However, there is no empirical study that has proven the benefit of relinquishing ties, rather it is counselling and therapy literature that has centred on the idea that holding on to the deceased brings complications. Developing a balance between avoidance and yearning for the deceased is seen as a way to successfully recover from the loss. This is achieved by a process of oscillation where the loss is at times confronted and at others avoided. It is rather an attempt to relocate the dead into a new identity by a process of relinquishing but also continuing attachments in order to activate recovery. Instead the continuing bonds thesis highlights the many ways people do retain some type of bond with those they have lost, but it does not mean that the continuation of a bond is pathological or necessarily stays the same as it was before the death.

The continuing bonds theory was an attempt to reject the models of detachment that Freud and others appeared to be claiming. The picture portrayed by Freud is a more complex understanding of interdependency and bonds than what is commonly depicted in grief theory, even those emphasising the role of continuing bonds. In particular Freud emphasised that mourning is normal and healthy, and that grief was not a cause for intervention.

Yet I would like to contend that Freud can be re-read as being far more ambivalent about attachments, especially if noting his later writings. This at least has been the way in which Freud’s ideas have been interpreted by later theorists. The melancholic figure persists as an example of what happens when people fail to mourn successfully, when they are unable to let go of the deceased. Whether it is framed as attachments or bonds, the focus on attachments has contributed to an understanding that suggests in order to recover the relationship with the deceased has to be reconfigured in some way, either as a process of detachment or reinstating and/or continuing bonds in order to accept the loss.įreud in ‘Mourning and Melancholia’ (1917) is often attributed as the first thinker to promote the idea of the need to detach from the deceased, and that ‘hanging on’ to the deceased is pathological and an obstruction to healthy mourning. One of the themes that recur throughout the grief literature is that of attachments and bonds with the deceased. Filed under: Grief, Recovery, Resistance, Subjectivities | Tags: attachment, continuing bonds, Cruel optimism, freud, mourning and melancholia, sovereignty

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