IDENTIFICATION AND ALIENATION IN THE EXPERIENCE OF GRIEF

Abstract

The experience of grief is a topic that is relevant for a person who is inherently emotional, in any social system, in any era. In our opinion, two psychological processes play an important role in an effective way out of a state of grief - identification and alienation. Identification can be carried out in relation to oneself, former, present or future, in relation to other people, near or far, in relation to a reference social group. Psychological alienation in a situation of experiencing grief can occur from other people, from society, specific social groups, from the world as a whole, up to self-alienation. The purpose of our work is to study the peculiarities of the interaction of two psychological processes, identification and alienation, during the experience of grief. The research methods are the analysis of the scientific literature published over the past 5 years on the topic, as well as the synthesis of the information obtained during the analysis in a definite answer to the question we posed about the interaction of identification and alienation in human grief. As a result of our research, we can note that the processes of psychological alienation and identification accompany any process of experiencing grief, permeating all stages of grieving. Moreover, what is worth paying attention to, the movement goes from alienation to identification. But not every identification allows a person to cope with grief. Positive identification with the real world, real people, helps to overcome the state of grief. Negative identification keeps a person in a state of pathological grief - with a person who has died. The movement towards positive identification goes through the transformation of the value-semantic sphere of a person, through the formation of a new self, who has gone through the experience of death, integrated a new understanding of the world into his personality, and managed to find the strength to stay alive.