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Biomedical subjects

C W Brice

Publications and source records attributed to C W Brice.

4 recordsLinked to original sources

Paradoxes of maternal mourning.

It has been customary to conceptualize mourning as a phasic or stage phenomenon (Lindemann 1944; Parkes 1972; Bowlby 1980; Knapp 1986). Such a conceptualization has proved to be of tremendous didactic value, especially in terms of succinctly organizing and communicating the major affects, behaviors, and reactions of mourning. It is, however, my belief, based upon clinical experience with many forms of bereavement, that the phenomenon of mourning is not comprised of clearly delineated stages and phases. I have come to conceptualize the phenomenon of mourning the death of a loved person as involving the bereaved's struggle with a series of more or less unresolvable paradoxes rather than as a progression through stages that possess relatively distinct and predictable beginning and ending points. The specific paradoxes encountered by a bereaved person differ, of course, in accordance with the relationship that was lost (mother, father, spouse, child, or sibling), the developmental stage of the bereaved (childhood, adolescence, adulthood, or maturity), the type of death (sudden or prolonged), and the cause of death (illness, murder, suicide, or accident). In this paper, I will address those paradoxes that seem specific to maternal mourning - that is, to mothers who are mourning the death of a child.

Adaptation, Psychological↗

Pathological modes of human relating and therapeutic mutuality: A dialogue between Buber's existential relational theory and object-relations theory.

There is, in my opinion, a rapprochement between the theories of psychoanalysis and existential-phenomenology. It is my major theoretical interest to articulate the points at which true dialogue between these different perspectives is possible. Such an effort is not an attempt to merge the two theories or subordinate one to the other; rather, I hope that the theoretical positions of both will be clarified and that the therapeutic dialogue of practitioners who represent both perspectives will be benefited.

Adult↗