The Phenomenology of Bereavement, Grief, and Mourning

Loss, understood as a process of bereavement, grief, and mourning, most immediately affects our bodily experience in our world, known in the phenomenological tradition as our lived world. Unlike Cartesian conceptions of the body as a self-contained entity, encapsulated within the skin, our bodying forth, as articulated in the discourse of Merleau-Ponty, and more recently Drew Leder, entails various manifestations of lived experience. These reflections on miscarriage loss, understood through the notions of Merleau-Ponty's chiasmic structure of flesh, and Drew Leder's recessive, ecstatic, and dys-appearing body, provides the possibility for a phenomenology of lived loss.