Doluance and Prolonged Grief Disorder: Toward a Framework of Constitutive Simultaneity

Many bereaved persons who experience persistent yearning, a transformed sense of identity, and ongoing connection to the deceased, all at once, find themselves either pathologized by existing diagnostic frameworks or left without a conceptual language for what they are living. This article identifies a common root for the major debates surrounding the delimitation of Prolonged Grief Disorder (PGD): the absence of a framework that treats the co-occurrence of loss and continuing presence as a constitutive structure of grief. Drawing on the concept of doluance, defined as the constitutive simultaneity of rupture and transformed presence in bereavement, the article evaluates the heuristic reach of this framework beyond its context of origin (Canada, COVID-19 pandemic). The analysis is developed through the close examination of four emblematic items from current PGD assessment instruments and outlines an empirical agenda whose initial hypotheses can be tested with existing datasets.