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Cultural, Existential and
Phenomenological Dimensions
of Grief Experience

This innovative volume examines the phenomenological, existential and cultural

dimensions of grief experiences. It draws on perspectives from philosophy,
psychology and sociocultural studies to focus on the experiential dimension of
grief, moving beyond understanding from a purely mental health and psychiatry
perspective.
The book considers individual, shared and collective experiences of loss.
Chapters explore the intersections between the profound existential experiences
of bereavement and how this is mediated by sociocultural norms and practices.
It points to new directions for the future conceptualization and study of grief,
particularly in the experiential dimension.
Drawing on a range of interdisciplinary perspectives, this important book will
appeal to academics, researchers and students in the fields of death and bereavement
studies, wellbeing and mental health, philosophy and phenomenological studies.

Allan Køster is Senior Researcher at the National Center for Grief, Denmark,
and Research Fellow at Copenhagen University Hospital, Denmark.

Ester Holte Kofod is Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication

and Psychology at the University of Aalborg, Denmark.
Cultural, Existential and
Phenomenological Dimensions
of Grief Experience

Edited by Allan Køster and

Ester Holte Kofod
First published 2022
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
and by Routledge
605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2022 selection and editorial matter, Allan Køster and Ester
Holte Kofod; individual chapters, the contributors
The right of Allan Køster and Ester Holte Kofod to be identified as
the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their
individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections
77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or
reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical,
or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including
photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or
retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks
or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and
explanation without intent to infringe.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A catalog record for this book has been requested

ISBN: 978-0-367-56811-5 (hbk)

ISBN: 978-0-367-56812-2 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-1-003-09942-0 (ebk)
DOI: 10.4324/9781003099420

Typeset in Bembo
by Apex CoVantage, LLC
Contents

Acknowledgements viii
List of figures ix
List of tables x
List of contributors xi

Introduction 1
E S T E R H O LT E KO FO D & ALLAN KØ STE R

PART 1
Phenomenology and its application to grief
and bereavement 7
A L L AN KØ STE R

1 Grief, melancholy, and depression: an existential

phenomenology of reactions to transience 11
THOMAS FUCHS

2 What is longing? An existential-phenomenological

investigation 25
A LLAN KØ STE R

3 Grief, commitment and the sense of community 40

L I N E RY B E R G I NGE RSLE V

4 Distorted space, unmoving time—aesthetic practices

in bereavement 54
K ATH LE E N H I GGI NS
vi Contents

5 Grief and the photograph: a phenomenology of captured

time and its resonances with death 69
K I RSTE N JACO B SO N

6 The interpersonal and social dimensions of emotion

regulation in grief 84
M ATTH E W RATCLI FFE & E LE ANO R A. B Y RNE

PART 2
The normative mediation of experiences of loss 99
E S T E R H O LT E KO FO D

7 Continuing bonds in the cultural, existential, and

phenomenological study of grief 103
D E N N I S K LASS

8 Poetic representations of parental grief 119

E S T E R H O LT E KO FO D

9 Grieving as relearning the world is inherently social 137

T H O M A S ATTI G

10 Grief dynamics and gendered expectations on expressions

of grief 149
L E E AT G R ANE K

11 The oughtness of grief: ontological, cultural and

existential perspectives 162
A LF RE D B O RDAD O SKÖ LD & SVE ND B RI NK M A N N

12 From ineffability and cultural taboo to meaning:

making sense of sensory and quasi-sensory experiences
of deceased loved ones 175
E D I TH M A RI A STE FFE N

PART 3
Social frameworks of grief 193
B RADY WAGO N E R AND I GNACI O B RE SCÓ D E LU N A

13 Collective grief: mourning rituals, politics and

memorial sites 197
B RADY WAGO NE R AND I GNACI O B RE SCÓ DE L UN A
 Contents vii

14 “A grief more deep than me”—on ecological grief 214

M I K K E L K RAU SE FRANTZE N

15 Finding solace in nature: a protestant/secular sensibility? 229

TO N Y WALT E R

Index 244
Acknowledgements

This book is the result of the 5-year research project “The Culture of Grief ”,
situated at Aalborg University, Denmark. The project was made possible by
generous funding from the Obel Foundation (Det Obelske Familiefond) from
2017 to 2021.
Figures

5.1 [Photograph of seated man with eye mask] 75

5.2 [Photograph of father being hugged by son] 77
13.1 Vietnam Veteran’s Memorial 205
13.2 Planned Utøya memorial 207
13.3 Pandemic memorial 209
Tables

8.1 “Extremely close and really absent”—A poetic representation

of presence and absence 126
8.2 “You are so strong”—A poetic representation of loneliness
and consolation 128
8.3 “This was what fucking happened”—A poetic representation
of acceptance and protest 130
8.4 “Grief has its own time”—A poetic representation of
altered temporality 132
Contributors

Thomas Attig is Emeritus Professor of Philosophy, Bowling Green State Uni-

versity, Past President of The Association for Death Education and Coun-
seling (USA) and author of Catching Your Breath in Grief (Breath of Life
Publishing, 2019), How We Grieve (Oxford, Revised 2011) and The Heart of
Grief (Oxford, 2000).
Ignacio Brescó de Luna is Assistant Professor at the Autonomous Univer-
sity of Madrid, Spain, and an external researcher at the Centre for Cultural
Psychology and The Culture of Grief in Aalborg University, Denmark,
where he has worked as Associate Professor until 2021. His research revolves
around collective memory, national identity and a cultural approach to grief.
Svend Brinkmann is Professor of Psychology in the Department of Com-
munication and Psychology at the University of Aalborg, Denmark, where
he serves as Director of the Center for Qualitative Studies. His research is
particularly concerned with philosophical, moral and methodological issues
in psychology and other human and social sciences.
Eleanor Byrne is a doctoral researcher in Philosophy at the University of York,
UK. Her research addresses issues in the philosophy of medicine, psychiatry
and phenomenology. She is currently working on experiences of chronic
fatigue and how such experiences interact with grief and depression.
Mikkel Krause Frantzen is a postdoc at the University of Copenhagen. The
author of Going Nowhere, Slow—The Aesthetics and Politics of Depression (2019)
and Klodens Fald (2021), his work has appeared in, e.g., boundary 2, Third
Text, Theory, Culture, and Society, Differences and Los Angeles Review of Books.
Thomas Fuchs is Karl Jaspers Professor of Philosophy and Psychiatry at
Heidelberg University, Germany. His main areas of research include phe-
nomenological philosophy, psychopathology, and embodied and enactive
cognitive science. His recent publication includes In Defense of the Human
Being: Foundational Questions of an Embodied Anthropology (Oxford University
Press, 2021).
xii Contributors

Leeat Granek is a health psychologist and Professor at York University in the

Department of Health Policy and Management who has published close to
a 100 peer-reviewed articles. Her recent awards include the Sigmund Koch
Award for Early Contribution to the Field of Psychology and Distinguished
Early Career Contributions in Qualitative Inquiry Award.
Line Ryberg Ingerslev is a postdoctoral fellow at the Department of Phi-
losophy, Julius-Maximilian University, Würzburg, Germany. She works on
passivity, responsiveness, habit and on aspects of emotional distress that play
a role in weaker forms of agency.
Kirsten Jacobson is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Maine. Her
research focuses on using phenomenology to investigate spatiality, dwelling
and issues of “existential health”. She is co-editor of Perception and Its Devel-
opment in Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology (University of Toronto Press, 2017).
Dennis Klass received his PhD in Psychology of Religion from the Univer-
sity of Chicago. He is on the editorial boards of Death Studies and Omega,
Journal of Death and Dying. Klass’s 20-year ethnographic study in a self-help
group of bereaved parents is reported in The Spiritual Lives of Bereaved Parents
(Brunner/Mazel, 1999) and Parental Grief: Resolution and Solace (Springer,
1988). He is the co-author of Dead but Not Lost: Grief Narratives in Religious
Traditions (AltaMira, 2005), co-editor of Continuing Bonds: New Understand-
ings of Grief (Taylor-Francis, 1996), and co-editor of Continuing Bonds in
Bereavement: New Directions in Research and Practice (Routledge, 2018). He
has written over 70 articles and book chapters.
Ester Holte Kofod is a licensed psychologist, PhD and assistant professor
at Aalborg University, Denmark, where she is affiliated with the research
center The Culture of Grief. Her research interests concern the intersection
between individual experiences of suffering and sociocultural practices,
norms and expectations.
Allan Køster is Senior Researcher at the National Center for Grief, Denmark,
and Research Fellow at Copenhagen University Hospital. His research cen-
ters on applying phenomenology to the investigation of abnormal and lim-
inal experiences in both somatic illness and psychopathological states. His
current focus is on the existential dimensions of grief and bereavement.
Matthew Ratcliffe is Professor of Philosophy at the University of York, UK.
Most of his work addresses issues in phenomenology, philosophy of mind
and philosophy of psychiatry. He is the author of Rethinking Commonsense
Psychology: A Critique of Folk Psychology, Theory of Mind and Simulation (Pal-
grave, 2007), Feelings of Being: Phenomenology, Psychiatry and the Sense of
Reality (Oxford University Press, 2008), Experiences of Depression: A Study
in Phenomenology (Oxford University Press, 2015), and Real Hallucinations:
Psychiatric Illness, Intentionality, and the Interpersonal World (MIT Press, 2017).
 Contributors xiii

Edith Maria Steffen is Associate Professor in Psychology at the University of

Plymouth, UK, and a chartered and registered counselling psychologist in
private practice. Her research is focused on bereavement, particularly con-
tinuing bonds, sensory experiences of the deceased and meaning-oriented
grief therapy. She has published her work in journals such as Death Studies,
Omega and Mental Health, Religion & Culture. In 2018, she was Co-Editor
of the anthology.
Brady Wagoner is Professor of Psychology at Aalborg University. He received
his PhD from the University of Cambridge, focusing on issues of culture
and memory. His books include The Constructive Mind and Handbook of
Culture and Memory. He has received several major awards, including the
Sigmund Koch Award from the American Psychological Association in 2018
and the Lucienne Domergue Award from the Casa de Velazquez in 2019.
Tony Walter is Emeritus Professor of Death Studies at the University of
Bath, UK. His most recent books are What Death Means Now (Policy Press,
2017) and Death in the Modern World (Sage, 2020). His current interest is the
climate/ecological emergency and the death of species.
Introduction
Ester Holte Kofod & Allan Køster

Losing an intimate other to death is one of the most profound and overwhelm-
ing events in human life. In this sense, grief is an individual, existential experi-
ence that cannot be given over to others. At the same time, grief is a shared
existential condition hardly anybody can avoid to face. Thus, grief is at the
same time a universal existential experience and a phenomenon that is deeply
entangled with historical, cultural, material and normative practices.
Traditionally, the systematic study of human mortality and vulnerability has
predominantly belonged to philosophy and theology. This has changed during the
last century, where the study of bereavement increasingly has become a subject of
public health, psychology and psychiatry. This process has encompassed a tendency
towards reducing the complex dynamics between individual experiences and
sociocultural conditions to causal hypotheses in which culture at best is included
as an external variable that influences individual grief symptoms. Accordingly,
there has been a narrowing of the scope and methodological approach to study-
ing grief, where symptoms, reactions and effects that can be measured quantita-
tively have been prioritised over qualitative and phenomenological examinations
of subjective experience, cultural understandings and interpretations. An example
of this tendency is the recent debate concerning the inclusion of a separate diag-
nosis for complex or prolonged grief disorder in the world’s leading diagnostic
manuals (American Psychiatric Association, 2013; World Health Organization,
2020). With notable exceptions, contemporary bereavement research is largely
focused on studying the consequences of bereavement on individual health and
well-being (Neimeyer, 2004; Stroebe et al., 1988). Of course, this is not to sug-
gest that the cultural dimension of death and bereavement has not been a central
subject of cultural-historical, sociological and anthropological studies. However,
while these studies have contributed significantly to our understanding of cul-
tural practices and beliefs concerning death and bereavement, examinations of the
complex dynamics between such cultural frameworks and the subjective experi-
ence of loss have been marginalised by the increasingly individualised and health-
oriented focus within contemporary bereavement research.
How did we arrive at this predominantly individualised, medicalised and
pathologised approach to such an existentially and culturally significant subject?
DOI: 10.4324/9781003099420-1
2 Ester Holte Kofod & Allan Køster

How did we come to understand grief mainly as a question of (mental) health

and potential disorder? And what is silenced when grief is conceptualised in
this way? In the following, we will sketch some of the main developments that
led us here, which gaps it leaves, and how this book intends to contribute to
filling this gap.

Bereavement research: a brief historical outline

Sigmund Freud’s (1917/1957) ground-breaking essay Mourning and Melancholia
marks a shift from the elaborate public grief culture of the nineteenth century’s
Romantic era towards the twentieth century’s privatised, psychologised and,
increasingly, pathologised grief. With his concept of grief work [Trauerarbeit],
Freud introduced the idea that grief is a process of emotional detachment. The
notion of grief as an inner, psychological process of detachment and resolu-
tion has had an enormous impact on Western cultural beliefs and practices
related to grief and loss. Throughout the twentieth century, grief was concep-
tualised as universally applicable, neatly organised, individual mental processes
of stages, phases or tasks (e.g. Bowlby & Parkes, 1970; Kübler-Ross, 1970;
Kübler-Ross & Kessler, 2005; Parkes, 1998; Worden, 1982). The empirical
foundation of these early theoretical developments was mainly qualitative data,
most notably from clinical settings and interview studies—the latter charac-
terised by a systematic over-representation of white, widowed women of the
British and American middle class (e.g. Glick et al., 1974; Marris & Bowlby,
1958). Anchored in a positivist epistemology, the findings of these studies have
been generalised to universal standards, through which descriptions of grief
experiences have been subjected to prescriptions for grief and grief interven-
tions (Valentine, 2006). Although contemporary theories of bereavement have
largely abandoned the Freudian grief work hypothesis, the very notion of grief
as an individual psychological process, and an object of psychological inquiries
and interventions, remains.
While Freud theorised grief as a natural and non-pathological response to
loss, research and clinical practice building on his work conceptualised grief
in an increasingly medicalised vocabulary that has made it possible to map and
categorise normal and what is considered as pathological grief reactions (see
fx Engel, 1961; Lindemann, 1963). Hereby, the symptoms of grief have been
separated from sociocultural context, as well as from subjective experience.
From the 1970s, a series of psychometric tests was developed for measuring
and quantifying physical and psychological effects of loss (e.g. Faschingbauer
et al., 1977). In recent decades, these tests have been followed by psychometric
tests targeted at identifying pathological reactions to loss (Boelen et al., 2003;
Prigerson et al., 2009). The large growth in this field reflects a scientific agenda
that prioritises quantification over complexity, prediction over comprehension
and objectivity over subjective experience.
 Introduction 3

Summed up, methodologically as well as conceptually, grief research has

travelled a long way since Freud introduced his clinically based grief work
hypothesis back in 1917. Methodologically, qualitative studies have been side-
lined by quantitative studies aimed at charting symptoms and systematising
normal versus pathological grief reactions. In spite of the indisputable benefits
of this research from a public health perspective, it has also implied a shift away
from the experiential and existential dimensions and towards issues of health,
diagnosis, prevention and treatment. Considering the prominent and encom-
passing place bereavement experiences take in human life, such a unilateral
focus is not desirable.

Integrating cultural, existential and phenomenological

dimensions of the grief experience
This situation, most notably marked by the past decade’s lively debate over the
recent introductions of separate diagnostic categories for complicated or pro-
longed grief in DSM-5 and ICD-11, prompted the initiation of the research
centre The Culture of Grief 1 at Aalborg University, Denmark, to which both
editing authors of the current volume are affiliated.
A central ambition with this centre has been to facilitate cross-disciplinary
examinations of the complex relations between grief experiences and the “cul-
tural setting and conception of happiness and distress within which grief is
situated in our time”;2 hence, the centre aims at examining grief not merely as
a matter of health and illness but as a profound existential and cultural problem
to which all known cultures have developed elaborate practices and cultur-
ally sanctioned responses. Thus, a comprehensive account of grief cannot be
achieved through the health sciences or through social engineering alone but
requires joint efforts and collaborations across different disciplines within the
human and social sciences.
This was the point of departure for a joint symposium in Copenhagen in
November 2019 on the cultural, existential and phenomenological dimensions
of bereavement, from which the current volume has grown. The intention of
the symposium was to bring together and facilitate a dialogue between scholars
from different disciplines whose works have contributed significantly to our
own understanding of the subject matter.
Of course, our ambition to analyse grief as a culturally situated and mediated
phenomenon did not grow out of a vacuum. Within bereavement research,
a growing body of research has focused on the historical, cultural, social and
material circumstances of death and loss, hereby challenging the individualised
and medicalised approach to grief. Simultaneously, there has been a regular
burst of interest within phenomenological philosophy in the past few years to
investigate bereavement experiences. However, in spite of obvious overlaps in
research foci, there has been very limited import and mutual exchange between
4 Ester Holte Kofod & Allan Køster

these research communities. With our symposium, and subsequently, with the
current volume, we intend to invite to and facilitate this dialogue.

Scope and structure

Thus, the ambition of this book is to take a significant step towards a return
to the experiential dimension in grief and bereavement studies. Specifically,
we aim to do so through the following three avenues. First, we introduce
philosophical phenomenology to grief and bereavement studies. While death
and dying has long been a significant topic of phenomenology, it is not until
recently that philosophical phenomenologists have started to engage specifically
with the experience of the death of the intimate others. While the field is cer-
tainly bourgeoning, it has not yet found a shared voice. With this volume, we
intend to fill out this void and make a phenomenological perspective available
to grief and bereavement researchers that are not familiar with philosophy and
phenomenology. Second, since grief experiences, like all other experiences, do
not occur in a vacuum, but are fundamentally mediated by social and cultural
practices and frameworks, the volume also focuses on the complexity of such
mediations; that is, how grief experiences are arbitrated, mediated, made pos-
sible and contested by their inherent sociocultural embeddedness. Third, since
grief experiences are not necessarily restricted to the first-person singular but
also include shared experiences of more-than-personal losses (e.g. collective sense
of loss in the face of imminent ecological degradation of shared living condi-
tions or the mourning of a shared political past), we also include contributions
focusing on shared experiences of grief. To cover this ground, this volume
includes perspectives from both phenomenology, psychology and the broader
field of sociocultural studies. The main focus of all contributions, however, will
be a dedicated focus on grief experiences.
Hence, reflecting these foci, the research book is divided into three sections:

(1) Phenomenologies of grief and bereavement

(2) Normativities: frictions and mediations
(3) Grief beyond the first-person singular

The first section presents contributions that are specifically phenomenological

in nature. Chapters in this section include detailed investigations into the basic
structure of grief experiences. The second section focuses on how these grief
experiences are profoundly afected and mediated by normative regulations
in sociocultural practices. Finally, the third section includes contributions that
explore grief experiences in relation to more-than-personal losses, i.e. how
individual grief processes become part of a we-experience in the face of col-
lective experiences of loss. To assist the uninitiated reader, each section begins
with a brief section introduction that lays out the perspective of the ensuing
chapters.
 Introduction 5

It is our hope that the current book may serve as an invitation to scholars
across the human and social sciences to engage in continued conversations and
joint collaborations on the existentially significant topic of grief. Particularly,
we intend to invite scholars from philosophy into the ongoing conversations
and debates in the field of bereavement studies, insofar as its subject matter
clearly calls for philosophical investigations. Furthermore, the book is intended
to contribute to the development of conceptual frameworks for analysing grief
experiences. As such, it is our hope that the book may provide useful con-
ceptual resources for qualitative researchers aiming at analysing the complex
dynamics between subjective and cultural dimensions of bereavement. Finally,
we hope the book may prove useful for clinicians and other health care profes-
sionals who want to broaden their understanding of grief beyond individual
health and dysfunction. Although the book does not provide guidelines for
clinical practice, it is our hope that it may serve as an invitation to engage in
a continuing dialogue on how to develop practices that take account of the
inherent cultural situatedness of grief experiences.

Notes
1 See www.kommunikation.aau.dk/forskning/vidensgrupper/cqs/sorg/culture-of-grief/
2 www.kommunikation.aau.dk/forskning/vidensgrupper/cqs/sorg/culture-of-grief/
(accessed May 23, 2021)

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Part 1

Phenomenology and its

application to grief and
bereavement
Allan Køster

Phenomenology is one of the dominant branches in contemporary philosophy

and has been so since it was established in the beginning of the twentieth cen-
tury by the German philosopher Edmund Husserl (1859–1938). Phenomenol-
ogy literally means “the science of phenomena” and is conceived as a systematic
and scientific investigation of human experiential life. Offhand, this description
might seem to overlap considerably with what is typically considered the proper
domain of psychology. And there are, of course, considerable overlaps and inter-
sections, such as the tradition for phenomenological and existential psychology,
which are both rooted in the phenomenological movement. However, when it
nevertheless makes sense to speak of phenomenological investigations as distinct
from mainstream psychology, it has to do with the kinds of questions asked by
phenomenologists and the kinds of answers provided. Whereas a psychology
researcher most commonly seeks to investigate human behaviour through the
discovery and mapping of underlying mechanisms and causal responses, the
phenomenologist is committed to stay with experience and the first-person
perspective without seeking an explanation that goes behind the phenomenon,
so to speak (Heidegger, 1994). Another way of saying this is to state that what
distinguishes phenomenology from mainstream psychology is that while psy-
chologists are interested in the “what” of a psychological phenomenon, the
phenomenologist is predominantly interested in the “how” of an experience.
While a cognitive psychologist or a neuro-psychologist, for instance, would
seek to explain what depression is by looking for cognitive mechanisms and
underlying neuronal correlates of depression, a phenomenologist would exclu-
sively try to describe how depression is experienced and what it means to the
experiencing subject to be depressed.
Given this emphasis on what is often referred to as lived experience in phe-
nomenology, it should not be surprising that there is an intimate link between
existentialism and phenomenology. Not only did modern existentialism grow
out of phenomenology through the work of predominantly Martin Heidegger
(1889–1976) and Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–1980), but today many phenom-
enologists specifically define phenomenology as a method for investigating
human existence (Heidegger, 2001). This is the reason why one will often
DOI: 10.4324/9781003099420-2
8 Allan Køster

see the phrase “existential” coupled with phenomenology. An “existential-

phenomenological” analysis is an investigation of how an experience manifest
and how it matters to the existing subject.
Although modern phenomenology originated as a purely philosophical
endeavor interested in questions of broad philosophical relevance such as What
is the self? What is the relation between the experiencing subject and the
world? What is embodiment? etc., phenomenology quickly became a source
of inspiration to a range of empirical disciplines. Hence, to many researchers
across psychology, sociology, anthropology, qualitative studies, cognitive science
and even neuroscience, phenomenology is becoming a familiar term. In recent
years, this development towards bridging the gap between phenomenology as
a purely philosophical discipline and the empirical sciences has continued to
flourish. This is both due to an increasing interest from phenomenological phi-
losophers to engage in dialogue with the empirical sciences and the reverse—an
interest from empirical scientists to integrate phenomenology in their research
designs. We may even speak of an emerging field of applied phenomenology. The
aim of such an applied phenomenology is to use the conceptual and method-
ological resources of phenomenology to provide a detailed analysis of the first-
person perspective in a range of relevant domains. A well-established example
of this is the broad field of phenomenological psychopathology, where phe-
nomenology is used as a resource to a systematic investigation of the complex
experiential realities of various psychopathological states. The recent publica-
tion of the ambitious and encompassing Oxford Handbook of Phenomenological
Psychopathology (Stanghellini et al., 2019) is a testimony to this development.
However, this is just one example of applied phenomenology, and one can find
similar initiatives within such variegated topics as somatic illness, sports science,
gender studies, etc.
In the past 5 years, there has been a notable interest among phenomenologists
in investigating experiences of grief and bereavement. In a sense, it is surprising
that this interest has only recently emerged, since topics such as death and the
experience of loss are profoundly existential in nature and in line with classic
existential-phenomenological themes. However, so far, this body of work has
not reached a broader audience in the interdisciplinary community of grief
and bereavement researchers. Providing a representative introduction of what
phenomenologists have to say about grief to a broader audience is the aim
of the first section of this book. As the reader will notice, the themes are all
recognisable to most grief and bereavement researchers (grief and depression,
longing, emotion regulation, continuing bonds, etc.). What is different is prob-
ably the style of writing and the attention to the intricacies of the experiential
dimension.
The first chapter of the section by Thomas Fuchs addresses the contested
issue of how grief can be distinguished from depression following a serious
loss, by providing an in-depth existential-phenomenological analysis of the dif-
ferences between grief, melancholia and depression. On the basis of Martin
 Phenomenology and its application to grief and bereavement 9

Heidegger’s distinction of an ontic and an ontological level of existence, Fuchs

argues that what separates grief reactions from the broader states of depression
and melancholia is that grief is intentionally directed towards the object of loss
and aims at overcoming the loss. Depression and melancholia, however, are not
structured through this kind of intentionality but rather express sensitivities and
responses to the experience of the transitoriness and finiteness of life. Whereas
melancholy is a general affective state that is sensitive to the ontological situ-
ation of transience, depression rather designates an existential vulnerability, a
disposition to react to loss through a loss of a fundamental sense of security and
trust in the world. Fuchs designates this state through Karl Jaspers’s notion of a
“limit situation” and argues that grief can be a gateway to depression only when
the loss becomes a limit situation to the bereaved individual.
In Chapter 2, Allan Køster provides an existential-phenomenological analy-
sis of longing. Although longing is one of the most central emotions in grief
experiences, it has so far not been exposed to a systematic phenomenological
analysis of its experiential structure. In his chapter, Køster argues that longing
is a highly complex and multi-layered emotion which, more than any other
human emotion, hinges on our sense of identity. Longing is an expression of
our existential need to belong to a familiar world. When we long for the dead,
matters are made particularly problematic, since the object of our longing, the
deceased and the world I shared with that person, is irretrievably gone. This
instils a complex dialectic between identity and alienation, which Køster repre-
sents through a mapping of four types of longing for the dead. These four types
of longing are distinguished in respect to the level of concreteness and abstract-
ness in the intentional object. According to Køster, we need such distinctions
if we are to understand how longing is experienced as quite different across
different types of loss, e.g. loss of a life partner, early parental bereavement, and
loss of a stillborn baby.
In Chapter 3, Matthew Ratcliffe and Eleanor Byrne address the nature and
role of emotion regulation in grief. Contrary to standard accounts of emo-
tion regulation that often focus on an individual capacity, Ratcliffe and Byrne
emphasise how human emotion regulation often involves processes that are
interpersonal and social in structure. This fact is particularly problematic in
grief processes since being bereaved of an intimate other often implies a loss of
the regulatory resources we would normally rely on in times of crisis. Hence,
grief responses become highly dependent on the extended social resources
available to the bereaved. Lastly, this point is illustrated through reference to the
challenges that have manifested in the wake of the social restrictions imposed
by the COVID-19 pandemic.
In Chapter 4, Kirsten Jacobson connects to the encompassing cultural use of
photographies in practices of remembering and commemorating the deceased
by offering a detailed phenomenological analysis of the existential functions
of the photograph. Based on a prominent critique offered by Roland Barthes
and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, maintaining that photographs are inert, without
10 Allan Køster

culture and enclosed upon themselves, Jacobsen sets out to investigate the liv-
ing potential of the photograph through a personal confrontation with Phillip
Toledano Days with My Father. Through this encounter, Jacobson argues that
the limitations emphasised by Barthes and Merleau-Ponty might actually not be
a limitation but the photograph’s most important existential function.
In Chapter 5, Kathleen Higgins addresses the experience of how time and
space are often altered and disturbed in states of profound grief and how aes-
thetic practices may contribute to restoring a sense of normalcy. Drawing on
first-person literary accounts, Higgins starts by illustrating how such alterations
are experienced and the kind of disorientation it entails. Based on Alexander
Baumgarten’s original framing of aesthetics as a broad field that investigates
the domain of sensory appreciation, Higgins then sets out to explore how aes-
thetic activities may help the bereaved in restoring a sense of orientation in the
social world. In this respect, Higgins investigates diverse topics such as mate-
rial objects, recollections from prior aesthetic experiences and commemorative
rituals.
In the last chapter, Line Ryberg Ingerslev explores the complex role of com-
mitment in grief and how this relates to our continuing bonds to the deceased.
To understand the nature of this kind of commitment, Ingerslev proposes that
we do not exclusively focus on particular contents shared with the deceased—
i.e. internalizations such as re-enactments of memories and re-telling of nar-
ratives. The problem with this kind of practice is, according to Ingerslev, that
it potentially ties us to a world from which we feel estranged and abandoned
and that it reduces the relation to the deceased to forms of past-directed repeti-
tion. By contrast, Ingerslev compares commitment in grief with a practice of
hope, where we commit to something we don’t quite know what is by taking
up a situation we do not experience ourselves as being in control of or in any
way being sufficient to. By this comparison, it becomes clear how the bereaved
keeps a sense of community not only with the deceased but also with the com-
munity of survivors.

References
Heidegger, M. (1994). Zollikoner Seminare: Protokolle—Zwiegespräche—Briefe (M. Boss,
Ed.; 2. Aufl). Frankfurt Am Main: Klostermann.
Heidegger, M. (2001). Sein und Zeit (14., durchges. Aufl. mit d. Randbemerkungen aus d.
Handex. d. Autors im Anh). Tübingen: Niemeyer.
Stanghellini, G., Raballo, A., Broome, M., Fernandez, A. V., Fusar-Poli, P., & Rosfort, R.
(Eds.). (2019). The Oxford handbook of phenomenological psychopathology (1st ed.). Oxford:
Oxford University Press.
Waldenfels, B. (2019). Erfahrung, die zur Sprache drängt: Studien zur Psychoanalyse und Psycho-
therapie aus phänomenologischer Sicht (Erste Auflage, Originalausgabe). Frankfurt Am Main:
Suhrkamp.
Chapter 1

Grief, melancholy, and depression

An existential phenomenology of
reactions to transience
Thomas Fuchs

Introduction
The distinction between grief and depression following a severe loss such as
bereavement has been a major problem in clinical psychopathology. The
DSM-III still regarded depression as a normal reaction to the loss of a loved
one, such that bereavement remained the only life event that excluded the
diagnosis of major depression (APA, 1980, p. 333). However, DSM-IV estab-
lished the criterion of a 2-month interval from the loss, beyond which a diag-
nosis of major depression could be made (APA, 2000). Finally, in the DSM-V
this criterion was removed, so that depression can now be diagnosed immedi-
ately following a severe personal loss (APA, 2013). Furthermore, with regard
to conditions of complicated grief that had already been researched for some
time (Horowitz et al., 2003), the DSM-V listed “persistent complex bereave-
ment disorder” (Boelen & Smid, 2017) in the section “conditions for further
study”. In the meantime, ICD-11 has included the related diagnosis of “Pro-
longed Grief Disorder” (PGD), which can be made after more than 6 months
of an unabatedly severe grief reaction, but which should be distinguished from
depression (WHO, 2020). Thus, a valid distinction between grief and depres-
sion following bereavement has become an even more urgent problem.
Usually, attempts have been made to locate the difference in the severity,
quality and duration of manifest symptoms, with depression being distin-
guished from grief by feelings of guilt, self-devaluation, and hopelessness of a
persistent character, as well as by vital symptoms such as lack of appetite and
weight loss (Prigerson et al., 1995; Tsai et al., 2018). However, such feelings
and symptoms may also characterize complicated grief processes, as mentioned
earlier, which can be accompanied by feelings of hopelessness and despair as
well. DSM-V tries to make the distinction by attributing “feelings of emptiness
and loss” to grief, while depression involves “depressed mood and the inabil-
ity to anticipate happiness or pleasure”, admitting that the distinction requires
the “exercise of clinical judgment” (APA, 2013, p. 161); it is obvious that
this attempt is all but convincing. Moreover, there is justified concern about
medicalization of bereavement through the aforementioned development of

DOI: 10.4324/9781003099420-3
12 Thomas Fuchs

the DSM, possibly leading to unnecessary treatment and stigmatization of non-

pathological reactions.
The distinction between grief and depression apparently remains unsatisfac-
tory on a superficial symptomatological or clinical level; it requires in-depth phe-
nomenological clarification. This task has already been undertaken (Bonanno &
Kaltman, 2001; Lamb et al., 2010; Ratcliffe, 2019), but it can still be deep-
ened by including the existential dimension. In order to ground the distinction
on a more fundamental level, I will outline an existential phenomenology of
(a) grief, (b) melancholy and (c) depression, based on Heidegger’s distinction of
an “ontic” and an “ontological” level of existence, namely as follows:

• Grief is characterized by a reaction to a certain loss (such as the death of a

loved one); that is, it is a feeling and a process that is intentionally directed
towards the lost object and aims at overcoming its loss. In Heidegger’s
terminology, grief and mourning are primarily related to the innerworldly
sphere or the “ontic” dimension, not to being or Dasein as such.
• Grief may be contrasted with the mood of sadness or melancholy (in Ger-
man Schwermut), which is fed by the awareness of the existential transitori-
ness and finiteness of life. Melancholy thus discloses the basic ontological
situation of transience, just as Angst discloses the basic situation of the
non-transferable mineness and freedom of existence—the fact that Dasein
is ultimately alone with itself.
• Finally, depressive patients are characterized by an existential vulnerability
that makes them experience a concrete loss as a limit situation in the sense
of Karl Jaspers. For them, too, the loss becomes an indicator of the inevi-
table transience of existence as such. However, unlike the melancholic
person who lives with the mood of transience without despairing, the loss
is unbearable for the depressive—it becomes the sign of the insecurity,
loneliness and finitude of existence itself, to which he capitulates. The
depressive illness is thus the result of a limit situation that cannot be over-
come, and in which the ontological level of existence is exposed.

In sum, grief belongs, at least in principle, to the ontic level of concrete loss,
while melancholy and depression refer to the ontological level of the transience
of existence as such. The change from grief to depression should therefore not
be understood as an increase in grief but rather as the inability to carry out the
concrete mourning, combined with the inability to maintain an attitude of
melancholic acceptance towards transience. I will elaborate on this conception
and its distinctions in the following.

(1) Grief
Grief as an immediate reaction to the loss of a loved one implies not only
intense feelings of pain, sorrow and longing for what has been lost. It also
includes a pattern of symptoms that, to a certain extent, resembles those
 Grief, melancholy, and depression 13

of depression. These include feelings of dejection, despair, sometimes also

remorse and guilt, which are directed toward omissions or faults that one has
committed with regard to the deceased (Parkes, 1972, p. 60ff.). Thoughts
may be dominated by complaining about the loss, struggling with one’s fate
and the loss of meaning. Like the depressed person, the bereaved feels a
weight on his body, and a constant pressure on the chest is only intermittently
relieved by sighing or crying. A general bodily exhaustion, passivity and lack
of drive, loss of appetite and sleep disturbances also resemble the symptoms
of depression.
However, grief does not show the general bodily rigidity and the loss of
affective resonance, which is characteristic of depressive illness, often amount-
ing to a complete lack of feelings (Fuchs, 2013a). Moreover, whereas depres-
sion remains a constant and frozen mood, grief typically remains in motion, so
to speak: it takes a fluctuating course, exacerbating in pangs of grief, which are
kindled each time the loss comes to mind, only to transition again into milder
phases of silent sorrow. Above all, the mourner remains related to the loss
through his feelings and thoughts; he is intentionally directed to the lost person
and remains connected to the shared past. Grief is thus related to the ontic level
of the concrete relationship, even if existential feelings of loneliness, futility and
meaninglessness may occur temporarily.
Hence, unlike depression, grief does not solidify in itself but remains a pro-
cess, and this further process of “grief work” consists essentially in struggling
for recognition and acceptance of the loss despite all rebellion against it (Fuchs,
2018). Though the loss may appear as an inacceptable imposition, there remains
in all grief a basic sense of the fact that it does not mean the end of one’s own
ability to live on; the hope for a possible future change remains.1 Being able to
maintain one’s own self under the conditions of finiteness and loss of relation-
ships, and to accept life under these presuppositions means to practice a fun-
damental renunciation. It also enables an inner development and maturation.
That is why grief is a process from which a person emerges changed and, pre-
cisely through this, can gain a new, internalized relationship with the deceased
(Klass et al., 1996; Fuchs, 2018).
However, this process can also come to a standstill. Then mourning cannot
fulfil its task of enabling the mourner to live a new life that is directed towards
the future again. This is when prolonged grief disorder (PGD) occurs, which
is characterized by protracted emotional pain and pervasive yearning for the
deceased, lasting more than 6 months after the loss. In most cases, those affected
are unable to accept the reality of death; the inner, imagined presence of the
deceased remains overpowering, and whatever might remind them of their
death—rituals of burial, farewells, separation from the deceased’s belongings
or rooms—is persistently avoided. PGD occurs more frequently after sudden
or violent losses in individuals with insecure attachment patterns, childhood
separation anxiety or an ambivalent relationship with the deceased (van Doorn
et al., 1998; Barry et al., 2001; Vanderwerker et al., 2006; Boelen & Smid,
2017). All of these interfere with the progress of grief work, and the bereaved
14 Thomas Fuchs

remain entangled in the loss they have suffered without going through the part-
ing process. I will come back to this later.

(2) Melancholy
The general mood of sadness and melancholy differs from the directed feel-
ing and process of grief. If we follow Heidegger’s concept of mood or attun-
ement (“Stimmung”) or Ratcliffe’s concept of existential feelings based on it
(Ratcliffe, 2008), then we can discern in melancholy not only a momentary
gloomy mood but a more fundamental relation to existence as such. Moods,
for Heidegger, apply not to the concrete innerworldly being or the ontic, but
they disclose in a still preconceptual way being-in-the-world as a whole, or
the ontological level (Heidegger, 1927, p. 137). Dasein is that kind of entity
which is “in itself ontological”, because in its very being it relates to this being
(ibid., 12f., p. 42). In moods such as anxiety, despair or boredom, the relation
of Dasein to its own fundamental insecurity and its exposure to nothingness
become manifest.
What is it then that is disclosed in melancholy or gloom?—It is not a spe-
cific, concrete loss, by which one is affected, but the fact of the inevitable
transience, or the mark of loss that characterizes existence itself. Philosophi-
cal anthropology and existential philosophy of the first half of the twentieth
century have articulated this character of loss in different ways. From birth,
life is characterized by transitions that always imply separations and partings.
The developing awareness of death intensifies the weight and finality of these
partings, for they simultaneously indicate the dwindling time of life: “With
every piece of life that has been lived . . . the leeway of still experience-
able life narrows tangibly”, writes Scheler (1957, p. 18f.). The life process
means the “constant consumption of what can be experienced as future life
by lived life” (ibid.). Human existence is thus characterized not only by the
recurring loss of what has been achieved but also by the progressive loss of
future possibilities. Likewise, for Heidegger, “the constant unfinishedness” or
“pending of being” (Seinsausstand) is the basic condition of Dasein, which is
essentially determined by its “being ahead of itself ” (Heidegger, 1927, p. 236).
In “running ahead towards death”—a thought that Heidegger takes over
from Kierkegaard—Dasein can realize its actual, authentic selfhood precisely
through anticipating the final loss of all its possibilities.
In Sartre’s understanding, too, the human subject is by its very nature incom-
plete, unfinished and transient: at any given moment, it “is to be what it is not
and not to be what it is”, as he famously put it (Sartre, 1956, p. 70). This means
that humans show an essential “lack of being” (manque d’être, ibid., 85), and all
their efforts to remedy this lack of being through their desires and actions must
remain in vain. Existence is inevitably permeated by negativity and transitori-
ness. Finally, let us take a phrase from Karl Jaspers’s General Psychopathology”:
“The incompleteness and vulnerability of human beings and their freedom and
 Grief, melancholy, and depression 15

infinite possibilities are themselves the cause of illness.” (Jaspers, 1997, p. 8),
pointing already to the connection of transience and mental illness.
Melancholy, then, may be understood as the mood, which discloses this fun-
damental condition of existence, namely in its three components (1) of essen-
tial incompleteness or unfulfilledness, (2) of transitoriness, and (3) of finitude. The
three components are interconnected: because of its openness and incomplete-
ness, the human being is at the same time essentially transitory; it never arrives
at a permanent state or destination. And because each transition, as a farewell,
anticipates the last farewell of death, the human being is essentially ephemeral
and finite: each moment of life also carries death within it.
Melancholy, in other words, is the ontological sensitivity or “clairaudience”
(Holzhey-Kunz, 1994) for the mark of loss in human existence, which for the
melancholic individual becomes the key note of experience. For him, life is
permeated with a memory of irretrievable losses. Time passes and takes away
what it has given. Indeed the awareness of what the past actually means, namely
irreversibility of time, develops from early childhood on through experiences
of “no more”, which are basically sorrowful: farewells, losses and disappoint-
ments. Suffering arises where the familiar gets lost, separations are experienced
and bonds are dissolved. Thus, the melancholic person experiences the tran-
sient even in the beautiful, the farewell already in the present joy, and even
in love there is death. Everything can bear the mark of loss, not because one
is particularly attached to it, but because it is transient. Melancholy therefore
often includes a component of nostalgia, a longing for the past: the myths of
paradise lost, of the golden age, or of the natural primeval state of humanity
point to a lost primordial time of wholeness and bliss, which contrasts with the
transient and sorrowful life of the present.
The basic situation of transience manifests itself in typical biographical tran-
sitions of life, in which there is always a loss to cope with: the loss of the moth-
er’s breast in weaning, the transition from childhood to puberty, parenthood,
entering work life, retirement, aging, the death of others and finally one’s own
death. By virtue of their self-relationship, humans are stance-taking beings and
become a task for themselves; they must also face these situations and carry
out these transitions themselves, for they are not accomplished by instincts. It
is no coincidence that various cultural rites of passage alleviate this task for the
individuals and help them to deal with their transitoriness. Indeed, it can be
said that human beings have always shaped their transitoriness and represented
transitional situations in symbolic form, in order to cope with them through
shared rituals (van Gennep, 1909/1960; Rosenblatt et al., 1976).

(3) Existential vulnerability

Melancholic persons feel the grievous awareness of transience, yet without
despairing of it. This does not have to mean final acceptance, but they have
learned to live with it. It is different with depressed persons: for them, transitions
16 Thomas Fuchs

and losses may become an existential threat, or to take a term of Karl Jaspers,
they become a limit situation (Jaspers, 1925; Fuchs, 2013b). According to Jas-
pers, these are situations in which a hitherto covered or repressed basic condi-
tion of existence may no longer be concealed and comes to the fore. Such basic
conditions are of different kinds:

• the inevitability of freedom and decision, but also the guilt that is con-
nected with it;
• the inescapability of separation and loss;
• the vulnerability and frailty of one’s body,
• the fundamental loneliness of existence, and
• its relentless finitude.

In limit situations, such a condition becomes manifest and can no longer be

denied. This shatters the individual’s fundamental security and trust in the
world: “In every limit situation”, writes Jaspers, “the rug is so to speak drawn
from under my feet” (Jaspers, 1925, p. 249). Something gets broken, which
Jaspers calls the “housing” (Gehäuse). Housings are fixed basic assumptions,
expectations, attitudes and world views which provide shelter against the con-
tradictions and impositions of life. Limit situations are experienced when the
housing breaks, or in other words, when one’s plan for how life should be fails:

The conscious experience of the limit situation, which was previously

concealed by the secure housing in the objective, commonsensical forms
of life, conceptions of reality, ideas of belief [. . . lets] a process begin,
which brings the hitherto and taken-for-granted housing to dissolution.
( Jaspers, 1925, p. 481)

Applying Jaspers’s concept to psychopathology, one can assume that this shat-
tering impact of the limit situation can also afect one’s mental constitution, to
the extent that mental illness may result—especially when the limit situation
remains uncomprehended and cannot be coped with.
A further assumption of a psychopathological approach to limit situations is the
following: people who are disposed to mental illness often show a particular sensiv-
ity for these basic conditions of existence (Holzhey-Kunz, 1994, p. 159); here, I
also use the notion of existential vulnerability (Fuchs, 2013b). Applied to depression,
this means that individuals prone to this disorder perceive the concrete, ontic life
event—for example, a major change in their life, a separation, or a loss—on an
ontological background: the event in question also points to the transitoriness of exis-
tence itself. But this means, that it means much more than just a specific stress—it
becomes a limit situation, in the face of which the individual surrenders and ulti-
mately falls into depression. While the melancholic person experiences transience
only as a general characteristic of existence, for the depressive patient it condenses
in the concrete loss as an abyss that he cannot cross.
 Grief, melancholy, and depression 17

Typical triggering situations of depression may thus be understood as limit

situations, even though they often seem rather inconspicuous from the point of
view of an observer. This is because for the existentially vulnerable person they
bear deeper, ontological implications. To name some examples (Paykel et al.,
1969; Brown et al., 1977; Klerman et al., 1994; Tennant, 2002):

• Generally, so-called “exit events” such as change or loss of job, divorce,

separation, change of location, migration, etc. can become limit situations
for the depression-prone person, for they indicate the loss of existential
constancy and security. Thus, even moving house may point to the impos-
sible fulfilment of the wish for a lasting home in life (Holzhey-Kunz, 1994,
p. 206).
• When the children have grown up and move out, this may not only mean
a painful separation but indicate the impossibility to give justification to
one’s existence by constantly being needed.
• Retirement, for the depression-prone person, can signify the impossibility
to escape the course of life towards death by constant activity.
• Finally, the loss of a loved one through separation or death indicates the
fundamental lack of a lasting protection and community in life.

All these situations or life events are recognizably transitions. For depression-
prone persons with their particular existential vulnerability, they gain a deeper,
more threatening character beyond the usual stress they create: they reveal the
unreliable and transient character of existence itself. In Heidegger’s terms,
we are dealing here with two diferent kinds of understanding: the merely
ontic understanding grasps a behavior or a reaction as intentionally referring
to the concrete situation. The ontological understanding, however, explores
the deeper implications of the situation (Heidegger, 1927, p. 312; see also
Holzhey-Kunz, 1994, p. 152). Below the surface of the patients’ reaction, we
encounter their relation to the fundamental situation of existence, in particular
their awareness of the inescapability of loss, separation and death.

(4) Depression, grief, and melancholy

We are now able to grasp the difference between grief, melancholy and depres-
sion more clearly:

• Grief, as I pointed out, is related to the concrete loss and tries to cope with
it. It deals with the ontic dimension, not with Dasein or existence as such.
It is true that the ontological level of transience as such can also appear in
mourning. However, it remains more of a general background that does
not become the determining dimension of the process; the grief remains
mainly focused on, and connected with the lost person, even in case it
turns into a prolonged grief disorder.
18 Thomas Fuchs

• Melancholy is the mood which discloses and senses the ontological dimen-
sion, namely the fundamental mark of the loss in existence itself, yet
without falling into despair. Situations of passing or loss give rise to mel-
ancholic mood through their ontological implications, but this remains a
painful tinge to the experience without overwhelming the resilience of the
individual.
• For persons prone to depression, however, the concrete situation of sepa-
ration, setback, or loss becomes an existential disappointment or a limit
situation: they sensitively feel its ontological implication, but it literally
becomes too heavy for them to sustain and to bear it. Depression thus results
from a felt powerlessness and helplessness vis-à-vis the limit situation. It
means not just an intensified or exacerbated grief reaction but a capitula-
tion in the face of the human condition. Indeed one might say that depres-
sion precisely results from the inability to enter into the process of grief, to
confront the loss and to mourn it.

Thus, grief can be a gateway to depression, but only when the loss becomes a
limit situation and is experienced on an ontological level, as something not to
be coped with. This requires a corresponding vulnerability, which is existential,
emotional and biological in nature (Murphy & Bates, 1997; Hammen, 2001;
De Raedt & Koster, 2010). Now if grief and depression difer in their existen-
tial dimension, how does this distinction manifest itself phenomenologically
and clinically?

• To begin with, depression is characterized by the loss of the intentional object,

which is always implied in the emotion of grief. The depressive patient can
no longer really feel the attachment to the deceased person; grief over him
or her is increasingly replaced by self-centered ruminations. The actual
process of mourning does not get going at all or it is unhooked, as it were.
Even if at a superficial level the loss may still be the object of depressive
complaints, one may discern from their emptiness, even more from their
generalization into laments about the world and oneself that it is basically
no longer the concrete loss that is at stake, but its ontological dimension.
• Moreover, grief is a feeling which is experienced in affective bodily reso-
nance, which may still allow for sorrowing or crying about the lost loved
one. Depression, in contrast, leads to a loss of affective resonance, which the
patients often complain about as lack of feelings (Fuchs, 2013a). In his
autobiographical account, Solomon describes his depression as “a loss of
feeling, a numbness, [which] had infected all my human relations. I didn’t
care about love; about my work; about family; about friends” (Solomon,
2001, p. 45)—and to this one could even add: about loss. For the bodily
constriction and rigidity characteristic of depression no longer allows for
feelings of love, joy, nor sorrow or grief. The affective attunement with
 Grief, melancholy, and depression 19

the world is lost, and the empty mood of depression is all that remains.
This mood is also different from melancholy, not only in intensity but also
in its constriction: whereas the melancholic person still feels attached to
transient things and longs for the past, the depressive patient has lost all
connection and longing.
• A further characteristic feature of depression is the standstill of lived time
and loss of open future (Fuchs, 2013c). This is noticeable in the patient’s
resignation and hopelessness regarding the possibility to cope with the loss
and to live on under its conditions. Mourning remains an—albeit labori-
ous and protracted—process, whereas in depression the temporality of the
subject stops. In other words, mourning still retains a sense of an open
future, while in depression the sense of the future as potentiality and pos-
sible change is lost. Typical complaints are as follows: “I think that my life
will never change, and that I will always be depressed. Thinking about the
future makes my depression even worse because I can’t bear to think of
being depressed my whole life” (Ratcliffe, 2019, p. 543).
• As the crucial feature of depression in distinction from grief, Freud already
emphasized the turn of the complaints against oneself: “In mourning it
is the world which has become poor and empty; in melancholia it is the
ego itself ” (Freud, 1917, p. 246; by melancholia here Freud means depres-
sion). The way into either grief or depression bifurcates at the question
which bereavement implicitly poses to the subject, namely: “Am I still
able and worthy to live on as an integral person without the other?” If the
loss becomes a limit situation which may no longer be coped with, it leads
to the capitulation of the self in the face of the unbearable conditions of
life, and this capitulation manifests itself in self-degradation, self-accusation
and feelings of failure and insufficiency. This also distinguishes depres-
sion from melancholy which is usually not related to feelings of guilt or
self-devaluation.

This last aspect points to an important prerequisite for experiencing a major loss
as an unmanageable limit situation, namely a lack of inherent self-confidence
and self-worth. This has led to the person erecting a housing of securities for
him- or herself, one of which is the often symbiotic dependence on relevant
others. This may serve as an “existential defense mechanism”. However, if
the self could hitherto only stabilize itself through the relationship and iden-
tification with the other, then it is now not only thrown back on itself but
also deprived of the central pillar of its own worth and self-esteem. Granted,
grief is also connected with a partial loss of the self, insofar as the person was
deeply engaged in his or her attachments. Nevertheless, the mourner manages
to transform this part of himself, to detach himself from the loss and to acquire
a new integrity. Depression begins where this process of transformation and
detachment does not get going or gets stuck, so that it is no longer the object
20 Thomas Fuchs

but the self that appears lost. On this, I will finally present a case study from my
own practice (Fuchs, 2000, p. 274f.):

Several months after the death of her father, a middle-aged bank employee
fell ill from a severe depression. She had always loved and revered him, had
often sought his advice or consolation, and in difficult situations she had
often thought what he would have done. She was married to a violent-
tempered man prone to binge drinking whose constant jealousy, threats
and blows she endured for 15 years, until he finally left her for another
woman. Fortunately, she said, for she would not have found the strength
for a divorce herself. In the same year, her only son was killed in an acci-
dent. Her father had also helped her very much in coping with the loss.
Three years later, her life gained new ground through a new relationship.
The patient reported that she had been inwardly frozen at the sudden
death of her father. She could not cry and not even grasp the death. At
the grave, she felt numb and could not feel any sadness, as if he was not
buried at all. Even now, she still had the creeping feeling that he was still
around, and she had the urge to tell him something. In the weeks after his
death, she had withdrawn more and more, felt worthless and empty, and
no longer saw any meaning in her life. She increasingly lost all feelings and
could not even feel the pain and grief for her father.
In our psychotherapy, it became clear that the magical sheltering coat
of the idealized father helped the patient to endure the physical blows of
her husband as well as the blows of fate. Under this protective shield or
“housing” in Jaspers’s sense, she could cope with her divorce and even with
the loss of her child without depression. In contrast, the loss of her father
seemed so incomprehensible and unbearable that she could not mourn it
and did not realize the loss even at the grave. Therefore she was still able to
feel the atmospheric presence of her father even 9 months after his death.
In the therapy, she also gained the insight that his death meant not only the
loss of a life-long shelter, but also the deeply disturbing recognition that “I
am now myself the next”, that means, that he no longer stood as a shield
between her and her own death. Only later in the course of psychotherapy
was it possible for the patient to enter into a process of grief and, supported
by rituals that we agreed upon, to finally bid farewell to her father.

This case study illustrates how the loss became a limit situation for the patient
that she could not cope with, thus missing the process of mourning. She sur-
rendered in the face of the ontological implication of the loss, namely that
there was no ultimate shelter against fate and death. Precisely her inability to
grieve ultimately led to the depression. We also recognize clearly the changed,
namely stagnating, temporality of the illness: depression freezes the process of
life, as it were, such that a gradual detachment from the loss and its integra-
tion into one’s future life is not possible. The task of transition and farewell,
 Grief, melancholy, and depression 21

which is otherwise enabled by mourning, fails in depression, and life gets stuck.
Standstill of time and desynchronization from the common or world time of
the others are the hallmark of depressive temporality in general (Fuchs, 2001).
Granted, lived time also falters in severe grief reactions, and the bereaved per-
son fails for a longer time to reconnect with the progressive time of the common
world. Thus, in a report of her experience after her son’s sudden death, Denise
Riley describes an “acute sensation of being cut off from any temporal flow”,
leading to a “freezing of time” (Riley, 2012, p. 7). But this stagnation results
from the fact that the mourner cannot let go of the past and remains bound to it
in longing, searching, and constant memories. In a sense, mourners therefore
live in two times—the present, which they rebel against, because it only presents
the loss, and the shared past, which remains unabatedly present to them (Fuchs,
2018). In depression, however, the emotional connection that grief sustains with
the shared past breaks down; here it is not the clinging to the past that stops
time, but it is the inner, vital time itself that comes to a standstill—as manifested in
the lack of drive and psychomotor inhibition (Fuchs, 2013c).
Finally, let us consider how this characterization of depression differs from
the phenomenology of prolonged grief disorder (PGR). I mentioned earlier
that in PGR there is a persistent and intense longing for the deceased whose
death cannot be truly realized and accepted. The affective intentionality
directed towards the past is thus undiminished, even increased, which means
that those affected still live “in two times”. In addition, they continue to expe-
rience intense feelings of sadness, pain, yearning, anger or blame related to the
loss. Depressed patients, however, can no longer feel an inner relationship to
the deceased; their emotions are numbed, and the loss leaves only emptiness
instead of sadness or longing.
Thus, PGR differs from depression mainly by a different intentionality, tem-
porality and affectivity; it remains related to the “ontic” or inner-wordly level.
According to the conception proposed here, prolonged grief is therefore not
based on a fundamental existential vulnerability; it has other, above all psy-
chodynamic preconditions, which consist in the circumstances of the death,
an insecure attachment pattern or ambivalent relationship to the deceased (see
earlier). Accordingly, PGR usually does not respond to pharmacological treat-
ment like depression but primarily to interpersonal therapy, not least including
emotional exposure to the loss (Bryant et al., 2014; Shear et al., 2016). Such an
intervention would not be indicated in the case of depression; only when the
illness itself has been largely overcome can the actual grief work get underway
and be supported.

Conclusion: reactions to transience

Human beings are incomplete, unfinished beings, who never quite arrive and live
in constant transitions. Moreover, as stance-taking beings, they have to perform
these transitions themselves, leaving behind their past and, to a certain extent,
22 Thomas Fuchs

their own selves time and again. I have considered different reactions to transience
and loss: grief as being directed to the concrete loss and the lost person; melancholy
as a basic mood that is ontologically related to transience in general; and depres-
sion, which again occurs as a result of a concrete loss but cannot mourn it as a
circumscribed event. Rather, depressive persons experience the loss as a limit
situation which reveals an unbearable existential truth and ultimately forces them
to surrender. The past- and future-oriented process of mourning is then replaced
by a standstill of time and a desynchronization from the world time shared with
others. This corresponds to the solitary exposition of the depressive patient to the
basic condition of existence that he feels more than others but cannot cope with.
The distinction of the ontic and the ontological level may serve as a useful
foundation for a clearer distinction of mourning and depression than could
be provided by criteria of intensity or duration. Although there are certainly
similarities and overlaps in the clinical presentation of grief, complicated or
prolonged grief disorder and various kinds of depression, it should not be over-
looked that depression denotes a new and deeper level of reaction to transience,
namely a surrender of the self resulting from an ontological disappointment and
despair. This will also lead to different psychotherapeutic approaches: grief may
require counselling or therapeutic support in working through the loss itself and
possible obstacles to the process of coping, all the more if there are signs of com-
plicated grief. On the other hand, an existential therapy of depression should
not start before the patient has overcome the acute illness. Then the therapy first
has to deal with the ontological implications of the loss: it will help the patient
understand his or her vulnerability with regard to certain basic conditions of
life, which has led him to establish a protective housing or existential defense
mechanisms. Therapeutic work will then try to increase the patient’s acceptance
towards such conditions, thus increasing his or her autonomy and freedom.
Once the patient has gained new existential ground, it becomes important to
catch up on the process of grief and reintegration that had been missing so far.

Note
1 “At the very least, what endures is an inchoate sense that life could one day be better than
it currently is” (Ratcliffe, 2019, p. 543).

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Chapter 2

What is longing? An
existential-phenomenological
investigation
Allan Køster

Introduction
Longing is without a doubt one of the most fundamental constituents of the
experience of grief. Some might even feel inclined to define grief as the very
experience of a profound longing for a deceased. While I am not sure that such
a narrow understanding of grief is productive—or even that longing is a neces-
sary condition for grief—there can be little doubt as to the centrality of the
emotion of longing to the phenomenon of grief. This is also reflected in the
recent mental health diagnosis prolonged grief disorder [PGD] (Eisma et al., 2020),
where longing appears as one of the core symptoms specified as a “persistent
and pervasive longing for the deceased”.
Notwithstanding this prominent place longing takes up in our understand-
ing of grief, it has so far not been exposed to any detailed phenomenological
analysis. In fact, in stark contrast to its overall place in human experiential life,
the nature of longing has received conspicuously little attention from contem-
porary researchers (Holm, 2001). This is not to say that there is no reference
to or investigation of the prevalence or existence of longing in empirical grief
studies. Rather, the point is that in such studies longing is assumed to be self-
explanatory and without any need for further qualification. The assumption
is, it seems, that we already have adequate clarity as to what longing is, and
can simply start counting. As already voiced by a range of commentators (e.g.,
Eisma et al., 2020; Greene, 2018), this tendency to assume the adequacy of a
plain language-use is problematic to the PGD diagnosis (and beyond), where
not only core features such as “longing” and “preoccupation” but also additional
criteria such as “guilt”, “anger”, “denial” and “blame” are open to interpretive
ambiguities that may compromise consistent use and emphasis. In light of such
ambiguities, it seems reasonable to propose that contemporary empirical grief
research could benefit substantially from phenomenological research to clarify
basic experiences and their associated concepts (see also Ratcliffe, 2019).
In this chapter, it is my ambition to provide a foundational analysis of the
experiential structure of longing—specifically, the phenomenon of longing for
the dead. In short, my claim is as follows: longing is by no means a simple and

DOI: 10.4324/9781003099420-4
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 “And where is your husband?”
“He is in London. My father does not know that such a person
exists.”
“Great Cæsar’s ghost!”
“No; I have never dared to tell him yet. I married from school,” she
continued, and in a few hurried sentences gave the outline of her
story, omitting her husband’s name and profession, and all reference
to her small son. “You see how I am situated. I have not ventured to
tell the truth yet, and I confide my secret to your honour and your
keeping.”
“Of course it is perfectly safe,” he began, rather stiffly, “and I feel
myself very much honoured by your confidence, and all that.”
“Oh, Lord Tony, please don’t talk to me in that tone,” she
exclaimed, with tears in her eyes. “I told you—because—you are
what men call ‘a good sort;’ because I feel that I can rely upon you;
because, though you like me, you don’t really care for me, you know
you don’t; nor have I ever encouraged you or any man. My father is
devoted to you; he is determined to—to—well—you know his wishes
—and I want you to allow him to think that you have cooled, and
have changed your mind. You—you understand?”
“And play the hypocrite all round!”
“Yes, but only for a little while.”
“Rather hard lines, when I have not changed my mind. Is Rachel in
the swindle?”
“No—oh no!—no one but you and me and my husband, and a
friend of his.”
“And pray, when do you intend to discharge your little domestic
bomb?”
“When I go home. If I were to speak now, I should be turned out,
probably on the hall door-steps, and the party would be broken up.”
(Yes, and there were several good days’ deer-stalking still in
prospect, thought Lord Tony, much as he was concerned at this
recent astounding confidence.)
“I know you are dreadfully vexed,” she said humbly; “but you will
forgive me and stand by me, won’t you?” and she looked at him
appealingly. She had really most lovely and expressive eyes; who
could refuse them anything?
“Meaning, that I am to neglect you openly, slight you on all
occasions?”
“There is a medium; you need not be too marked in your defection,
unless you like”—with a short, hysterical laugh.
“I don’t like the job at all; but I will lend you a hand, and be a party
to the fraud. Whoever is your husband, Mrs. What’s-your-name, is a
deuced lucky fellow!”
“Then it is a bargain, that you keep my secret?”
“Yes; here is my hand on it!”
At this instant (it is constantly the way) Mr. West paused and
looked behind, and was extremely pleased. He had intended to
shout to this tardy pair to hurry on, for the carriages were waiting, the
horses, of course, catching cold. However, he must make
allowances, under the circumstances.
Evidently Tony had come to the point again, and been accepted.
He hastened down the road in great delight, hustled the company
into various vehicles, and departed in the landau vis-à-vis to Mrs.
Leach (the wretched condition of her hair and complexion discounted
many delightful recollections of her beauty); and he took care to
leave the dog-cart behind, for the sole use of the happy couple.
 CHAPTER XXI.
AN INTERRUPTION.

It was certainly strange that Lord Tony had not sought him out the
evening after the picnic, said Mr. West to himself, considering that it
was all settled now. Indeed, it struck him that his future son-in-law
pointedly avoided him, and had lounged out of the smoking-room
when he found himself with him alone. Of course, Lord Tony was
aware that his consent was granted, but he would have liked him to
have come to him at once. The next day, despite an effort to escape,
Mr. West captured his reluctant quarry en route to the stables, and
said, as he overtook him, rather out of breath, “Well, my boy, I see
you made it all right yesterday! Why have you not been to tell the old
man—eh?” and he beamed upon him and poked him playfully with
his cane.
Lord Tony suddenly found himself in a very nice moral dilemma.
Oh! here was a fix and no mistake!
“There is nothing to tell yet, Mr. West,” he blurted out.
“What! when I saw you both philandering behind the party hand-in-
hand, and—and—left you the dog-cart on the strength of it!”
“Oh, I only took Miss West’s hand for a moment—to—to ratify a
promise.”
“Promise of what?” impatiently.
“A promise of her friendship,” stammered his companion. It was a
moment of mental reservations.
“Oh!” with an expression of deepest scorn. “That wasn’t the way
we made love when I was a young man. What a miserable milk-and-
watery set you are! Friendship!”
 “Yes, I know there is a falling off,” admitted Lord Tony, with
humility. “But we are not as energetic in any way as the last
generation. We prefer to take things easy, and to take our own time.
Miss West is young—‘marry in haste and repent at leisure,’ you
know,” he pursued collectedly. “You must not rush Miss West, you
know. She—she—all she asks for is time.”
“Did she name any time?”
“Er—well—no.”
“I’m afraid you mismanaged the business—eh? You just leave it to
me. I’ll arrange it!”
“No—no—no. That’s just the one thing I bar. Interference would
dish the whole concern. I beg and implore of you to leave—a—well
alone—for the present, at any rate. Miss West and I understand one
another.”
“I’m glad of that; for I’m blessed if I understand either of you!”
exclaimed his disgusted listener.
“Ah! hullo, there goes Miss Pace, and I promised to play tennis
with her. I must go and get my bat and shoes.” Exit.
At the end of September the tide of enjoyment at Clane was at its
height. Theatricals were in rehearsal—that fertile field for flirtation
and fighting. The bags of the season had been enviably heavy; the
poor neighbours were sensible of a pleasant circulation of money
and new ideas; prices were rising steadily. The wealthy neighbours
appreciated Mr. West’s princely hospitality, and spoke of him as “not
a bad sort in his way, though a shocking little bounder.” Mrs. Leach
had prolonged her visit, and her attentions to her host were
becoming quite remarkable. He was not an ardent sportsman; his
short legs were unaccustomed to striding over the heather-clad
mountains; he did not want to shoot deer—in fact, he was rather
afraid of them. So he left the delights of his shooting to well-
contented, keen young men, and was easily beguiled into long
saunters among the grounds and woods in the syren’s company. To
tell the truth, they were not much missed, and they frequently rested
on rustic seats, and talked to one another with apparent confidence
—flattering confidence. He spoke of Madeline’s future—his earnest
desire to see her suitably married. “A girl like her might marry a
duke; don’t you think so, Mrs. Leach?”
“She might,” said the lady, but without a trace of enthusiasm in her
voice—in fact, there was an inflection of doubt. “She is undeniably
lovely, but——”
“But what?”
“I—well—I am sentimental” (about as sentimental as a
charwoman), “and I have my own ideas. I think that dear Madeline
has a private romance: that she either cares for some one whom she
can never marry——”
“That’s nonsense,” interrupted her companion, impatiently. “I have
her word of honour that there is no one she wants to marry.”
“Oh, well, she may have loved and lost,” said the lady, sweetly;
“for, speaking as a woman, it is inconceivable that a girl who is, or
was, heart-free could be absolutely indifferent to every one. She has
dozens of admirers, for she is not only very pretty, but”—and she
smiled enchantingly into Mr. West’s little eyes—“very rich—your
heiress. It is my opinion that Madeline has some little closet in her
heart that you have never seen—that she is constant to some
memory. Of course, time tries all things, and in time this memory will
fade; but I am positive that dearest Madeline will not marry for some
years.” Then she tapped his arm playfully. They were sitting side-by-
side in a shady path in the vast pleasure grounds. “You will be
married before her yourself.”
“I—I—marry! I have never dreamt of such a thing.”
“Why not, pray? You are comparatively young. A man is always
young, until he is really going downhill. A man is young at fifty. Now,
look at a woman at fifty!” and she paused expressively.
He turned his eyes upon her. Little did he suppose that he was
contemplating a woman of fifty—a woman who was extravagant,
luxurious, dreadfully in debt, almost at the end of her resources and
her friends’ forbearance, and who was resolved upon marrying him
whom she had once called “that vulgar horror, the little Australian
squatter.”
He looked at her with a rather shame-faced air and a grin. Alas!
flattery was hurrying him to destruction. She was an extremely
handsome woman, of the Juno type—erect, stately, with bright, dark
eyes, dark hair, a short straight nose, and beautiful teeth (some were
her own). She was dressed in a pale yellow muslin, with white
ribbons, and wore a most fascinating picture-hat and veil; her gloves,
shoes, and sunshade were of the choicest, and it was not
improbable that, in the coming by-and-by, Mr. West would have the
pleasure of paying for this charming toilette.
“A woman of fifty,” she pursued, “is an old hag; her day has gone
by, her hour of retreat has sounded. She is grey, stout—ten to one,
unwieldy—and dowdy. Now, a man of fifty shoots, hunts, dances as
he did when he was twenty-five—in fact, as far as dancing goes, he
is thrice as keen as the ordinary ball-room boy, who simply won’t
dance, and is the despair of hostesses!”
“I’ve never thought of marrying,” he repeated. “Never!”
“No; all your thoughts are for Madeline, I am aware, and the
alliance she is to make; but my motto is, ‘Live while you live; live
your own individual life, and don’t starve on the scraps of other
people’s good things.’”
“Do you think any one would have me, Mrs. Leach?” he asked, as
he leant on his elbow and looked up into her glorious eyes.
She was the Honourable Mrs. Leach, well-connected, fashionable,
handsome, and—oh, climax!—“smart.” Yes, the idea was an
illumination. How well she would look at the head of his table and in
the landau!
“Dear Mr. West, how humble you are! I am sure you would—(she
meant his money)—make any reasonable woman happy.” She
glanced at him timidly, and looked down and played coyly with her
châtelaine.
What eyelashes she had, what a small white ear, what a pretty
hand! His own was already gently laid upon it, the words were
actually on his lips, when a bareheaded page burst through an
adjacent path, breathless from running. He had a telegram in his
hand, and halted the moment he caught sight of his master, who
instantly withdrew his hand and became the alert man of business.
Mrs. Leach was a lady, so she was unable to breathe an oath into
her moustache,—had oaths been her safety-valve. She, however,
thought some hasty thoughts of round-faced pages who brought
telegrams (which she kept to herself). Mr. West, however, was not so
self-possessed. As soon as he cast his eyes over the telegram he
gave vent to a loud exclamation of impatience, and then subsided
into an inarticulate mutter, whilst the page and the lady devoured him
with their eyes!
“Bad news, I’m afraid,” she said sympathetically.
“Um—ah, yes. My stockbroker in London has made a most
confounded mess of some business. Buys in when I tell him to sell
out. I wish I had him by the ear this minute.”
“Is there an answer, sir?” asked the page.
“Yes; I’m coming in directly. Tell the fellow to wait.” And Mr. West
and the handsome widow turned towards the house.
This vile telegram had entirely distracted his ideas. His mind was
now fastened on the Stock Exchange, on the money market; he had
not a thought to spare for the lady beside him.
“It’s the twenty-ninth, is it not?” he asked.
“Yes.”
“I must go home sooner than I intended. I shall have to be in
London next week. The fox is his own best messenger” (and the fox
was going to escape!).
Mrs. Leach had intended remaining in her present comfortable
quarters for another fortnight. This odious telegram had upset her
plans.
“Then, you will not return here?”
“Oh no. What would be the good of that?”
 “It seems a pity. You will be losing all the lovely autumn tints.
October is a charming month.”
“Yes; but it is not charming when some one at a distance is making
ducks and drakes of your coin, and I’d rather see the colour of my
own money again than any autumn tint,” was the practical remark.
“I have had a most delightful visit here. I shall never, never forget
dear Clane, nor all your kindness and hospitality.”
“You must come to us in London.”
“Thank you so much, and I shall always be delighted to chaperon
dear Maddie at any time. A girl like her is in such a difficult position.
She is very young, you know, to go out without a married lady. Of
course, you are a host in yourself; but——”
“But Lady Rachel and Mrs. Lorraine take Maddie out, you know,”
broke in Mr. West, “and a girl can go anywhere with her father.”
“Now there, dear Mr. West, I differ with you totally—indeed I do. A
girl should have an older woman as well—a woman for choice who
has no young people of her own, who is well-connected, well-
looking, well-dressed, and who knows the ropes, as they say.” She
was sketching a portrait of herself. “And Madeline is so remarkably
pretty, too, the observed of all observers. I am so fond of her. She is
so sweet. I almost feel as if she were my own daughter. Ah! I never
had a daughter!” (But she could have a step-daughter; and if she
was once established as Madeline’s friend and chaperon, the rest
would be an easy matter.)
“I am very sorry to have to leave Clane sooner than I expected;
but business is business. Business first, pleasure afterwards.”
“And you have given us all a great deal of pleasure. I don’t know
such a host anywhere; and it has been such a comfort to me to talk
to you about my hateful law business, and to tell you things
unreservedly, and consult you. My odious brother-in-law, Lord
Suckington, never will assist me, and I never seem to be out of the
hands of my solicitors. Ah, here is your horrid telegraph-boy waiting.
May I go in and order tea, and pour you out a cup?”
 In ten days’ time the entire party had dispersed. Madeline and her
father travelled over to London. As the latter took leave of Mrs.
Leech at Mallow Junction, and saw her into the Cork train, that
warm-hearted lady, looking bewitching in a charming travelling-cloak
and hat, leant out of the window and whispered as she pressed his
hand, “Good-bye, or, rather, au revoir. Be sure you write to me!”
And was it possible that he had seen a tear in her eye?
 CHAPTER XXII.
MR. WYNNE’S VISITOR.

And meanwhile what of Laurence Wynne? His short, smart

sketches had made a hit. He was becoming a man of mark in literary
as well as legal circles, and was overwhelmed with invitations to
dinners, luncheons, and “at homes;” for be it known that Laurence
Wynne was looked upon with favourable eyes by not a few mammas
and daughters as a clever, rising, good-looking young bachelor.
Some had heard a vague rumour that there once upon a time had
been a Mrs. Wynne, a girl whom he had married out of a lodging-
house or restaurant, but who, fortunately for him, had died in the first
year of her marriage. Some said this was not true, some said it was.
All agreed with extraordinary unanimity in never alluding to Mrs.
Wynne in his company. After all, in these days of feverish haste, a
story is soon forgotten, and people have too much to do to waste
time in turning over the back pages of other folks’ lives. The ladies
had not been slow in picking up sundry hints and allusions to
“Wynne,” as dropped across dinner tables by their husbands and
fathers, and not a few hospitable families had made up their minds
that they would cultivate Mr. Wynne.
In vain they were assured that he was not a society man and
hated ladies—which, of course, was nonsense. He was busy and
industrious, that was all; and now and then he did come out of his
shell, and sit at their tables, and stand against the wall at their
dances, and made himself so agreeable that he was figuratively
patted on the back, and requested to come again; but he so seldom
came again.
It was part of his duty, he told himself, to be on good terms with his
august seniors—to respond to their first invitations, to make himself
pleasant to their wives and daughters, hand tea-cups, turn over
music, open doors, talk suitable commonplaces; but when any of
these same young ladies sat down, so to speak, before him, and
commenced to open the trenches for a flirtation, he began to feel
uncomfortable. Long ago, before he met Madeline West, this sort of
thing was well enough—but even then a little of it had gone a long
way.
Now, with Madeline in the background, and amusing herself, no
doubt very delightfully, and not thinking of him, he could not—no, he
could not—like others less conscientious, laugh and exchange
sallies and cross swords and glances with any of these pretty,
sprightly girls, knowing full well in his heart that he was all the time
that wolf in sheep’s clothing—a married man! And then he was
critical at heart, and hard to please.
As he looked round the various groups at picnics and tennis
parties—he now and then went for an hour—he saw no one who
approached Madeline in any way—face, figure, grace, or gait—
especially Madeline as he had last seen her—in her very fine
feathers. Doubtless any of these girls would have made a more
manageable wife, he thought to himself bitterly. Yes! she had now
taken the bit completely within her teeth, and he was powerless to
control her. She went and came and stayed away when she pleased,
and for precisely as long as it suited her. Her desertion—it was that
—was all in pursuit of his interests—his and the child’s. What a fool
she must think him! She had evidently resolved to play the rôle of
daughter first, wife next, and mother very much the last of all! Her
neglect of him he could tolerate, but her neglect of her child made
him excessively angry. She had wholly consigned it to Mrs. Holt, and
lightly shaken off all a mother’s duties. She a mother! She did not
look the part as she chattered fashionable gossip to those idiotic
young men on Euston platform, and never cast a thought to the
infant she was turning her back on in a certain country farmhouse.
She had been away nearly four months, and she had written—oh
yes, pretty frequently, but the tone of her letters was a little forced,
their gaiety was not natural—perhaps the tone of his own epistles
was somewhat curt. The relations between Mr. and Mrs. Wynne
were becoming strained—a crisis was impending.
 Among the departures from Kingstown on a certain date were Mr.
and Miss West and suite, who duly arrived at Belgrave Square, and
found London filling fast. Their arrival, however, was somewhat
unexpected—the housekeeper had barely time to despatch her
sister’s family back to Manchester, and the poor woman was
compelled to put off an evening party for which she had issued
invitations among her own set.
Mr. West had a great deal of business to transact, and spent most
of his days in the city—and this was Madeline’s opportunity.
She lost no time in paying a visit to the Inner Temple, arriving on
foot, plainly dressed, and wearing a thick veil. She was a good deal
bewildered by the old courts and passages, but at last discovered
Mr. Wynne’s chambers. Here she was received by an elderly, bare-
armed, irascible-looking woman—with a palpable beard—who, after
looking her over leisurely from head to foot, told her to “Go up to the
second flight front. She could tell nothing of Mr. Wynne; he was in
and out all day, like a dog in a fair.”
Further up the narrow stairs she came face-to-face with two
gentlemen, who paused—she felt it—and looked back at her as she
knocked and rang at the door of “Mr. Laurence Wynne.” Truly, such
an elegant-looking young lady was not to be met about the old
Temple every day; and never had such an apparition been seen on
Mr. Wynne’s landing. The outer room was occupied by two clerks,
who stared at the visitor in unqualified amazement. Here was
something spicy in the shape of a client! Very, very different to the
usual run. “A breach of promise,” was their immediate and mutual
idea. Something more to the purpose than cranky old fogies fighting
about rights of way, or an involved legacy case. This was a pretty
girl, and a swell.
So much they noted with their sharp, semi-judicial eyes, as she
stood timidly in the doorway and raised her veil.
One of them instantly bounded off his seat, and asked what he
could do for her?
 “Could she see Mr. Wynne?” she faltered, as her eyes roved round
the outer office, with its great double desk piled with documents, its
rows of law books ranged round the room on staggering, rickety
shelves, its threadbare carpet, its rusty fender, its grimy windows,
and last, not least, two bottles of stout, and a pewter mug.
Still, these two youths might be Laurence’s clerks. Could it be
possible? Could it be possible that these immense piles of papers
concerned Laurence? If so, he was getting on—really getting on at
last. But what a horrible musty place! The very air smelt of dust and
leather and law books.
“Mr. Wynne, miss, did you say? Very sorry, but Mr. Wynne is in
court,” said the clerk, briskly.
“When will he be back?” she inquired, advancing and standing in
the front of another door, evidently Mr. Wynne’s own sanctum.
“Afraid I cannot say, miss; he is to speak in the case of Fuller v.
Potts—breach of contract. Any business, any message——”
But the words died upon his lips—this uncommonly cool young
party had actually walked into Mr. Wynne’s own sitting-room.
“It’s all right,” she remarked carelessly, divining his horror. “Mr.
Wynne knows me.”
And she went and sat down in his armchair, in front of a table piled
with documents, all more or less neatly tied up and docketed.
There were numbers of letters under little weights. There was a
law book, a couple of open notes, and all the apparatus of a busy
legal man. She shrugged her shoulders and looked round the room;
it was dingy and shabby (furniture taken at a valuation from the last
tenant); the carpet between the door and the fireplace was worn
threadbare, as if it were a pathway—which it was.
Another pathway ran from the window to the wall, which the
inmate had probably paced as he made up his speeches. There was
her especial abomination, horse-hair furniture, a queer spindle-
legged sideboard, some casual old prints on the wall; certainly there
was nothing in the room to divert Laurence’s attention. Outside there
was no prospect beyond a similar set of chambers, a very ugly block
of buildings, and one forlorn tree waving its branches restlessly to
and fro.
She got up and glanced into an adjoining apartment. The clerks
were not now watching her—Mr. Wynne did not tolerate idleness.
This was his bedroom, a still barer scene. No carpet whatever, no
curtains, a small iron bedstead, a big bath, a battalion of boots.
Laurence, she remembered, was always extremely particular about
his boots, and hated to wear them when patched; these were whole,
well cut, and in good case. There was a sixpenny glass on the wall,
a painted chest of drawers and washstand, also one chair. Spartan
simplicity, indeed! What a horrible contrast to her own luxurious
home! She closed the door with a little shudder, and as she did so a
quantity of large, important-looking cards and envelopes, stuck about
the dusty chimney-piece mirror and the pipe-rack, caught her eye,
and she immediately proceeded to examine them with dainty fingers.
“Blest if she ain’t overhauling his invitations!” exclaimed one of the
clerks, who, by tilting his chair back until it was at a most hazardous
angle, caught a glimpse of what he and his coadjutor began to think
was “Mr. Wynne’s young woman.”
“Her cheek beats all! Shall I go and interfere?” asked the first
speaker, in an awestruck whisper.
“No; you just leave her alone,” said number two, who had the
bump of caution well developed. “It ain’t our business; but I did think
he was about the last man in the world to have a lady coming and
routing among his things. There ain’t nothing that she’ll find as will
make her any wiser,” he concluded contemptuously.
But here he was mistaken! She discovered a great deal that
surprised her much—very much. Here were cards from old judges
and stupid law fogies, requesting the pleasure of Mr. Wynne’s
company at dinner. That was easily understood. But there were
several invitations to entertainments to which she and her father had
been bidden! and also, what was the strangest thing of all, blazoned
cards of invitation to houses to which her father had not been able to
obtain an entrée, smile he never so assiduously on the smart or
noble hosts. She stood for several minutes with one of these
precious cards in her hand, and turned it over reflectively as she
recalled the desperate and unavailing efforts of her parent to obtain
a similar honour—the toadying, the flattery, the back-stair crawling
that it made her crimson to recall! And, such is poor human nature—
poor, frail human nature!—this bit of pasteboard did more to raise
her husband in her estimation than all the briefs she saw piled upon
his desk. She now began to contemplate him from a new point of
view. Hitherto she had been very fond of Laurence—in a way—her
own way. He had been good to her when she had no friends, he had
borne their poverty with wonderful patience. Yes, certainly he had.
But she had thought—rather resentfully at times—that a man without
some preparation for such a rainy day as they had experienced
ought not to have married; he should have left her as he found her.
She did not hold these views at the time. She liked Laurence better
than any one, all the same; but the horrible intimacy of dire want had
bred—well, yes, a little contempt; his illness, his helplessness had
made her put herself somewhat above him in her own secret
thoughts. She (for a time) had been bread-winner and house-band,
and well and bravely she had struggled at that desperate crisis; but,
alas! that it must be recorded, riches had spoiled her. She had
inherited a luxurious, pleasure-loving nature, which cultivation had
fostered, until, from a small and scarcely noticeable plant, it had
grown into an overwhelming jungle! The longer she lived in her
father’s home the less disposed was she to return to her own modest
roof-tree; and especially, looking round with a wry face, to such a
place as this! She was now necessary to her father. He was
something (he said) of an invalid; whilst Laurence was young and
strong. Every day she was hoping to see her way to making the
great disclosure, and every day the chance of making that disclosure
seemed to become more and more remote. Laurence was evidently
well thought of in influential circles, and, “of course, Laurence is of
good family. Any one can see that at a glance,” she mentally
remarked; “and, no doubt, his own people had now taken him by the
hand.”
The discovery that he moved in a set above her own had raised
him in her opinion. Latterly she had been looking down on Laurence,
as already stated—perhaps only an inch or so, but still, she placed
herself above him. He had drawn a great and unexpected prize in
the matrimonial lottery, but he scarcely seemed to realize the value
of his treasure! She had bracketed Laurence mentally with obscurity,
shabbiness, and poverty, and had a vague idea that only through her
means could he ever emerge into the sunshine of prosperity. She
had a kind of protecting affection for him, dating from the days when
she had starved for his sake, and made his bed and his beef tea,
and washed his shirts. She looked down upon him just a little. It is
possible to be fond of a man and to entertain this feeling. And now
Laurence’s busy clerks, and these coroneted envelopes had given
her ideas a shock. She went over and stood in the window, and
drummed idly upon the small old-fashioned panes, where not a few
names and initials were cut. As she stood thus—certainly a very
pretty figure to be seen in any one’s window, much less that of an
avowed anchorite like Laurence Wynne—a young gentleman
sauntered to the opposite casement, with his hands in his pockets
and his mouth widely yawning, as if he were on the point of
swallowing up the whole premises. He paused in mute
astonishment, and gazed incredulously across the narrow lane that
divided the two buildings. Then Madeline distinctly heard him shout
in a stentorian voice—
“I say, Wallace, come here, quick—quick, and look at the girl in
Wynne’s window! My wig, ain’t that a joke?”
On hearing this summons she instantly backed out of sight, and
had the amusement of seeing three heads peering across, vainly
endeavouring to catch a glimpse of the promised apparition.
However, they saw her depart—although she was not aware of the
fact—and they were highly pleased with her figure, her walk, and her
feet, and took care to tell Mr. Wynne of their gratifying and flattering
opinion, and to poke him in the ribs with a walking-stick—not as
agreeable or facetious an action as it sounds—and to assure him
that “he was a sly old bird, and that still waters run deep, and that
they had no idea he had such good taste;” all of which witticisms Mr.
Wynne took in anything but good part, especially as he could not tell
them that the lady upon whom they passed such enthusiastic
encomiums was his wife. Indeed, if he had done so they would only
have roared with laughter, and flatly refused to believe him.
Madeline waited three-quarters of an hour, and then made up her
mind to return home. As she walked through the outer office, once
more thickly veiled, the alert clerk sprang forward to open the door.
As he held it back, with an inky hand, he said, with a benevolent grin
—
“When Mr. Wynne comes back, who shall I say called, miss?”
Madeline hesitated for a moment, and then, turning to the youth in
her most stately manner, said—“Say Miss West,” and having thus
left her name, with all due dignity she passed through the door with a
slight inclination of her head and walked downstairs.
She met a good many cheery-looking young barristers, in wigs
and flyaway gowns, as she passed through the precincts of the inns,
and wondered if she would come across Laurence, and if she would
recognize him in that funny dress. For, of course, he wore a wig and
gown too; but he had always kept them in his chambers, and she
had never seen them. But she did not meet Laurence—so she took a
hansom, did a little shopping in Bond Street, and then got home just
in nice time for afternoon tea.
As she sat sipping it in her luxurious tea-jacket, and with her feet
on the fender-stool, Mr. Wynne returned home, tired, hoarse, and
cold. His fire was out. And, moreover, there was no sign of his
modest evening meal.
“Confound that old hag downstairs!” he muttered.
“Please, sir,” said one of the clerks who had been busy locking up,
and who now followed him into his sanctum, “there was a party to
see you while you were out—a party as waited for a good bit of an
hour.”
“Well, well, couldn’t you have dealt with him?” impatiently. “What
did he want?”
“It was a lady,” impressively.
 “A lady!” he echoed. “Oh yes, I know, old Mrs. Redhead—about
that appeal——”
“No, it was not; it was a young lady.”
“Oh, a young lady?” he repeated.
“Yes, and she bid me be sure to tell you,” embroidering a little to
give colour to his story, “as she was very sorry not to see you, and to
say that Miss West had called.”
“Miss West? Are you sure she said West?”
“Yes, sir. I’ll take an oath to it, if you like.”
“All right, then. Yes, yes, it’s all right. You can go,” dismissing him
with a wave of his arm, and, suddenly pitching his wig in one
direction and his gown in another, he sat down to digest the news.
So Madeline had come to beard him in his den. What did it all
mean? and did she intend to return?
For fully an hour he sat in the dusk—nay, the darkness—
pondering this question, forgetful of fire, light, and food. He would
have liked to have cross-examined his clerk as to where she sat, and
what she said; but no, he could not stoop to that; and then his mind
reverted again to that crucial and as yet unanswered question—“Did
she intend to come back?”
 CHAPTER XXIII.
A BOLD STEP.

Mr. West announced that he was obliged to run down to Brighton

on business and would not return until late that night, and he
commanded his daughter to write and ask Lady Rachel to come and
lunch, and spend the day. At lunch time Lady Rachel duly drove up,
and rustled in, full of gossip, full of vitality, and dressed out in the last
suggestion of the winter’s fashion. She had a great deal to tell about
a grand dinner at a great house the previous evening, and retailed
volubly and at length—the menu, the names of the guests—twenty-
six—and the dresses of the ladies.
“I wore a new frock, rather a daring style, geranium-red, silk skirt
and sleeves, and a white satin body, veiled in black net, and
embroidered in steel sequins. But it really was sweet—one of
Doucet’s. I dare not think of the price. However, it suited me—so my
cavalier assured me.”
“You asked him?”
“I don’t think I did. He was a barrister. Barristers are looking up!
Yes, another chicken cutlet, please,” holding out her plate—the
Jeameses were banished. “And such a good-looking young man—a
Mr. Wynne. My dear, you are giving me oyster sauce!” she
screamed. “What are you thinking about? And, oh—where was I—
what was I saying? Yes, about Wynne. He was so amusing, and said
such witty things. I wish I could remember half—nay, any one of
them—and pass them off as my own. It was more the way he said
them, though. And Madeline, my love,” laying down her knife and
fork, as if suddenly overwhelmed by the recollection, “he had the
most irresistible dark eyes I ever looked into!”
“Ever looked into?” repeated Madeline. “You—you seem quite
impressed,” breaking up her bread rather viciously.
 She—no, well she did not like it! How dared any woman talk of her
husband’s irresistible dark eyes? And Laurence, had he been
flirting? Could he flirt? Lady Rachel was an irreclaimable coquette.
“He is coming to dine with us next Sunday week. I wish you could
come too, and see my new lion. They say he is awfully clever. Writes
such smart articles, and scarifies us poor women. The emancipated
female is his particular horror.”
“Indeed! How very pleasant!”
“But men like him, which is always a good sign. They say he is
going into Parliament some day.”
“If you are going to make a lion of every one who is said to be
going into the House of Commons, you will be able to stock every
menagerie in Europe,” retorted Madeline, dusting crumbs off her lap.
“Or that I shall discover a good many asses under lions’ skins, eh?
I mentioned you, ma belle, and asked if he had ever heard of you,
and he said yes. See what it is to be a social celebrity! And I told him
that you were the prettiest girl and greatest heiress in London—and
that he really ought to know you.”
“And—and what did he say?” turning a salt-cellar round and round.
“Oh, I’m not quite sure what he said beyond that he was a busy
man, and—oh yes, that he detested the genus heiress.”
And then the vivacious matron led the conversation away to
another topic, and Madeline led the way to her boudoir. Presently
Lady Rachel announced that she had an engagement at four o’clock,
and that she could not remain for tea—not even if Madeline went on
her knees to her, a feat that Maddie had no desire to perform—and
finally she rushed off in a sort of mild whirlwind of good-byes, kisses,
and last messages—screamed from the hall and stairs.
Then Madeline sat alone over the fire, and reflected on what she
had heard with keen discomfort, whilst she stupidly watched the red
coals. Laurence had not answered her last two letters—he had not
taken any notice of her call. Of course, he could not come to the
house; but at least he might have written. He had no right to treat her