The plural meaning of the bereavement process- Towards a new phenomenal understanding and ethical healing of mourning for the new widows/widowers

• Main Authors: I-Chen Hou, 侯懿真
• Other Authors: 林耀盛
• Format: Others
• Language: zh-TW
• Published: 2006
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/57763015998189527041

碩士 === 高雄醫學大學 === 行為科學研究所碩士班 === 94 === Abstract To explore the Taiwanese widowers and widows who lost their loved one for cancer how to transform their “limited experience” to be back to the life world in the first year after the loss, the study was aimed to release complex “bereavement” phenomena from the emic context. In the study, we employed the multiple-site and the multiple-time procedure for depth interviews, and used the phenomenological research methods to analyze the narrative and to contruct the text. In this qualitative research, 10 subjects (in the ratio of 3 to 7 between man and women, with a mean age of 46.0±11.65 years, a mean married duration of 21±11.4 years, and a mean of 33±54.16 months for caring their spouse ) lost their spouses during the hospice care. Each subject was interviewed three or four times in the mourning period nearly during the one and half years. Then the collected data were analyzed. As the results of this research showed, the healing processes for the widows/widowers who lost spouses in hospice were complex. With time some individuals adapted to the loss and renewed their capacities for recathexis. Some kept the emotional life and symbolic relationship. The healing process was understood as an ethical act in the life world. The central task of mourning was “non-object” rather than “Other’s face”, which meant the “Absence”- to experience the dead person as living presence, with which one maintained the dialogue, would not be viewed as maladaptive. To analyze further, we found three vicissitudes of the mourning processes were named as “the awareness of body sensory “, “the holding of spatiotemporal habitus”, and “the transformation of commemoration”. Then, we found four strategiccs were adopted by the widows/widowers to reconnect or to accomplish full resolution for the “habitus”. Finally, the implications, suggestions and limitation about the study were discussed.