I would like to argue retroductively that, based on the basic assumption that human
beings are “meaning-seeing” beings, crucial generative mechanisms can be traced
behind the ICD-11 category, “prolonged grief disorder”. This paper’s argument is based
on the theoretics of contemporary diagnostics, and can be summarized the following
way: With the fall of the grand narratives (Dufour) and with Disenchantment of the
World (Weber)— and thereby the fall of the dominating theodicies (Weber)—people
look for alternative explanatory theodicies (Wilkinson). Furthermore, I argue that the
embryonic form of these alternative theodicies can be understood through Bauman’s
thoughts on the individual’s deconstruction of their own mortality in relation to
modernity. This consists of the individual’s attempt to cope with and/or resist their own
mortality by splitting up their mortality into smaller, explanatory segments. In doing so,
the individual’s experience of suffering is allowed to be understood through a new lens
of meaning based on the officially described suffering found in ICD-11. Meaning
generation is then co-produced through the explanatory medical lexicon and the
adoption and synthesis of said lexicon in the individual’s experience of suffering,
creating a “diagnostic language of suffering”. This new “medicalised” language of
suffering colonizes other alternative forms of languages dealing with suffering,
ultimately resulting in an absence theodical explanations and what I call the
“administration of suffering”. The goal of “administration of suffering” being the attempt
to master, categorize and eliminate suffering. I conclude that “prolonged grief disorder”
is an imagined addition underneath administrational understandings of suffering.