The Grief & Loss Lineage

Grief is not a disorder. It is the human response to loss — of a person, a relationship, a future, an identity. Yet psychotherapy has always struggled with it: is grief a natural process that needs witnessing, or a clinical problem that needs intervention? Freud's "Mourning and Melancholia" (1917) made the first formal distinction between normal and pathological grief. Kübler-Ross gave us five stages — then the field spent decades arguing whether stages exist at all. Worden shifted from stages to tasks. Stroebe and Schut offered the Dual Process Model, recognizing that grieving people oscillate between confronting the loss and attending to ongoing life. Most recently, Prolonged Grief Disorder entered the DSM-5-TR (2022), formally pathologizing grief that persists beyond expected timelines — a move both praised for enabling treatment access and criticized for medicalizing a normal human experience.