Events Schedule

Psychotherapist and writer Juliet Rosenfeld will join us to discuss her moving account of bereavement and profound grief, The State of Disbelief: A Story of Death, Love and Forgetting (published February, 2020). Juliet's book details her experiences navigating the illness and death of her husband, and draws upon Freud’s essay Mourning and Melancholia. This interactive event will be chaired by members of the University of York research project ‘Grief: A Study of Human Emotional Experience’ and will give you the opportunity to hear more about Juliet’s work and pose your questions to her.

​Definitions of grief will be explored, whether ‘normal,’ prolonged/complicated or anticipated; in terms of the classes of trigger; whether the causative event is singular or continuing; and whether grief is in the subject of the event or their carers/relatives. The psychiatric literature’s attempts to classify reactions as expected and excessive, and to tease apart grief and depression will be considered before the ways in which various neurological impairments handle grief will be discussed, (stroke, Parkinson’s, spinal cord injury). From these emerge questions rather than conclusions: should grief be discussed as a verb rather than a noun (and if so which tense?), how might normal and abnormal types be defined and treated, does grief imply a single event and loss rather than unwanted presence, and why are some people more resilient?