Grief The Price of Love

by Brinkmann, Svend; Mcturk, Tam

• ISBN13: 9781509541232
• ISBN10: 1509541233
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2020-06-15
• Publisher: Polity

Summary

Wherever love and death meet there is grief.  It affects us all regardless of ethnicity, age, class, or sexual orientation.  Grief is universal – it has endured across time, societies and cultures from the earliest human communities to the present day.  But the way we deal with grief is changing. Increasingly, we are diagnosing grief as a medical condition to be treated rather than embracing it as a natural part of being human.

In this book, Svend Brinkmann gets to the heart of what it is to grieve, arguing that the sorrow we experience after the death of a loved one is a necessary and meaningful dimension of human existence.  However painful, it unites us all.  As humans we are uniquely privileged to feel grief.  Rather than trying to escape or smother grief, we must allow ourselves to feel and accept it as the price we pay for love.

Author Biography

Svend Brinkmann lived quietly as a professor of psychology at Aalborg University until he published Stand Firm which became an overnight bestseller and quickly established him as a leading public intellectual and cultural critic. Winner of the prestigious Rosenkjær prize, Svend travels widely to host events and lecture on the key problems of modern life. In 2019 he published the acclaimed The Joy of Missing Out. He has also appeared in various television documentaries, and presented Danish television’s Live Fast! programs and the Meaningful Life series on Danish Radio 1. 

Table of Contents

Preface
1. Introduction: The century of grief
2. Grief as a foundational emotion
3. The phenomenology of grief
4. The body in grief – grief in the body
5. The ecology of grief
6. Grief as a psychological diagnosis?
7. A homeless love
Bibliography
Notes