Description
Book SynopsisGrief is a universal human experience, painful and inevitable. In this wise and compassionate book, a psychiatrist who has done extensive work and research with the bereaved shares her broad experience, revealing how people cope with, understand, and eventually adapt to many different bereavements in the course of human life. Those first few hours and days after a loved one has died may seem to pass like a dream, and only afterward does the real work of grieving and healing begin. In this comprehensive book, Beverley Raphael describes all the stages of mourning and healing, and analyzes how the effects of loss differ at each stage of life. Starting with the infant's loss of a parent, taking up the effects on adolescents of death in the family, and moving on to the losses people face in adult life and in old age, Raphael, with sensitivity and grace, shows how the dynamics of grief and recovery vary over the course of time. In describing the experience of loss, the author provides the reader with a rich understanding of how different people at different ages cope with grief, loss, and pain. The most thorough book on the subject ever written, The Anatomy of Bereavement is the standard work.
Trade ReviewA book of outstanding value. It offers wise counsel and thoroughly informed understanding to those who have experienced loss and to those who would help them. -- Robert S. Weiss, Harvard Medical School
Beverley Raphael's volume is an invaluable addition to the literature on grieving, mourning, and bereavement. . . . The book, very well written, is filled with clinical reports that illustrate and amplify the more theoretical constructs that she presents. . . . It will be an excellent reference book and a fine introduction to an ever significant field of study. -- George H. Pollock, M.D., Ph.D. * American Journal of Psychiatry *
This comprehensive and authoritative work springs from Dr. Raphael's long, personal experience in the field as a leading researcher and sensitive therapist. With its many telling vignettes and up-to-date references, it will be welcomed by teachers and students alike. -- John Bowlby, The Tavistock Clinic
