Dennis Klass
Dennis Klass earned his doctorate in the Psychology of Religion at the University of Chicago. He has been active in the study of death, dying, and bereavement since 1968 when he was an assistant in the famous Death and Dying Seminar led by Elisabeth Kubler-Ross at the University of Chicago Hospitals. Klass is retired from a clinical practice with difficult and complex bereavements. He is on the editorial boards of Death Studies and Omega, Journal of Death and Dying, and a member of the International Work Group in Death, Dying, and Bereavement.
Beginning in 1979, Klass focused his attention on parental bereavement in a long-term ethnographic study of a local chapter of a self-help group of bereaved parents. The Compassionate Friends National Board honored him in 1992 with their Appreciation Award. His contribution to the continuing bonds model of grief grew from the ethnographic study. Klass used traditional Japanese ancestor rituals as a lens to understand what he observed in the self-help group. Then he expanded his scope to how cultural rituals manage continuing bonds with the deceased and how bonds with the dead interact in larger cultural and political dynamics.
Klass is the author of Parental Grief: Resolution and Solace (Springer, 1988) and The Spiritual Lives of Bereaved Parents (Brunner/Mazel, 1999). He is the co-editor, with Phyllis Silverman and Steven Nickman, of Continuing Bonds: New Understandings of Grief (Taylor Francis, 1996) and the co-author with Robert Goss of Dead but not Lost: Grief Narratives in Religious Traditions (AltaMira, 2005). With Edith Maria Steffen co-edited Continuing Bonds in Bereavement: New Directions for Research and Practice (Routledge 2018), an anthology that sampled the develoments in the continuing bonds model of grief in the 20 years after he and others introduced it. Klass has written over 80 articles or book chapters on death and grief and on the psychology of religion. A book of his selected essays titled Culture, Consolation, & Continuing Bonds in Bereavement was published by Routledge in early 2022.
Address: Collington #1009
10450 Lottsford Road
Mitchellville MD 20721
Beginning in 1979, Klass focused his attention on parental bereavement in a long-term ethnographic study of a local chapter of a self-help group of bereaved parents. The Compassionate Friends National Board honored him in 1992 with their Appreciation Award. His contribution to the continuing bonds model of grief grew from the ethnographic study. Klass used traditional Japanese ancestor rituals as a lens to understand what he observed in the self-help group. Then he expanded his scope to how cultural rituals manage continuing bonds with the deceased and how bonds with the dead interact in larger cultural and political dynamics.
Klass is the author of Parental Grief: Resolution and Solace (Springer, 1988) and The Spiritual Lives of Bereaved Parents (Brunner/Mazel, 1999). He is the co-editor, with Phyllis Silverman and Steven Nickman, of Continuing Bonds: New Understandings of Grief (Taylor Francis, 1996) and the co-author with Robert Goss of Dead but not Lost: Grief Narratives in Religious Traditions (AltaMira, 2005). With Edith Maria Steffen co-edited Continuing Bonds in Bereavement: New Directions for Research and Practice (Routledge 2018), an anthology that sampled the develoments in the continuing bonds model of grief in the 20 years after he and others introduced it. Klass has written over 80 articles or book chapters on death and grief and on the psychology of religion. A book of his selected essays titled Culture, Consolation, & Continuing Bonds in Bereavement was published by Routledge in early 2022.
Address: Collington #1009
10450 Lottsford Road
Mitchellville MD 20721
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Books by Dennis Klass
We organized the book by religious issues, not by how grief and religion interact in particular traditions. This book is about Religion, not religions. Still after we finished the book, we were pleased that there are large sections on both historical and contemporary Christianity, Judaism, Islam, and Buddhism. We found parallels between historical changes and contemporary changes. For example, between recent conflicts about the psychological model of grief and conflicts in the Deuteronomic Reform in ancient Israel. We examined grief rituals in ancient Tibet and how the Tibetan grief narrative changed when it was adopted by contemporary North Americans. We ended the book with a chapter on how grief has been shaped in today’s North American culture that is dominated by individualism and consumer capitalism.
The book gives voice to an emerging consensus among bereavement scholars that our understanding of the grief process needs to be expanded. In the dominant 20th century model of bereavement, the function of grief and mourning is to cut bonds with the deceased, thereby freeing the survivor to reinvest in new relationships in the present. Pathological grief was defined in terms of holding on to the deceased. Close examination revealed that this model was based more on the cultural values of modernity than on any substantial data of what people actually do.
Presenting data from several populations, 22 authors - among the most respected in their fields - demonstrate that the health resolution of grief enables one to maintain a continuing bond with the deceased. Despite cultural disapproval and lack of validation by professionals, survivors find places for the dead in their on-going lives and even in their communities. Such bonds are not denial: the deceased can provide resources for enriched functioning in the present.
Chapters examine widows and widowers, bereaved children, parents and siblings, and a population previously excluded from bereavement research: adoptees and their birth parents. Bereavement in Japanese culture is also discussed, as are meanings and implications of this new model of grief. Opening new areas of research and scholarly dialogue, this work provides the basis for significant developments in clinical practice in the field.
Papers by Dennis Klass
In 1999 Kenneth Doka the then-new editor of Omega asked me to write state-of-the-field article the cross-cultural study of grief. The project of developing a cross-cultural model of grief was in its infancy. I had studied Japanese ancestor rituals as part of my contribution to the continuing bonds model of grief. As I thought about the invitation, I found myself amidst dialogues within a broad range of psychological and social sciences. The issue of psychic unity vs. cultural diversity had prevented fuller use of anthropologists' work, but it seemed to me that sociology of knowledge mediates between those poles. Work on the universality of emotions provided the concept of innate meta interpretive schemas within cognitive models supplied by culture. Cultural historians traced changes in how death is perceived and in the acceptability of emotional expression. The article concludes with two suggestions to carry the project forward. The first suggestion, a large scale cross-cultural survey, has never been attempted. The second suggestion is qualitative studies that look at the researchers' own cultures and at other cultures. In the quarter century since Doka's invitation, work in the second suggest has progressed on several fronts.
We organized the book by religious issues, not by how grief and religion interact in particular traditions. This book is about Religion, not religions. Still after we finished the book, we were pleased that there are large sections on both historical and contemporary Christianity, Judaism, Islam, and Buddhism. We found parallels between historical changes and contemporary changes. For example, between recent conflicts about the psychological model of grief and conflicts in the Deuteronomic Reform in ancient Israel. We examined grief rituals in ancient Tibet and how the Tibetan grief narrative changed when it was adopted by contemporary North Americans. We ended the book with a chapter on how grief has been shaped in today’s North American culture that is dominated by individualism and consumer capitalism.
The book gives voice to an emerging consensus among bereavement scholars that our understanding of the grief process needs to be expanded. In the dominant 20th century model of bereavement, the function of grief and mourning is to cut bonds with the deceased, thereby freeing the survivor to reinvest in new relationships in the present. Pathological grief was defined in terms of holding on to the deceased. Close examination revealed that this model was based more on the cultural values of modernity than on any substantial data of what people actually do.
Presenting data from several populations, 22 authors - among the most respected in their fields - demonstrate that the health resolution of grief enables one to maintain a continuing bond with the deceased. Despite cultural disapproval and lack of validation by professionals, survivors find places for the dead in their on-going lives and even in their communities. Such bonds are not denial: the deceased can provide resources for enriched functioning in the present.
Chapters examine widows and widowers, bereaved children, parents and siblings, and a population previously excluded from bereavement research: adoptees and their birth parents. Bereavement in Japanese culture is also discussed, as are meanings and implications of this new model of grief. Opening new areas of research and scholarly dialogue, this work provides the basis for significant developments in clinical practice in the field.
In 1999 Kenneth Doka the then-new editor of Omega asked me to write state-of-the-field article the cross-cultural study of grief. The project of developing a cross-cultural model of grief was in its infancy. I had studied Japanese ancestor rituals as part of my contribution to the continuing bonds model of grief. As I thought about the invitation, I found myself amidst dialogues within a broad range of psychological and social sciences. The issue of psychic unity vs. cultural diversity had prevented fuller use of anthropologists' work, but it seemed to me that sociology of knowledge mediates between those poles. Work on the universality of emotions provided the concept of innate meta interpretive schemas within cognitive models supplied by culture. Cultural historians traced changes in how death is perceived and in the acceptability of emotional expression. The article concludes with two suggestions to carry the project forward. The first suggestion, a large scale cross-cultural survey, has never been attempted. The second suggestion is qualitative studies that look at the researchers' own cultures and at other cultures. In the quarter century since Doka's invitation, work in the second suggest has progressed on several fronts.
When we asked the question, we quickly found good scholarly work on several historical changes that seem to mirror the changes the twentieth century. A consistent theme in the scholarship was the relationship between the changed grief narratives and changing political power arrangements. In this essay we recount changes in the rules of how continuing bonds are maintained in five cultural settings.
It is clear from these historical studies that continuing bonds with the dead are not simply phenomena in individual and family grief, as they now are regarded in most bereavement research and clinical theory. Continuing bonds are woven into larger cultural narratives in which individual grief narratives are set. How individuals and families maintain their bonds to the dead is subject to the legitimizing needs of those who hold political power.
After describing consoling in human relationships, the paper moves to consolation in cultural resources that are often religious, including God or gods, saints, and bodhisattvas, as well as doctrines, liturgies, sacred texts, music, and art. The most common consolation in the histories of religious traditions comes within continuing bonds with the dead. The paper gives several examples from different religions and historical periods, as well as changes in the history of religious traditions that affect how the bereaved are consoled. The paper notes that contemporary people have difficulty finding consolation in continuing bonds because available cultural narratives do not include the ontological reality of the deceased. In a self-help group of bereaved parents the difficulty is overcome as the group creates rituals that make members’ bonds with their children social, that is inter-subjective reality. The paper closes by pointing to the relationship of consolation to faith.
A condensed version of this paper is in press in Omega, Journal of Death and Dying.