Speaking from bereavement instead of speaking from death? Western societies in front of demographic and cultural changes of the 21st century.
Fiche publication
Date publication
avril 2013
Auteurs
Membres identifiés du Cancéropôle Est :
Pr BACQUE Marie-Frédérique
Tous les auteurs :
Bacque MF
Lien Pubmed
Résumé
If bereavement is a crossroad phenomenon involving both collective belonging and private attachment, the cultural part in the loss of a kin has progressively been erased since the beginning of the 20th century in France. What remains is the affective dimension. There is a kind of reversal of grief expression in our western societies. One hundred years ago, the social expression of mourning was predominant whereas the intimate expression of grief was hidden behind. But with the two world wars, the disorganization of rituals and the loss of faith in a protective God, the affects came to the forefront. Once collective, bereavement is now solipsist (referred to the self). Faced with a lack of social treatment, bereaved people turn to medicine and try to "cure" their grief. They acclaim "advances" in Medicine and appreciate the individualization in the medicalization of emotional states. On one hand, there is the most frequent bereavement in our societies, which is the loss of their old companions by lonely spouses. But this ordinary loss is cautious and quiet. On the other hand, media are exaggerating exceptional bereavements. But instead of being shared in collective ceremonies, these catastrophic deaths are provoking numbness, even in therapeutic groups and are now included in psychiatry manuals. By 2050, the number of dead people will have increased by 38 % in France. Prospective studies are planning 750,000 dead people in the year of 2050. Bereavement will not be exceptional then. A real demand for psychosocial support will certainly develop in the future, far beyond family propositions and community support. Associations with medical expertise are today centered on complicated grieves and propose special follow up in sanitary institutions (where about 70 % of persons die in France). Although bereaved people have a subjective feeling of a too long and uncertain temporality of grief, unusual bereavements draw outpour of grief in blogs or are searched for on Facebook. But grief is frequently lived alone. It seems that common bereavement is a kind of incongruity that many would like to bypass with a hastened death, a discreet and sober disappearing. Restoring social bonds around the mortality and fragility of existence would give back grief its social place in existence as generating human collective solidarity. Mourning would find again its affective role as a driving force behind individual experience and would find again its legitimate place within family lives, passing down from generation to generation the modalities of attachment and of identification to a lineage. (c) 2012 Elsevier Masson SAS. All rights reserved.
Référence
Ann Med-psychol. 2013 Apr;171(3):176-80.