Dr. Alan Wolfelt speaking on the truth about the Stages of Grief... I met Konigsberg(Ruth Davis Konigsberg, author of the recently published book The Truth About Grief. The old debate: the art of caring for people in grief versus the supposed science of bereavement.)briefly in the fall of 2009, when she attended a two-hour workshop I facilitated in Cherry Hills, New Jersey. She informed me that she was writing a book that would “question the efficacy of stage theory” as proposed by Elisabeth Kübler-Ross in her 1969 bestseller On Death and Dying. I recollect that she didn’t seem very happy when I informed her that the stage theory of grief had been debated for years and that indeed, Kübler-Ross herself never intended for the theory to be seen as a scientific, prescriptive model. In fact, I reminded her that Kübler-Ross had warned against grief being understood as an orderly and predictable experience and that her theory was based purely on her own observations of people who were dying (not the family members who were grieving).
Posted on: Sat, 01 Feb 2014 13:00:01 +0000