Mourning as a mode of attention

On the temporal grain of bereavement, and what it asks of the listening therapist.

AUTHOR

Olumide AdesinaSchool of Psychotherapy, Regent’s University London · UKCP reg.

DOI

10.65828/ea.36.2.001

PUBLISHED

14 July 2025

Abstract

This paper argues that mourning is best understood not as a sequence of stages but as a re-orientation of attention. Drawing on Husserl’s account of inner time-consciousness and three clinical vignettes from long-term work with bereaved adults, I propose that the therapist’s task is to attune to a temporality that is neither past, present, nor future, but the gathering of all three around an absence.

1. Introduction

The literature on grief in psychotherapy is dominated by stage theories — Kübler-Ross, Bowlby, Worden — each useful as a teaching device, each inadequate as a description of what actually unfolds in the consulting room. What clients describe, when invited to describe rather than to fit themselves to a model, is something less linear: a collapse and re-gathering of attention around the missing.

The phenomenological tradition has resources for thinking about this differently. Husserl’s analyses of retention, protention and the living present offer a finer-grained vocabulary than the stages literature allows.

“What clients describe is a collapse and re-gathering of attention around the missing — not a journey through stages.”

2. The phenomenology of grief

To say that mourning is a mode of attention is to insist that it is not a content of consciousness but a way consciousness arranges itself. The bereaved person does not contain grief as a vessel contains water; she is grief, for a stretch, the way a swimmer is in the water.

3. Three vignettes

The three vignettes that follow are composites, with names and identifying details changed; consent was given by all parties for the underlying material to be used in this form.

Vignette I — “The clock that won’t restart”

K., a man in his late forties, came to therapy nine months after his wife’s sudden death. He described his time as broken into two: a period before, in which the clock ran, and a period after, in which the clock had stopped and he could not start it again.

4. Attention as ethical posture

If mourning is a mode of attention, then the therapist’s attention is not incidental to the work but constitutive of it. To attend well to a grieving person is to lend one’s own temporal capacities to a consciousness that has, for the moment, lost them.

5. Conclusion

The stages were never wrong so much as mis-levelled: they describe contents that may pass through a grieving life, but not the underlying re-arrangement of attention that makes those contents possible. It is to that re-arrangement that the existential therapist attends.

References

Bowlby, J. (1980). Attachment and Loss, Vol. 3: Loss. London: Hogarth Press.
Husserl, E. (1928). Vorlesungen zur Phänomenologie des inneren Zeitbewusstseins. Halle: Niemeyer.
Kübler-Ross, E. (1969). On Death and Dying. New York: Macmillan.
Stolorow, R. D. (2007). Trauma and Human Existence. New York: Analytic Press.
Worden, J. W. (2009). Grief Counseling and Grief Therapy (4th ed.). New York: Springer.

Cite this article

Adesina, O. (2025). Mourning as a mode of attention. Existential Analysis, 36(2). https://doi.org/10.65828/ea.36.2.001