Rituais e significado no luto

Death as an irrefutable fact is part of the human experience. Consequently we have to deal with the experience of losing significant others and with the repercussions in terms of emotional and cognitive functioning. A historical concept of extreme relevance in this context is the “grief work” (Freud, 1917), which expresses the idea of a painful process centered on loss and pain, with a limited duration in time, that when it is not successfully resolved carries the risk of becoming a pathological mourning. However research in this field suggests that in most cases, the pain associated with grief and sadness disappear without external intervention (Currier, Neimeyer & Berman, 2008) and that, at best, this experience might result in something positive. In this paper, from a literature review of psychological models of grief, we intend to support a broader understanding of this process by exploring the role of grief ritual, today minimized or avoided (Tenezio & Romanoff, 1998), questioning an essentialist and individualistic vision of bereavement (Neimeyer, 2011), whose understanding should respect the processes and social structures in which unfolds.