Enter the Grief Police

The first World War transformed, along with so much else, the way people mourn. The British anthropologist Geoffrey Gorer argues that the death of so many people in such a small span of time overwhelmed those they left behind, and rendered them unable to undergo the rituals that had previously been in place for grieving. Combined with the rise of psychoanalysis and its emphasis on the interiority of the individual—Freud’s Mourning and Melancholia presented grief as a highly personal phenomenon—the social practice of mourning was transformed in the early 20th century, to the extent that, by the 1960s, Gorer was describing grief as something to be kept “under complete control by strength of will and character, so that it need be given no public expression.”