The "problems" identified with the Kübler-Ross model seem to be twofold:
- That the popular perception of the model is not what Kuber-Ross herself had in mind and communicated. This can hardly be laid on her.
- That the empirical research, and it was both, has subjective elements and is again interpreted in contradiction of K-R's statements as some specific sequence of phases.
I'd bring to this a few additional observations:
Emotions seem to be common among at least many mammalian species. That is, both that they're a shared inheritence, and an evolutionary one. This isn't a novel observation, and the connection between emotion and evolution was first proposed, at book length, by Charles Darwin in The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Expression_of_the_Emotions...>.
Grief is one of those emotions. The notion of animal grief is well developed and much studied (see the Wikipedia overview: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animal_grief>). It seems highly likely that it serves some positive adaptive purpose.
As studied by K-R, one characterisation of the grief observed was of a profound change in the worldview of the patients themselves. That is, coming face to face with their own mortality or morbidity.
There is also at least an anecdotal understanding of stages of grief being associated with challenges to individual or group worldviews, paradigms, or understandings. This can be seen in, e.g, responses to the notions of limits to growth, in politics, and other social contexts.
What I suspect, though I've not come across any clear expression of this in scholarly literature, is that what we call grief is in actually part of a spectrum of responses to radical shifts in understanding of one's world. And that the stages, or perhaps more accurately phases or expressions relate to unlearning and relearning new patterns. That there's a value in not dropping a particular model too quickly, but that similarly there's not value in blindly holding on to a model which clearly no longer serves any specific use.
- That the popular perception of the model is not what Kuber-Ross herself had in mind and communicated. This can hardly be laid on her.
- That the empirical research, and it was both, has subjective elements and is again interpreted in contradiction of K-R's statements as some specific sequence of phases.
I'd bring to this a few additional observations:
Emotions seem to be common among at least many mammalian species. That is, both that they're a shared inheritence, and an evolutionary one. This isn't a novel observation, and the connection between emotion and evolution was first proposed, at book length, by Charles Darwin in The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Expression_of_the_Emotions...>.
Grief is one of those emotions. The notion of animal grief is well developed and much studied (see the Wikipedia overview: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animal_grief>). It seems highly likely that it serves some positive adaptive purpose.
As studied by K-R, one characterisation of the grief observed was of a profound change in the worldview of the patients themselves. That is, coming face to face with their own mortality or morbidity.
There is also at least an anecdotal understanding of stages of grief being associated with challenges to individual or group worldviews, paradigms, or understandings. This can be seen in, e.g, responses to the notions of limits to growth, in politics, and other social contexts.
What I suspect, though I've not come across any clear expression of this in scholarly literature, is that what we call grief is in actually part of a spectrum of responses to radical shifts in understanding of one's world. And that the stages, or perhaps more accurately phases or expressions relate to unlearning and relearning new patterns. That there's a value in not dropping a particular model too quickly, but that similarly there's not value in blindly holding on to a model which clearly no longer serves any specific use.
The lack of any significant discussion of these elements at least to my knowledge has long struck me as distinctly odd. Checking Google Scholar currently I find at least some theoretical work, e.g., Doka Understanding Grief <https://www.taylorfrancis.com/chapters/edit/10.4324/97813155...> and Hall, Bereavement theory <https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/02682621.2014.90...>, though by the blurbs, these don't seem to take the leap I'm suggesting.