Anthropologie Et Psychodynamique Du Deuil
Authors: Saucier Jean-François 
Published: April 2017

For centuries the excessive reactions of mentally ill subjects to the death of one parent have been noticed. Bowlby (3, 4) was struck by the similarity of these reactions to those of young children separated from their mother. According to him, the child reacts first by a vehement protest, expressed in many-different forms (confusion, negation, efforts to recover the lost one, crying, rage against her, self-mutilation and introjection). The following phase is that of despair, manifested by apathy, disorganization of behaviour, loss of appetite, solitary rumination and isolation. At last, the third phase is the one of gradual detachment from the mother, followed by a reattachment to the surrounding persons and to the mother-substitute.

This behaviour sequence of the young child following the mother's departure is hypothetically considered here as the prototypical sequence of mourning behaviour in adults (following the final departure of a parent), not only in our western culture, but in all human societies. A brief investigation is made to verify the presence throughout the world of institutionalized funeral rituals similar to the many separation reactions of the young child.

Phase one: Protest

As an example of negation of death, one has the mummification used by the Egyptians to prevent the putrefaction of the corpse, or the belief (48) in the reincarnation of the dead one in a grandchild. As equivalent to efforts to recover the mother, one has the custom in Trobriand (50) to visit the Island of the Dead and to talk with them. The practice of crying is ritualized in many societies, for example the ‘paid’ weepers. Rage against the dead one is expressed among the Kurnai (30) through violent protest, or through aggressive behaviour against the corpse (63). Self mutilation among the bereaved, through guilt, has been observed with the Hottentots (11), where the relatives have to cut off their little finger to be placed with the body in the grave. Introjection of the dead one is facilitated among the Armas (61) by the custom of putting on the deceased's clothes or, in Melanesia (51), by the ritual of piously eating the deceased's flesh, sarco-cannibalism.

Phase two: Despair

Not only do most societies allow the bereaved to abandon themselves to grief by temporarily excusing them from their social duties, but often they prescribe precise behaviours, as in Bengal (64), the prohibition against washing, shaving and combing one's hair, or among the Warramunga (80), the custom for the widow to keep silent for years.

Phase three: Detachment

Detachment is favoured in many societies through the beliefs in integration of the deceased into another world (41) through rituals forbidding the dead ones to come back among the living (28), or through preventing them from doing so by building symbolic barriers around the house (55), or in Africa leaving wooden monuments to the dead to rot (34), or putting into the coffin all their belongings (73). Finally, many ceremonies are provided to reintegrate the bereaved into society after a certain period of time, through banquets (93), steps to facilitate the remarriage of the widowed (85), etc.

In conclusion, it is confirmed that the spontaneous, purely psychological reactions of the young child following separation from his mother, although sometimes strange and unexpected, have been found institutionalized, that is imposed as normal in many human societies. Then contrary to what Durkheim had thought, there is not a chasm between psychology and socio-anthropology, but a differential continuity in the sense that each society chooses, among the large field of possible behaviours of the child to separation, a few of them which it prefers, and institutionalizes them as rituals to be followed by the community. The following stage of this study would be to investigate the causes of these choices, for example why certain societies dramatize mourning so much, whereas others try to minimize it.