Trauer und Trost

Loss can have a tremendous impact on the course of a social work case. Social work institutions, such as welfare services for children, teenagers or homeless people, have been and are still being established as a reaction to one or more losses. At the same time, these institutions tend to multiply losses through their interventions, for example in custody cases. In a social context, coping with loss is a subjective task. Loss appears in a variety of dimensions and does not only occur in the aftermath of a significant person’s death. The central reaction to loss is grief, which is then responded to with comfort, which defines the educational approach in different fields. In this study, the most common theories on grief are introduced and extended to a specific understanding of loss in social work theory.