OMEGA, Vol. 70(1) 99-117, 2014-2015

CONTINUING BONDS, SOCIETY, AND HUMAN EXPERIENCE: FAMILY DEAD, HOSTILE DEAD, POLITICAL DEAD

DENNIS KLASS, PH.D. Webster University, Truro, Massachusetts

ABSTRACT

In most times and places, the focus of continuing bonds is on the well-being and activity of the dead that are linked to the well-being and activity of the living. In this article we describe continuing bonds across cultures by focusing on the dead. Three relationships between the living and the dead organize our thinking. First, the family dead in which living and dead offer help to each other. Second, the hostile dead that threaten the well being of the living. Third, the political dead in which the living enlisting the dead in political conflicts, and the dead motivate the living to battle on their behalf. Shifting the focus this way allows us to see that continuing bonds play important roles in larger narratives as well as in individual and family narratives.

When I invited Bob Kastenbaum to give a lecture, I wrote saying I could get him a hotel room, or he could stay at our house. He replied he would rather be at our house. Between the invitation and his lecture I had submitted my first attempt to write about the grief in a self-help group of bereaved parents. It was a topic on which there was no prior literature. After the lecture we sat in my living room. I asked him about the submission. “I don’t know if the article is any good, but I know it is right.” His acceptance letter arrived 3 days later. That was fast in pre-email days. A few weeks after that he invited me to join the Omega editorial board. The evening had shown me that Bob was a guy to have fun with, so I replied that I would accept the position pending more information about the salary. 99 Ó 2014, Baywood Publishing Co., Inc. doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.2190/OM.70.1.i http://baywood.com

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A few days later an envelope arrived with a plastic bag of green/brown slime that had once been celery. And what followed were years of pun-full letters, sometimes accompanying a request to review a submission or my returning the review, and sometimes just because there was an interestingly idea about which it seemed right to share thoughts. The phrase “Professor Pikunshovl’s ground-breaking research on Siberian burial practice” often floats into my mind when I think of Bob. In this article, I propose to explore some of the varieties in continuing bonds across cultures and over time. Questions about the relationship between the living and the dead have been interesting to people over the course of human history. We have, then, an incredibly long and broad record of on which to draw. The diversity of our data lends itself to a volume honoring Bob Kastenbaum. In his publications and in our correspondence, his mind restlessly jumped between times and places, from culture to culture and phenomenon to phenomenon, as one theme opened itself to the next. In the section on cremation in his last book (Kastenbaum, 2004), he begins with the Viking chief’s ship of flames, moves on to medieval Christian rejection of cremation, then to the now-outlawed Hindu practice of Sati, and concludes with his account of the state board of funeral directors asking him to look into their problem of storage closets filled with unclaimed ashes. In the 11 editions of Death, Society, and Human Experience, Bob could never bring himself to tightly package “human experience.” He found the multiplicity in lived human experience more interesting than abstract factors or variables. As he said in the memorial volume for Herman Feifel, “Once opened, the dialogue cannot be assigned arbitrary boundaries” (Strack, 1997, p. 361). Let’s begin by setting our exploration in our own historical context. The contemporary study of bereavement started within a few decades after the culture stopped concerning itself about the well-being of the dead. That is, in the developed West, our focus over the last century has been on the survivors’ life after death, not the life after death of the dead. The ontological status of the dead is now relegated to parapsychology that uses ideas that are on the fringe of cultural and academic discourse (see Becker, 1993; Berger, 1995; Stoeber & Meynell, 1996). That makes us relatively unique in human history because, in most times and places, the focus of continuing bonds is on the well-being of the dead that is linked to the well-being of those who grieve for them. Even though in the last decades of the 20th century bereavement studies recognized that a significant portion of the population continues their bonds with those who have died, in both scholarship and bereavement support, the focus remains largely on the living individuals who remain bonded to the dead, not on the dead who are active in the lives of the living. That poses a problem to the bereaved and to those who study them. “Bereaved people are positioned between the living and the dead,” Tony Walter noted, but “how do they manage to relate to the dead in a rational secular society that has no place for the dead?” (Walter, 1999, p. 205). If, then, we take our own culture’s continuing bonds as normative, the findings of our research will be applicable to only our own time and place. First, our

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findings will be partial because in present research, we are limited to studying only one party in the relationship (see Klass, 2006). Second, our findings would be limited because to really understand we need to know where continuing bonds fit into the cultural narrative. In this article we will deal with rapid historical changes in continuing bonds. We will avoid, however, gradual changes over time because, although we have good studies of particular cultures, the studies are so detailed that it is hard to abstract them enough to find generalizable patterns. In her work on ancient Greece, for example, Sarah Iles Johnston (1999) says: Greek beliefs evolved from a system in which the dead were relatively weak and unlikely to affect the world of the living, except under very special circumstances and then of their own volition, into a system in which the dead were an active force in the world of the living and could be called into action when the living chose. (p. 31)

She then spends the rest of her book in very detailed reviews of literature, inscriptions, and other material from ancient Greek history to support her hypothesis. The cross-cultural changes in continuing bonds over time, it seems to me, then, must wait for a scholar with a broad enough historical, linguistic, and literary background to draw connections that are far beyond the limitations I bring to the question. Further, we will concern ourselves only occasionally with the variations in the attributes of the dead. Medieval historian Ronald Finucane (1996) notes that in some periods the dead remain close to their bodies, so are often contacted in graveyards, and at other times the dead remain in the place where they died. At other times the dead are separated from their bodies and place of death and so may appear to the living anywhere, any time. Sometimes the dead return bearing the marks of their final illness or violence, while at other times they are as insubstantial as puffs of smoke. Sometimes they bang on and come in the door, and at other times they can float though walls. Sometimes they are recognizable to those who knew them, other times their identity is disguised. We will bring the attributes of the dead only when they are important to help us understand the interaction we are describing. Three broad kinds of relationships the dead have with the living seems to be a useful way to organize our thinking. We will look first at the family dead, in ways the living can help the dead, and what the dead offer the living when the dead remain part of the family. Second, we will explore the hostile dead, that is, the dead spirits that threaten the well-being of the living. Third, we will consider the political dead as we look at the ways the dead become embroiled in the political interests, causes, and conflicts of the living to whom they are bonded. All that will take us far beyond the arbitrary limits to which current research on continuing bonds usually restricts itself. It will, however, not take us

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outside the scope of Bob Kastenbaum’s inclusive definition of death, society, and human experience. THE FAMILY DEAD A good place to begin to understand continuing bonds where the dead have ontological standing is in ancestor rituals that occur at some periods in the history of most cultures. Peter Ching-Yung Lee (1995) says that until Western individualism was imported to China, the family, not individual, was the basic unit of society. The Confucian tradition assumes the continued existence of the dead and the mutual dependence between the dead and the living. It was natural, then, Lee says, that the most important religious activity is ancestor rituals, “the veneration of predecessors in the father’s line of descent, beginning with his parents” (Lee, 1995, p. 174). The importance of ancestor worship is seen in the ancestral altar in the main hall of every house, on which are tablets for each deceased ancestor. Incense and food are offered daily to the dead, morning and evening. The rituals maintain the continuity of the ties between the living and the dead and serve as “a reminder of the existence of the role of the dead among the living in the family” (Lee, 1995, p. 180). The rituals thus reinforce the ties of loyalty and solidarity among family members, as well as symbolizing and helping the family’s good fortune and well-being. The ancestors are, then, what Emil Durkheim called collective representations. Such figures play a major role in developing social solidarity and identity in families, tribes, ethnic groups, or nations. Mourning rituals install the dead into collective memory, not merely into the individual memories of those who knew them. Japanese Buddhism, in the Theravada tradition, has incorporated the Confucian idea of family and ancestor rituals as a central element in lay people’s relationship to their temples (Goss & Klass, 2005; Klass, 1996). Indeed, ancestor rituals are so central to lay Buddhism in Japan that it is often called “funeral Buddhism.” The bond between the living and the dead is mutually beneficial. A Japanese student told me that her mother has a history of depression. When she is depressed, she thinks that her mother (my student’s grandmother) is lonely and hungry. To help the depression, my student and her mother travel to the small town where the grandmother is in the family grave and where the grandmother’s tablet is in the family Butsudan (a small Buddhist altar). In front of the Butsudan and at the grave, they burn incense, present food offerings, and pray. The prayer gesture is to bow and hold the hands with palms together. When Japanese people try to tell English speakers what they are doing, they say they are praying, but as several have explained to me, the prayer is not like they perceive Americans praying, with many words addressed to God. Rather, prayer is the living person and the dead person experiencing each

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other’s presence. In the rituals my student and her mother experience the grandmother’s presence and put out offerings of food. In her attitude in silent prayer, the mother may apologize for not visiting often enough, and promise to come more often. Perhaps the mother intuits that the grandmother accepts her apology; in rare instances she might even hear her mother’s voice. The interaction is really not so different than if the grandmother were in a retirement home and her adult daughter lived a few hours away. After the rituals, my student reported, her mother feels less depressed, and the grandmother no longer feels lonely and hungry. In the southern Asian Mahayana Buddhist traditions, we find continuing bonds in merit transfer. Monks can work off their negative karma, accumulate positive karma, and thus move toward a better rebirth, by devoting their lives to meditation and ritual. Lay people accomplish that task by ethical living, that is by practicing right action, right speech, and right intention. More often, however, lay people see their religious life as offering material gifts to the monks. In return, the virtuous power of the monks returns a reward of merit. The merit earned by the lay person’s giving can be transferred to a deceased relative about whom the gift giver is concerned. Merit transfer was important in the early development of Buddhism in India as it replaced the Brahman rituals before Brahmanism was revised into what we now know as Hinduism. As often happens when religious traditions change, this change was led by business people of lower social status, in this case low caste. Their caste status prevented them from performing the Brahman rituals, but they could act ethically in their business dealings and use what they earned to support the monks (see Goss & Klass, 2005, chapter 4). The living helping the dead is a common theme in the Western traditions as well as the Asian traditions. The side altars in medieval churches allowed many priests to offer masses for the dead to secure their early release from purgatory. We find similar continuing bonds in many Muslim cultures (see Goss & Klass, 2005). Before Wahhabi reforms prohibited it, prayers were offered at the graves of Muslim saints (wali; plural: awliy~). Often those prayers were asking the saints to help those who have died toward a more secure eternal life. Even now, Almad H. Sakr says, helping the dead is an important part of many Muslims’ religious life (also see Hussein & Oyebode, 2009). In many Muslim cultures, the soul hovers above the physical body until burial. The soul can hear and see what is going on, but cannot communicate. The grave is, then the focus of continuing bonds. Some Muslims visit the grave the second day to ask forgiveness of the deceased. The living should not forgive the dead because that was supposed to have happened when the person was alive, especially during the dying process. Survivors can also settle the accounts of the dead. Heirs are responsible for paying debts of the deceased. Some debts can be religious debts such as Hajj (pilgrimage) or fasting in Ramadan (Sakr, 1995). A Saudi student told me that the year after his paternal grandmother died his father went on Hajj “for her. He loved his mother very much.”

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Although in most contemporary Islam the dead have no direct contact with the living, there are things the living can do for the dead. Some of what Sakr lists are the pillars, while others are ways of acting that define being a good Muslim. The living can: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9.

Make supplication of forgiveness and mercy for the deceased. Give charity (sadaquah) and zakat (alms) on behalf of the deceased. Perform pilgrimage (hajj) on their behalf. Perform extra prayer (salat) on their behalf. Give water to the thirsty people on behalf of the deceased. Fast any number of days outside the month of Ramadan for the deceased. Read Qur’an on their behalf. Teach Qur’an or request someone to teach Qur’an on their behalf. Spread knowledge through television, radio, books, or other literature on their behalf. 10. Build schools, mosques, clinics, and hospitals on their behalf. Sakr says, All of us are in need of these while we are in our graves. Otherwise, we may be penalized daily. We may cry for help, but in vain. Allah may allow the soul of the deceased to come over in our dreams to remind us of our needs for supplication (Du’a) and other good deeds on their behalf. We hope and pray that we do something good for the deceased before we ourselves go to our graves. (Sakr, 1995, p. 68)

These accounts of continuing bonds in ancestor rituals, merit transfer, and helping the dead to a better eternal life are very different from continuing bonds we experience in the contemporary developed West. We cannot access the dead as we could in a culture in which the dead are real. We have only vague ideas about where they are, what they need and want from us, and therefore only vague ideas about what we need and want from them. Edith Steffen and Adrian Coyle’s (2010) study shows the problem concisely. They collected reports of a sense of presence from contemporary people in the United Kingdom. As we have seen, the sense of presence is a common phenomenon in continuing bonds in many cultures. Steffen and Coyle’s subjects had difficulty using the sense of presence in their constructions of meaning because they have no culturally sanctioned way of locating the dead. The potential of spiritual benefit-finding as a result of presence-sensing may, however, be difficult to realize if the conceptual frameworks that are available for making sense of the experience do not permit spiritual interpretations or if they privilege reductionist explanations. (Steffen & Coyle, 2010, p. 227)

It may well be, then, that the mixed results we find in empirical studies of the correlation between continuing bonds and coping (Field, Gao, & Paderna, 2005; Field, Gal-Oz, & Bonanno, 2003) are a cultural artifact. That is, the results show difficulties that arise when one partner in post-death interactions is so nebulous.

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It was, of course, not always so in the West. Patrick Geary (1994) says that in the middle ages in Europe, “Death marked a transition, a change of status, but not an end” (p. 2). The living, he says, owed the dead memoria, that is remembrance. This meant “not only liturgical remembrance in the prayers and masses offered for the dead for weeks, months, and years but also preservation of the name, the family, and the deeds of the departed” (p. 2). The sense of presence, that is so often vague in Steffen and Coyle’s research subjects in modern Britain, was the ground of the individual sense of self a thousand years ago. Significant people (we know almost nothing about the bonds to the dead among the peasants) had a prayer list of the names in the historical succession that led to them. Inheriting property carried with it the duty to pray for those who gave it. Saying the names, Geary says, “was the means by which the dead were made present” (p. 87). Just as we saw in Asian ancestor rituals, the dead provide the individual his or her place in the family, and thus in the society. The name given to a child was often chosen to reinforce the historical lineage. By reusing certain name elements or entire names from generation to generation, families or individuals were consciously preserving their own names and those of their ancestors. Names were a form of immaterial inheritance.” (Geary, 1994, p. 88)

Continuing bonds are still important in defining social membership among some groups. In their study of London cemeteries, Doris Francis, Leonie Kellaher, and Georgina Neophytou (2005) say that as immigrant groups establish themselves in England, the cemetery becomes a piece of the old country, an ethnic homeland. Funeral and burial practices there are often hybrid; that is, elements of English practice come into the ethnic traditions. In this way, the cemetery is a transition space in the movement from one country to another. Often early in the immigration history, bodies or remains are shipped back home, but later, the homeland is brought to England as a section of an older cemetery. They note that in the Greek Cypriot burial ground the ethnic cemetery shows clearly the way bonds with the dead are part of the bond with the ethnic identity. One of their interviewees said, “There is no separation between the dead and the living; we are all part of the [Greek] Orthodox community” (Francis et al., 2005, p. 192). Another said, “To be buried in a community cemetery makes me feel that we are with our own people; here where my parents are buried, there is a small part of Cyprus” (Francis et al., 2005, p. 192). We will deal with the political roles of the dead later in the article, but we can note here that Francis, Kellaher, and Neophytou report that in some ethnic cemeteries, patriotic observances are part of the memorial rituals to the dead. For example, “It is now customary to include a memorial service at New Southgate (Cemetery) on the anniversary of the Turkish invasion of Cyprus, conducted by local Orthodox priests, bishops, and the Archbishop” (Francis et al., 2005, p. 190).

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THE HOSTILE DEAD There is, of course, a more problematic aspect of continuing bonds, an aspect that, in its overt form, has almost completely disappeared from bonds with the dead in our day. That is, the majority of the reports of continuing bonds in contemporary research and counseling are that the dead comfort, reassure, and sometimes help. I recall one mother who was having a hard time quitting smoking. She said her teenage son was cheering her on, “Come on, mom, you can do it.” Outside of fictionalized stories of exorcism or horror movies, however, we very seldom hear of dead people who come back to haunt or harm living people whom they knew when they were living. Finding reasons why something is not is difficult. So it is hard to say why reports of the hostile dead are rare in contemporary continuing bonds. In the conversations that led to our book Dead but not Lost: Grief Narratives in Religious Traditions (Goss & Klass, 2005, chapter 5; also see Klass & Goss, 1999), Bob Goss and I wondered if relationships with the dead are like other relationships in transnational consumer capitalism which has replaced the more intimate and directly interpersonal clans, villages, and neighborhoods that managed grief for most of human history. Freed from the obligations of the small interpersonal social memberships, individuals are freed from old guidelines and role expectations. Individuals can now find their intimate identity in self-chosen friends, colleagues, and marriage partners. If the bonds are not satisfactory, the individual is free to leave them and form other bonds that are more satisfactory. Perhaps the hostile dead are less problematic because the living can now modulate which aspects of the relationship continues after the death, much as an individual can modulate which aspects continue after a divorce. In cultures not based in individualism, but rather based in more collective identity, relationships are based in obligation, not freedom. That means that the tensions in the bond continue beyond death. The problem of the dead returning as harmful spirits is deeply woven into Asian ancestor rituals. Lee notes that the positive motivations of family loyalty and solidarity in the Chinese rituals was balanced with the negative consequences if the rituals were not performed. The spirits of a dead person could become “unpredictable and might do evil even to his or her own intimate kin” (Lee, 1995, p. 177). Mary Picone (1981) notes that in traditional Japan because aborted children are “cheated out of life and of the veneration of descendants, the souls of children can be particularly dangerous” (Picone, 1981, p. 30). Beginning in the 1960s, mizuko kuyo, rituals for aborted and children who died prenatally or as neonates, were introduced into Buddhism. Mizuko means water child and kuyo means rituals for the dead (Klass & Heath, 1996). Although modern scientific thinking has made a dent in primary naiveté, fear of the child returning as a harmful spirit continues from earlier days. Bardwell Smith (2013) quotes from women’s written thoughts in journals in a mizuko temple in Japan where they come to do the rituals. One woman wrote, “In scientific terms it is clear

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that curses do not exist, but there is something that I cannot completely dismiss emotionally” (Smith, 2013, p. 102). For other women, thoughts and feelings about the child causing bad things to happen is intertwined with their thoughts about their relationship with the child’s father. Whenever I encounter something bad I take it as mizuko retribution. No matter how much I suffer, I take it as fate. . . . Although I have such a strong sense of tsumi (having given offense), the man seems to feel nothing. . . . The sin belongs to both man and woman, but why is it that the woman has to carry the full weight of this? (p. 111)

The reconciliation between the living and the dead is important in traditional Japan. In his study of new religions, Winston Davis (1992, pp. 288-290) gives a case of how spirits of the dead can be harmful and how they can be transformed into helpful spirits by including them in the lives and concerns of the living. His story is of an unmarried woman—a bad fate in Japan—who was now alone in the world living at the dojo, the group’s practice hall. The woman had spirit seizures that recurred after each time she received rituals of healing/purification that her sect’s teaching said should have cured her. The spirit, she discovered, was her older sister in a previous life. The sister had died at 28 from tuberculosis. Angry at her untimely death, the sister became a malevolent ghost, possessing and killing off family members, so finally there was no one left to care for her memorial tablet. Because of what the dead woman had done, and because there was no one to care for her, she was transformed into various animal spirits that were described as “big as elephants.” After the woman living at the dojo discovered the spirit’s identity, the spirit gradually got smaller and smaller and finally took on human shape, wept, and confessed the evil she had done. The seizures then abated. The presence of this spirit explained the bad things that had happened in the woman’s life. The spirit had often caused her to be sick, just as the spirit had caused the family to be sick in the previous life. The spirit had also caused her to remain single. She remembered that she had suitors but that things had never worked out. So, she reasoned, if she had known earlier, she might have gotten married. As the woman decided that the spirit was her sister in a former life, she was adopting the spirit. As the spirit had someone to care for it, the spirit became less and less hostile and then became a comforting ancestor spirit. The woman was also possessed by some other spirits, including her grandmother, who complained of being hungry. She went home to see what was wrong and found that a family member who had converted to Soka Gakkai (a Buddhist sect) had wrapped the grandmother’s memorial tablet in a cloth, stored it away, and put a new tablet in its place. Soka Gakkai encourages its members to acquire a special kind of Buddha altar as a way of connecting bonds with the dead to bonds with the sect. That is why the grandmother’s tablet was

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put away and replaced with another tablet. The woman realized the grandmother’s spirit had not moved to the new tablet, so of course the grandmother was hungry; she could not eat the food that was put out as an offering. The woman got out the old tablet, put it beside the new tablet so the grandmother’s spirit could move, and the grandmother was satisfied. The story ends with the woman no longer harmed by the spirits and given the positions of member of the dojo’s auxiliary cabinet and vice chairperson of the Helper’s Society. That is, as she integrated her sister’s spirit into her life and made sure that her sister and grandmother were included in the proper rituals, the woman also moved up in status as she was more fully integrated into her religious community. Geary says that in medieval central Europe the gifts of the dead, including life, property, and personal identity, were so great that the living would be threatened if they did not offer gifts in exchange. The threat was “hostile or dominating intrusions by the dead in the society of the living” which could only be prevented by restoring the balance of gifts. In Germanic sagas, “the dead regularly return to inflict punishment, share meals, exact revenge, give advice, teach, offer advice or—more often, through mute suffering, warnings—to repent” (Geary, 1994, p. 83). When the sagas were still a living tradition, the idea of Purgatory was in its formative stages, so ideas about the relationships of the living with the dead were not yet fixed. In the early medieval period the dead could be directly involved to encourage moral behavior and to help the individual monitor his or her thoughts. As the medieval period progressed, the church became the intermediary between the living and the dead, offering prayer and masses for the dead. The new rituals maintained the role of supporting moral living both through the positive examples the dead provided and by the threat that the dead would come back as harmful spirits that could bring extreme misfortune on the individual, family, and even the whole town or village if the rituals were discontinued. We find an interesting variation in medieval Icelandic sagas before Christianity took full hold. Individuals of marginal social status were integrated into the society and moved to higher status by conquering and banishing the hostile dead. The process was, thus, opposite of the Japanese model of embracing the spirit, but the end was the same: integrating the living into the community. Because the sagas are about heroes, they tell us little about how more common people interact with their dead relatives. Whereas in both Japan and medieval Europe the dead spirits were separated from their bodies, Icelandic dead remained attached to their bodies. The most common way to get rid of the hostile dead was to dig up, decapitate, and then burn the corpse, although Kirsi Kanerva (2013) reports simpler methods, for example summoning the spirit and banishing it as a living person who violated community norms would be banished. In one saga, the hostile spirit appears while the farmer is driving his cows into the barn. The farmer attacks the spirit with a spear. The spirit grasps the spear so the shaft breaks off, then before the farmer can attack the spirit more, the spirit sinks into the ground. The next day the farmer digs at the

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place the spirit sank and finds the body with the spearhead in it. He then burns the corpse and the spirit causes no more problems. Kanerva’s study shows that the those who become heroes by confronting and defeating the harmful dead often had a marginal social status. They did not have inheritance rights because they were born of “an unapproved sexual relationship” (Kanerva, 2013, p. 115), for example the child of concubine. The problem is that they are living on farms that are not rightly theirs. The dead being buried on the land, of course, made the land legitimately belong to the dead. By destroying the corpse, the hero undercuts the claim and makes the land his own. Overcoming the hostile spirit offers a possibility to renegotiate their social status. Thus they can step out of the liminal space of ‘fatherlessness”, and take their place in society after obtaining a position as a rather heroic, well thought-of man and farmer. (Kanerva, 2013, p. 116)

In cultures where all continuing bonds with the dead are forbidden, any interactions with the dead are regarded as harmful to the living. That was the case in Europe and North America in the middle of the 20th century. At that time, psychiatry provided the socially sanctioned guidelines for grieving. In the work of grief: Each single one of the memories and situations of expectancy which demonstrate the libido’s attachment to the lost object is met by the verdict of reality that the object no longer exists. (Freud, 1917, p. 255)

If the living insisted on maintaining bonds to the dead they were deluded. They could not adequately function because they lived in a fantasy world separated from socially sanctioned reality. That is, continuing bonds to the dead kept the bereaved from reintegration into the society of the living. In order to fully function in the present, the theory said, the living must be emancipated from their bondage to the dead. If the bereaved had not successfully realized that the “object no longer exists,” the goal of psychiatric intervention, Vamik Volkan (1985) said, was to help them to do so. He and Robert Showalter described “re-griefing” psychotherapy in a case study of a 16-year-old girl whose mother had committed suicide. Instead of talking with her about her mother as a dead person, her mother was referred to as an inanimate object consisting of degenerating anatomic structures such as skin, muscle, and bone. Such an attempt, after the phase of abreaction, serves to hasten the actual return to normal reality testing while paradoxically giving impetus to repression of some conflictual ideas expressed. As can be readily seen, this somewhat harsh technique does not provide for full emotional insight but rather serves to repress some instinctual demands, especially the patient’s “death wishes” toward the lost object. . . . The therapist must be authoritative but at the same time he must be understanding. In this way the “strong” therapist can take over most of the guilt that the patient had been experiencing. (Volkan & Showalter, 1968, p. 370)

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It is interesting that Volkan and Showalter in the mid-20th century Europe and North America thought the spirit of the dead was associated with the body, much as it was in medieval Iceland. While the Icelandic heroes physically dig up the bodies to destroy them, Volkan and Showalter demand that the patient visualize her mother’s body being destroyed by natural processes. That is, when the body is destroyed, the spirit should no longer be available for interaction, thus emancipating the teenager from her bonds with her dead mother. THE POLITICAL DEAD Historically, as we have noted, the most common continuing bonds are within ancestor rituals that create family identity and define the values by which the family lives. Just as ancestor rituals are important in family loyalty and cohesion, bonds to the dead are also an important element in loyalty and cohesion in larger social bonds. In his address at the dedication of the cemetery at Gettysburg, Abraham Lincoln linked the people’s bonds with the dead buried there to their bonds with the ideals of the nation whose union they fought to save: “that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion.” At critical times in history as the arrangement of political power changes, loyalty to the family dead detracts from the individual’s allegiance to the new order (Goss & Klass, 2005). “This new loyalty—to God or the Church, to the Nation, to the Party or ideology—awards maximum points to those who forsake all other ties” (Mount, 1992, p. 6). When power arrangements change, continuing bonds with ancestors are recast into narratives that more directly support those who now claim political and economic power. A few examples will illustrate this widespread phenomenon. In ancient Israel, monotheism finally overcame Baalism in the Deuteronomic reform under King Josiah (621BCE). Before the reform, to appeal to the dead meant basically to call upon lost relatives residing in Sheol to aid the living. From these dead relatives the living expected personal protection and, more importantly, numerous offspring (Lang & McDannell, 1988, pp. 3-5).

Although there were ancestor rituals among the Israelites as they came into Canaan, the rituals were quickly mixed with Canaanite fertility religion. Almost all the graves dating from before Josiah contain clay female figures. These are the fertility goddess. Under Josiah, family graves, where ancestor rituals were performed, were destroyed and the bones dumped on the altars of other gods. Communications with the dead were forbidden (Bloch-Smith, 1992). Although the reform was short lived, the Israelites who went into the Babylonian Exile used Josiah’s reform as a template as they reformulated the religion into book-based Judaism, thus setting the pattern that would be adopted in Christianity and Islam.

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In mid-20th century, a very similar change happened in China. In the Communist narrative under Mao Zedong, individuals were no longer to regard themselves as family members, but rather to define themselves as workers, members of the proletariat. Funeral reform was high on the Communist Party’s agenda. Ancestor rituals were suppressed (Whyte, 1988). Filial piety was converted into loyalty to the state, and then to loyalty to Mao himself. The dead were eulogized as exemplars of dedication to Mao and to newfound zeal in production. As a way of consolidating the new cultural narrative, the Communists created new ancestors (Wakeman, 1988). In an antique Chinese house last inhabited in 1982, now at the Peabody Essex Museum near Boston, Mao’s name heads the list of ancestors above the ritual table. After Mao’s death, his preserved body in a tomb on T’ien-an Men Square became a pilgrimage site. In all of these developments, continuing bonds were assigned new meanings in keeping with the emergent dominant narrative of the state. As the Communist Party retained its political power, but abandoned its underlying ideology in favor of state-controlled capitalism, the family ancestors were less of a threat. Tentatively at first, and then openly, family ancestor veneration is again widely practiced. As collective representations, the dead are often involved in the political aspirations of groups that are excluded from political and economic power. It is common to hear the names and memories of those who died for the cause evoked as a way of energizing group members to work to achieve what those martyred have died for. Union organizer and song writer Joe Hill recognized the dynamic after he was sentenced to die by firing squad. “Don’t mourn for me—organize.” We find continuing bonds and politics connected in some interesting places in history. In mid-19th century, American Spiritualism grief and continuing bonds with the dead played an important role in the fight for woman’s rights (as it was called then) and in the movement to abolish slavery. Spiritualism is a broad term, but we can roughly define it as a religious belief that communication with the spirits of the dead is a means of directly experiencing sacred power and an expression of the best aspect of human nature. In Europe, especially in England, Spiritualism was a popular response to the cold rationality of the enlightenment. The Romantic movement always had a spiritualist side (see Finucane, 1996, pp. 153-216). American Spiritualism began in 1848 in Rochester, New York when Kate and Margaret Fox, ages 11 and 15, communicated with spirits of the dead through mysterious rapping sounds. Among the earliest people to recognize the validity of the Fox sisters being mediums were Amy and Isaac Post, who were Quakers active in the anti-slavery and marriage reform movements. The Post house was a station on the underground railroad. William Lloyd Garrison and Frederick Douglas had stayed as guests there. Among the early spirits they contacted in the Post home was the Posts’ 5-year-old daughter who had recently died, and then a 5-year-old son who had died several years earlier.

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The Posts were convinced and gathered “a small group to meet weekly in search of the truth that might be revealed by communicating with the dead through the girls’ mediumship” (Braude, 1989, p. 11). In a short time other people discovered they were mediums, and the Spiritualist movement was soon widespread. The rapping was replaced by writing, in which the spirits guided the medium’s hand, and speaking, in which the spirits used the medium’s voice or spoke from out of the darkness that surrounded the séance table. Later, the spirits communicated through a planchette, an early form of Ouija board. The early Spiritualists were, like Amy and Isaac Post, radical reformers who campaigned for woman’s rights and for the abolition of slavery. The two causes were related in that both were a challenge to the political and religious hegemony of white males. While most religious groups viewed the existing order of gender, race, and class relations as ordained by God, ardent Spiritualists appeared not only in the woman’s rights movement but throughout the most radical reform movements of the nineteenth century. They led the so-called ultraist wings of the movements for the abolition of slavery, for the reform of marriage, for children’s rights, and for religious freedom, and they actively supported socialism, labor reform, and vegetarianism, to name a few of their favorite causes. (Braude, 1989, p. 3)

The Spiritualists made two claims that undermined white male authority. The first claim was scientific. If the spirits of the dead could be contacted directly, then the sacred could not be confined to the Bible or to the churches. Spiritual truth was no longer the province of the clergy. Science could now overcome the barrier between the living and the dead just as the telegraph, that had been invented a few years earlier, could overcome the barrier of space and time. Verifiable scientific experience could replace the second-hand theological doctrines from the past. Second, Spiritualism made a theological claim. The Spiritualists reported that the dead who returned told of a beautiful heaven that everyone could enter. Humans were thus by nature good, not worthy only of damnation as the Calvinists preachers taught. The essential goodness that all humans shared was not limited by race or gender. If there were a gender preference, women were more spiritually inclined. The preachers of the day said that women were too passive and emotional for religious or political leadership. The Spiritualists argued that the passive emotional qualities of women made them better instruments through which the spirits of the dead could speak. It is very likely that the first time a person in the mid-19th century heard a woman speak in public, the woman was a Spiritualist medium and soon thereafter a Spiritualist reformer. Many people who came to Spiritualists’ meetings hoping to communicate with the dead were bereaved parents. Nineteenth century children were valued in the world where the private sphere of feminine domesticity had recently replaced the masculine dominated theological and political spheres as the locus of religious

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life (see Lasch, 1977). The spirits of the dead functioned much like we see continuing bonds functioning today. The spirits provided solace and moral guidance to those who felt their presence. The political meaning, however, was different. The moral guidance from the dead gave the Spiritualists heavenly support for the causes to which they devoted their lives. Wendy Simonds and Barbara Katz Rothman (1992) note that middle-class women and liberal ministers had both been excluded from public discourse and political power with the rise of early capitalism. The women and ministers became allied to promote the values of the private sphere. With its Victorian sentimentality and especially its concern with the feelings of grief at the deaths of little children, the private sphere could be a force that could counteract the masculine, rational competitiveness of industrial capitalism. Ann Douglas (1977) finds political meaning in the preoccupation with the communicating with the dead and in the loving descriptions of heaven as a world just as real as this one. If the insignificant could be proved to be the significant, if the dead could live, ministers and women could establish a new balance of power in the free-for-all, intensely competitive democracy of American culture.

We need not describe the whole arch of American Spiritualism. Ann Braude’s book remains a delightful read. Spiritualism gained popularity rapidly in the 1850s and through the Civil War. Séances became an accepted part of Victorian life. As Spiritualism moved into the homes of the privileged and into the public sphere, the reform doctrines receded. Continuing bonds with the dead could still be intensely personal, but were largely separated from political reform. The Civil War had begun as a fight to save the Union, but had been redefined as a war to end slavery. After the war, some reformers, for example abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, believed the reform movement had been successful, even though women’s rights remained as they had been. Women played public roles in other reforms, for example speaking in public for the prohibition of alcohol. A more liberal Protestant theology made the Spiritualist opposition to Calvinism seem outmoded. From the late 1860s into the 1880s, Spiritualism’s scientific claims led to more exaggerated and theatrical demonstrations. To prove their scientific claim, the Spiritualists abandoned the theological claim and then resorted to fraud. Harry Houndini was only one of the magicians who came forward to expose the charlatans who had turned communication with the dead into stage shows. Spiritualism fell of its own weight, although a small band of true believers remains to this day. The reforms that had been so intimately connected with Spiritualism moved forward on their own. The women’s cause proceeded with little additional help from the dead toward women’s constitutional right to vote and toward equality in the workplace. Birth control separated sex from conception, thereby helping women gain the control over their bodies that the Spiritualists had demanded. The

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fight against slavery had been won, although the battle against Jim Crow still lay ahead. The Freedom Movement of the 1960s that completed the work of the Civil War had few references to continuing bonds with the dead. Those who died in the struggle, including Martin Luther King, were honored as collective representations, but they did not return to offer advice or to testify to truths from beyond the grave. As the movement succeeded and African Americans were more integrated into the larger society, King himself became a collective representation of the whole country, with a monument in Washington DC almost equidistant from the Lincoln and Jefferson memorials, and the Washington Monument. SO WHAT’S THE CONCLUSION? What are we to conclude from all this data in our brief foray into continuing bonds, society, and human experience? In Kastenbaum’s mode, we do not need to make any broad conclusions. Each of the reports in this chapter would be interesting in itself to Kastenbaum. Knowledge was, for him, more about opening up with wonder, curiosity, and a wry comment or two than it was about closing off with conclusions. There are, however, a few broad statements we can make that I hope will help us as we further our work. The first is a warning. If we persist in excluding the dead from our study of continuing bonds, any conclusions we reach will be very partial, giving us data on only a limited range of interactions with a limited sample of the world’s population in one unusual historical period. Second, maybe we could revive Carl Jung’s (1964) idea that what was ritual and myth in traditional societies is internal psychiatric symptom or process in modernity. We might ask how many of the ways continuing bonds function in other times and places are still functioning below the level of individual or collective awareness. It would be interesting to see if Jung’s theory of objective and subjective interpretations (1962) could be integrated into more contemporary grief counseling therapy techniques. Third, we have seen that the integration of the individual into larger social units is a dynamic running through our explorations in family dead, hostile dead, and political dead. In family systems theories, social psychology, and the sociological study of death and grief we have good conceptual tools to study that aspect of continuing bonds. Here is a hypothesis to test: some individuals diagnosed with Complicated Grief, or what a few researchers have described as Prolonged Grief Disorder, continue their exaggerated grieving because the dead are not integrated into the family or intimate social networks. Thus, individuals diagnosed with the disorders must grieve because if they don’t, the dead will be forgotten. We could, as Volkan did, demand that the bereaved give up the dead as the price for readmission to social membership; or we could focus instead on installing the dead as family and community members.

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Fourth, one way around the problem Walter posed when he asked how do we “manage to relate to the dead in a rational secular society that has no place for the dead?” (Walter, 1999, p. 205) is to adopt William James’s strategy. We do not need to prove the dead’s ontological status, as does parapsychology, to take them seriously. That was the mistake the Spiritualists made in their scientific claim. In his book Varieties of Religious Experience, James (1902/1958) argued that unseen things, in which people believe, have real existence because they have real effects. We can treat the dead as legitimate objects of our research because we can observe their effects on people in our day, and, as we have seen in this article, on peoples of many other places and times. Fifth, the times they are a changing. If the dead are excluded from academic study, they are less and less excluded from other cultural discourse. Psychological study might do well to expand. It might, for example, incorporate Adrianne Kunkel and Michael Dennis’s nuanced the study of funeral literature like eulogies, elegies, memoirs, and memorials by which family and intimate groups create meaningful narratives (Dennis, 2008; Kunkel & Dennis, 2003). Tony Walter (2011) traced how a reality TV star who died transitioned into an angel in pop culture. Sociologists and students of popular culture have given us reports of spontaneous memorials, both physical and on the Internet. We have then conceptual tools and ample data that are waiting to be integrated into the fuller study of both parties, the living and the dead, in continuing bonds. Bob Kastenbaum would have wanted us to do nothing less. I, for one, am sad that he is no longer with us in body to lead the way. REFERENCES Becker, C. B. (1993). Paranormal experience and survival of death. Albany, MA: State University of New York Press. Berger, A. S. (1995). Quoth the raven: Bereavement and the paranormal. Omega: Journal of Death and Dying, 31(1), 1-10. Bloch-Smith, E. M. (1992). The cult of the dead in Judah: Interpreting the material remains. Journal of Biblical Literature, 111(2), 213-224. Braude, A. (1989). Radical spirits: Spiritualism and women’s rights in nineteenth-century America, Boston, MA: Beacon Press. Davis, W. (1992). Japanese religion and society: Paradigms of structure and change. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Dennis, M. R. (2008). The grief account: Dimensions of a contemporary bereavement genre. Death Studies, 32(9), 801-836. Douglas, A. (1977). The feminization of American culture. New York, NY: Alfred A. Knopf. Field, N. P., Gao, B., & Paderna, L. (2005). Continuing bonds in bereavement: An attachment theory based perspective. Death Studies, 29, 1-23. Field, N. P., Gal-Oz, E., & Bonanno, G. A. (2003). Continuing bonds and adjustment at 5 years after the death of a spouse. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 71(1), 110-117.

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Direct reprint requests to: Dennis Klass, Ph.D. Professor Emeritus Webster University P.O. Box 202 Truro, MA 02666 e-mail: [email protected]