitting-on-an-air- plane-a-mule/. Accessed on 27 December, 2018. Contents 1 Introduction: Recovering Normal 1 2 Grief as a Psychological Object of Study 23 3 Making Sense of Grief 61 4 Affective Practices: Managing Grief 103 5 Emotions, Bodies, Practices 145 6 Inhabiting and Resisting Identities 179 7 The Other Side of Recovery 209 Appendix A: Tables of Participants 225 ix x Contents Appendix B: B ereavement Organisations—Detailed Information 227 Index 231 List of Tables Table A.1 Bereavement care professional participants 225 Table A.2 Bereaved participants 226 Table A.3 Former or current mental health service users 226 xi
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