Course Overview

Those of you who have taken my interpersonal relations course may recall my argument that loss and grief are regular parts of the experiences of close relationships. From early in life to the end, we begin to anticipate and dread the loss of the presence of close others. This anticipatory grieving occurs in attachment to parents or caretakers when we are very young and in longing for close others now departed as we approach death late in life. Hazrat Khan summarized the sorrow of the lover quite well in this quote: "The sorrow of the lover is continual, in the presence and absence of the beloved: in the presence for fear of the absence, and in absence in longing for the presence. The pain in love becomes in time the life of the lover."

I taught this course in F95 as a special topics course with 55 students to see if it s eemed to be a type of course that had a legitimate place in a psychology curriculum. I was convinced by students' feedback then and the work being done on the loss and trauma topics to go ahead and begin a formal course. This is the seventh such offering. Students have taught me something new each term about the depth and diversity of loss experiences.

In moving into work on loss and trauma, someone in the publishing world asked me how I had become interested in creating a journal in 1996 called the Journal of Personal and Interpersonal Loss and also writing in the area (e.g., Embracing Their Memory). By this question, this person was suggesting that I didn't seem to have done much work on death and dying. This is true. But that is not the whole of loss. As we will see in this course, the spectrum of types of loss that may be studied is broad. Part of our task is to analyze the similarities and differences across major types of loss, such as death, divorce/dissolution, war and violence, injury and disease, homelessness, prejudice, stigmatization, aging, and the like.

At least by the time we enter mid-life, we begin to know what it means to have losses pile up in our lives. By major losses, I mean a depletion of resources in an area in which we are emotionally invested (including loss of presence of close other; loss of self-esteem; loss of valued possessions; loss of trust). As a simple categorization of losses, personal ones are those which we experience mostly by ourselves -- such as aging. Interpersonal ones are those which we experience with key others -- such as discussion of relationships.

I believe that the key to understanding loss is the meaning we attach to our individual losses. A death may literally devastate us, or seem timely, or even helpful in light of a person's suffering prior to it. A loss can be highly individualized, as conceived in the mind of the "victim." In May, 1996, the Top U.S. naval officer Adm Mike Boorda took his life a few hours before a Newseek reporter was scheduled to interview him regarding the possibility that the "Combat V" medals he had worn until a year earlier were not deserved. Some question had been raised by highly-placed Vietnam Vets about the real peril that existed for this officer, when, for example, the ship he commanded had engaged in hostile fire during the Vietnam War. It did not seem to be a clear matter, nor therefore, a clear situation involving dishonest and dishonorable behavior. But Boorda had great pride in the Navy, was celebrated by thousands of sailors because he was the first noncom to rise to the post of highest naval officer, had helped the Navy endure and move on from a series of embarrassments such as the "Tailhook Scandal," and apparently saw the inquiry as having the potential to harm the Navy, him, and his family -- the likely investigation of his honesty was, in short, apparently a prospect beyond his coping capacity. What was the potential loss that led Boorda to this decision? Pride, integrity, shame? My argument is that the meaning we impute to each of the acts of our lives must be understood and appreciated in context to understand and appreciate loss. This course is about major losses, broadly-construed, that result in various consequences including trauma.

I should stress that the course is about being open and frank in cosidering and discussing such losses. They are as Judith Viorst said "Necessary Losses," and as such deserve our attention and understanding. However, you may wish to reconsider your involvement in the course if confrontation with the ideas and images of loss -- that can be daunting -- is not what you want to encounter in such a course. We will see many images of loss in the various videos that will be shown, because often we can get closest to understanding other's loss only in imagery and not words. I also would guess that there are some people enrolled in the course who are at an acute point in struggling with their own losses for whom this course may be questionable. You might consider visiting with me early if that is possible.

I also know from teaching this course that a few people may have difficulty appreciating others' losses. They have said that they are young and never have experienced such losses, and may even find others' reactions to losses as to be too far afield from their lives to warrant spending a lot of time analyzing the nature of the losses described. If you feel this way after looking over class materials, you probably will be uncomfortable in this class and your performance too may suffer. Caveat emptor!

While I will argue and provide illustrative evidence that many of us never "get over" our losses, most importantly the course also is about hope and courage and what Erik Erickson called generatively (i.e., giving back what we've learned or gained to future peoples and generations). An argument that will be found in most of the course's readings is that people can use seemingly insuperable losses to give them hitherto unrecognized or unappreciated perspective about life and energize their zeal, work, plans, and contributions to others. Sure, losses tear us all down. That is their initial consequence. But through the process of coming to grips with or adapting to them, they also may be framed in our minds as important landmarks that influence new directions in our behaviors and planning.