Unspoken grief

‘Unspoken grief’, reference 3, is a short, easy read book from 1986 by one Helen Rosen, about children and young adults coping with sibling loss, at the time of writing at least, something of a neglected topic. People worried about the parents of prematurely dead children – most often the result of a road accident – but not so much about their siblings.

This book had turned up in the course of reading reference 2, which itself had turned up in the margins of reference 1. A previous foray into the world of mourning is to be found at reference 4 and there will be more arising out of the present foray into the totem poles of the Pacific north west.

As far as the author of the book is concerned, I more or less drew a blank with Bing, and did not do much better with Google. Given that this book was written 50 years ago, the author must be quite old, assuming that she is still alive: she may have been associated with the (alternative looking) Won Institute of reference 11 at some point, but search there draws a blank.

The argument of the book is that failure of young people to mourn significant losses properly can lead to all kinds of problems later, perhaps seemingly unrelated. And that this failure can be the result of poor communications within the family, in particular parents withholding information about the death of one child – and the complex of emotions arising – from the others, particularly the very young among them. Generally speaking, it is better to be open, to talk about these things and to allow children to grieve in their own way, whatever that might be, in a supportive environment – and if that takes a bit of help from a therapist, so be it.

One of the (eight) chapters is about living with a dying sibling. From where I associate to living with a severely handicapped sibling – either physically or mentally – which can also give rise to various difficulties – that is to say, apart from the sheer amount of time and effort involved in the care of same. On the upside, a sibling is likely to become much more sensitive, much more alert to the needs of others. With the consequent downside that he might repress or neglect his own needs – as might his parents. 

Another chapter reports on an extended interview with various members of the one bereaved family. One is reminded of the reluctance of most people to talk about this sort of thing, particularly with a stranger, however well-meaning, who is taking notes with a view to publication. One is down to volunteers, most of whom are going to be women, perhaps women with problems, perhaps just women who like talking about themselves, and getting a proper sample is going to be more or less impossible. One is going to find out something about how some people behave when they lose a family member, but one is not going to know how representative they are of the population at large.

In the chapter about communication in the bereaved family, some interesting comments about taboos on mentioning the dead, taboos which in various part of the world have been found to be very strong. Taboos which might extend to getting rid of anything that might remind one of the dead person. Mementoes not permitted. Which rather goes against the remarks above about talking. Perhaps the answer is a compromise, to contain most of the talking within a ritualised period of mourning. The ritual serves both to encourage talking – and to contain it, to keep the talk within proper bounds. From where I associate to the Jewish practise of shiva, described at reference 11 and previously touched on at reference 4.

Maybe I should take a look at what Freud has to say about all this – both ‘Totem and taboo’ and ‘Mourning and melancholia’. Having been reminded that this last might be translated as black bile, one on the four humours that the early moderns went on about. For which see reference 12.

Tests

Along the way I came across – not for the first time – what sounded like two simple and effective psychological tests.

The first was the projection test of reference 10. In this case, you show a child a sketch, perhaps to do with hospitals, and invite the child to elaborate on the scene depicted. Which struck me as a simple and effective way to draw out issues that were on the child’s mind which he did not care to talk about in a more direct way. A sample of such sketches, lifted from the Internet Archive copy of the book, is included above.

The second was extracting interesting aspects of personality from the forced choice answers to a battery of questions, the battery in question being the California Psychological Inventory, originally developed into the 1950s and now the property of the company at reference 7. The snaps above and below being taken from reference 5.

The first page. The personality of normal and reasonably normal people is reduced to 18 numeric scales arranged in four classes. With some versions being driven by the answers to 434 questions, supplied in a little booklet. The test might take an hour or so to complete.

The first twenty questions, lifted from reference 8, are snapped above. I have not yet worked out how one gets from questions to scales, but I think it is not much more complicated than assigning each of the questions to one of the scales. Psychological computation in the 1950s did not stretch to much more.

I get the impression that this sort of thing was popular in the US, perhaps here in the UK too. Simple and easy, if a little time consuming. But maybe now it is being supplanted by more complex, AI branded tests.

Conclusions

I came away from this book with the sense that this was a real enough problem – but perhaps one which the commercial culture of the US was doing quite well out of, with therapists and therapies everywhere. With women very much in the lead, probably because they are more open to talking about this sort of thing than men. One facet of this is the (controversial) elevation of unreasonable grief to the list of mental health disorders (DSM-5-TR), used in the US for medical insurance purposes.

I associate to the ‘lady in vanity fair married to unpleasant soldier who is killed at Waterloo’, whom Bing identifies as Amelia Osborne of Thackeray’s ‘Vanity Fair’. A lady who mourns a handsome but unpleasant husband for rather too long after his death at Waterloo – but she gets her man in the end. Maybe mourning was a bigger issue in the 19th century when death was a lot more visible, at all ages, than it is now. A lot more mourning was going on and maybe it was better managed. By the same token, the extravagant mourning of the loss of a child we get nowadays would not have done in a family of a dozen or more children among whom several – if not more – deaths might be expected. Not something the present book goes into – although there is a sly dig at anthropologists very near the end:

‘… Anthropologists are fond of pointing out ways in which more primitive societies cope with issues of living that modern society fails to adequately address, and death is certainly a case in point…’.

While at the beginning, I rather liked the psycho-analysts definition of mourning in the middle of the snap above. Very systems. 

A pity that on the previous page the proofreader had failed to spot that the figure, in the very first paragraph, described as annual child deaths in the US – some 3.5 million a year – was actually all deaths.

There seemed to be a certain sloppiness about numbers generally, both here and in other material that I have turned up. But the story that I have come to is that there are around 350 million people living in the US, of whom something more than 20% are under 20. Something over 3 million of them die each year, with 20,000 of those under 20, less than 1% of the total.

All in all, an interesting find.

And so back to the totem poles.

PS 1: my copy of the book is from the library of the University of East Anglia. As it happens, we once used to live quite near their Earlham Park campus on the western outskirts of Norwich. Helped along by money from one of the Sainsburys.

PS 2: I have just learned that the Wigmore Hall has done a deal with Apple Music Classical, part of the Apple family of companies, to take over Wigmore Hall Live. I dare say it makes sense, but, nevertheless, one worries about the onward march of big tech from California. See references 13 and 14.

References

Reference 1: https://psmv6.blogspot.com/2026/05/polish-grub.html. 

Reference 2: Giving Meaning to Grief: The Role of Rituals and Stories in Coping with Sudden Family Loss – Julia Janelle Barnhill – 2011. 

Reference 3: Unspoken grief: coping with childhood sibling loss – Rosen, H. – 1986. Available at https://archive.org/details/unspokengriefcop0000rose. 

Reference 4: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2022/07/mourning-form-and-content.html. 

Reference 5: Manual for the California Psychological Inventory – H. Gough – 1975. At https://archive.org/details/manualforcpicali00goug/page/n3/mode/2up. 

Reference 6: https://www.themyersbriggs.com/. Formerly CPP Inc. For CPI and other tests. Monetised, naturally.

Reference 7: Data Guide for the CPI™ 434 Inventory – for CPP Inc – 2012. 

Reference 8: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Psychological_Inventory. 

Reference 9: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Projective_test. 

Reference 10: https://www.woninstitute.edu/. 

Reference 11: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shiva_(Judaism).

Reference 12: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2022/05/medical-vocabulary.html. 

Reference 13: https://classical.music.apple.com/us.

Reference 14: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Music.