Three, there are things to be learned from grief. God does not orchestrate loss in order to teach us, but grief radicalizes life. And in reorienting ourselves to the world around us, we learn new things about ourselves, our relationship to God, and what we value. We can "get stuck"—the insights to be gained from living with those moments cannot be put on a clock and measured out.
Relationships that are lost are nothing to get over. Among the assumptions implicit in the church's doctrine of the resurrection is the message that we endure as individuals in God's presence. To lose the immediacy of a loved one's companionship is to suffer painful loss, but the relationship endures.
Psychological approaches that lack that dimension cannot talk about a meaningful hope that follows on the loss of someone we love—apart from the saccharine consolation that those we love "live on in our hearts." But, for that reason, it is not surprising that the debate over the D.S.M. appears to imply, "Give them a month. If they aren't over it, medicate them."
It turns out that the greatest problem with the practice of psychology might not be when it forgets that it is art, as well as science. The real problem may be its pretensions to be a religion.