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This study sought to determine if depression is an inevitable outcome of childhood bereavement experiences, as the Freudians believed, or if children can experience healthy mourning, as Bowlby predicted. In an application of Q methodology, 43 adults parentally bereaved as children sorted statements about childhood bereavement experiences and outcomes in adulthood. Debriefing interviews followed. Four distinct types of experience emerged through factor analysis: appreciation, frustration, enmeshment, and ambivalence. Depression was not found to be an inevitable outcome, and Bowlby's prediction that certain positive family factors can influence a child toward healthy mourning during childhood were corroborated. Salient factors contributing to healthy childhood mourning included positive relationships between the child and both parents, ample emotional and psychological support from the surviving parent, and open and honest communication with the child about the death and its impact on the family.
During this century, clinical practice in response to childhood bereavement experiences has been divided between a theory-driven psychodynamic perspective and an experience-centered environmental perspective. The research described here sought to evaluate the two approaches by studying the perceptions of adults who had experienced parental death as children.
Review of the Literature
Freud's (1917) theory expressed in Mourning and Mdancholia dominated clinical understandings of how children perceive and respond to the death of a parent. Freud theorized that mourning is the normal reaction to the loss of a valued person, object, or ideal. Mourning includes a conscious separation of the libido from the lost object, a gradual reinstatement of reality, the emergence of a healthy ego, and a timely return to an emotionally stable life. Melancholia involves an inability to separate the libido from the lost object and the concomitant withdrawal of the loss from consciousness, thereby creating an internal ego conflict in which the ego is both identified with and struggling to be free of the lost object. The internal conflict of the melancholic person is played out in the unconscious until it surfaces as symptoms of self-reproach and selfdeprecation (i.e., sleeplessness, loss of appetite, ennui, suicidal ideation, and other signs of depression).
Freud's theory referred to adult experience, but succeeding generations of Freudian practitioners inferred that children and adolescents would always be vulnerable to melancholia when a parent died because of their dependence on...