Volume 9, No. 1, Art. 50 – January 2008

Mourning as Biography Generator

Heidemarie Winkel (Germany)

Abstract: For bereaved persons, an alter ego's death proves to be a serious experience of contingency. It can unsettle the individual's conception of the self, whereby mourning emerges as grief of a unique intensity and depth. The development of the emotional experience becomes a starting point and measure for the individual's re-conceptualization of the self in terms of psychological and therapeutic images. The notion of mourning as personal grief corresponds to a general, typically modern attribution of emotionality within the realm of inner experience and inwardness, i.e., I am what my feelings are expressing. From a general systems approach, talking about mourning as private and individual grief requires social communication standards. Within a research based on biographical interviews mourning proved to be a symbolic communication code for the expression of a unique and individual experience of sorrow, despair and bewilderment. Furthermore the results revealed that the distinctiveness of different biographical discontinuations and passages could be communicated under the aspects of grief and mourning, regardless of the particular social system. But mourning not only guarantees selective or sporadic narrations about the self. The central assumption is that mourning functions as a biography generator by offering a systematic and all-embracing re-construction of a life story under the aspects of sorrow and grief.

Key words: mourning, bereavement, biography generator, self-description, communication media and codes, general systems approach, emotions

This contribution is only available as a full text in the German language. German text

Volume 9, No. 1   Table of Contents

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© 2008 Forum Qualitative Sozialforschung / Forum: Qualitative Social Research
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