continuing bond
the emotional attachment that a bereaved person continues to maintain with the deceased long after the death. The increasingly influential continuing-bond approach to the bereavement process focuses on ways in which the emotional and symbolic relationship with the deceased can be reconstructed and integrated into the bereaved’s life. This approach is in contrast to the view, particularly prevalent following Sigmund Freud’s 1917 essay “Mourning and Melancholia,” that successful mourning must necessarily involve the bereaved’s complete emotional detachment from the deceased. See also grief work; mourning; object loss. [introduced by Dennis Klass, Phyllis R. Silverman, and Steven L. Nickman in their 1996 edited volume, Continuing Bonds: New Understandings of Grief]