From mourning and melancholia to bereavement and biography: An assessment of Walter's New Model of Grief

A New Model of Grief has been proposed by Tony Walter (1996). This challenges traditional conceptualizations, which emphasize the working through of emotion during the grieving period and eventual detachment from the deceased. Instead, Walter proposes that grieving serves the purpose of integrating the deceased into ongoing lives, through construction of a durable biography in conversation with other survivors. This novel perspective is explored. It is suggested that neither the process of grieving nor the purpose of grief identified by Walter can replace traditional formulations, but that a supplementary perspective is indeed provided, which incorporates and emphasizes elements neglected in the past, in particular, by focusing on the social construction of the meaning of loss and on a non-medical outcome (relocation of the deceased).