If the theory of the “continuing bonds” perspective of bereavement is true, it is reasonable to suppose that there is a difference in the types of communication that occur between those who “cope” and those who do not. The ideas of Freire (1972) about communication which may, at first sight, seem to have little relevance to bereavement, have proved very useful in exploring this issue. Freire pioneered effective literacy programmes in South America and developed ideas related to oppression, freedom and communication. The programmes were effective because he used ethnographic methods to develop materials which worked from people’s own experience rather than trying to teach them to read and write words which represented concepts of which they had no understanding (1972).
Freire presents an excellent example of how oppression works at the level of human interaction and not only at the macrocosmic level of what we usually think of as “the political world” of legislation, military action and of national and international economics. Freire quotes Fromm (1964, page 32) to underline this wider understanding of oppression: “… the aim of sadism is to transform a man [sic] into a thing, something animate into something inanimate, since by complete and absolute control the living loses one essential quality of life – freedom”. Those who are free are described as ‘subjects’ which at first may sound contradictory but the word is used as, for instance, it is used in grammar. Graddol, Cheshire and Swann (1994) contrast the English language with Welsh, explaining that, in English, the usual word order is subject (S), verb (V) and object (O) whereas Welsh is a language which puts the verb first. Hence, English is described as a SVO language and Welsh as a VSO language.
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In both instances, irrespective of word order, the subject of the sentence is the person who is doing something and the object is whatever may be receiving the effect of the action. Hence, in this perspective, a subject is a person who does something, a person who acts, but who does so without oppressing others. “Subjects” are neither oppressors nor oppressed. In contrast, “objects” are oppressed. Continuing the analogy with grammar, the “object” is the part of the sentence that has something done to it. In Freire’s context of Latin America, “objects” were often poor, uneducated, powerless and dispossessed. “Objects” are owned, as for example, is the slave but Freire also takes on Marx’s ideas concerning alienation and the ownership of labour (1920). In Freire’s view, “objects” are also “owned” because they have internalised the character of the oppressor and whilst this may often be adult-adult oppression, Freire also discusses parent-child oppression (1972, pages 123-124). Oppressors “possess” the object who does not think their own thoughts but those of the oppressor and this is reflected in the words which are spoken because objects do not “speak their own word” (page 61) but speak the word of the oppressor.
“Subjects” are free to be fully human (pages 21 & 58). The “subject” is a “new man” and Freire talks about a “birth process” into this freedom. Freire applied these concepts to education, describing the traditional educational process as the “banking concept” of education; the teacher is a “narrator” whose “…..task is to ‘fill’ the students with the contents of his narration – contents which are detached from reality …..” (page 45). The aim of this ‘education’ is the socialisation of the student, to produce conformity to the system of “oppression”. Knowledge becomes a “deposit”. Memory rather than experience becomes important. As with any form of oppression, the student “speaks the word” of another. In “speaking the word” of another (the oppressor), the student (object) is oppressed, not free, not
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fully human. To be fully human, he must “speak his own word” and “name the world”. Dialogue is the encounter by which people name the world. In describing “dialogic education”, contrasted with “banking the deposit”, Freire draws examples from adult literacy work in the third world. In this work, the educators, by means of a type of ethnographic survey, discover the themes, codes and situations which exist in the world of the potential students. This method is contrasted with the didactic approach in which not only the vocabulary, but also the values are those of the educators. In “naming his world” the subject “creates his own world” which results in liberation and revolution.
These ideas, clearly, were fashioned in the context of educational work and in a context of poverty and oppression. The relevance of such theory to bereavement responses and support for bereaved people may not, therefore, be immediately apparent but the intention is to demonstrate how these ideas may be applied to important issues of communication and non- communication in the context of children’s grief. It has been seen, above, in discussing attachment theory, that communication plays a key role in the forming of emotional bonds. It has also been seen, above, that there are questions about how, or if, people communicate with themselves and with others in trying to express grief and that it may important to confront feelings rather than simply to rehearse them. It has been argued by Xavier (2013) that the concept referred to as ‘naming the world’ is implicitly synonymous with semiotics because it involves assigning descriptions which have meaning for the person employing those descriptions.