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Continuing Bonds in Bereavement: Insights from Dennis Klass Dennis Klass, author and academic
Event details
Grief: A Study of Human Emotional Experience Lecture
This lecture is an introduction to the Continuing Bonds model of grief. We will review the history of the model in an ethnographic study of bereaved parents in a self-help group. In the group parents interweave their bonds with their deceased children with their bonds to the other parents in the group. This dynamic opens us to understanding grief in a larger cross-cultural and historic context. We will briefly look at Japanese ancestor rituals that serve as a lens to better understand Western bereavement narratives. We will structure our brief look at some of the implications of the continuing bonds model by thinking about the themes Edith Marie Steffen and Dennis Klass found in their anthology of developments in the model since it was introduced twenty-five years ago.
About the speaker
Dennis Klass received his Ph.D. in the psychology of religion from University of Chicago. He is on the editorial boards of Death Studies and Omega, Journal of Death and Dying.
Klass’s 20 year ethnographic study in a self-help group of bereaved parents is reported in The Spiritual Lives of Bereaved Parents (Brunner/Mazel, 1999) and Parental Grief: Resolution and Solace (Springer, 1988). He is the the co-author of Dead but not Lost: Grief Narratives in Religious Traditions (AltaMira, 2005), co-editor of Continuing Bonds: New Understandings of Grief (Taylor-Francis, 1996), and co-editor of Continuing Bonds in Bereavement: New Directions in Reseach and Practice (Routledge, 2018). He has written over 70 articles and book chapters.