Why do we care so much about closure?

It struck me again on Monday. There, on the front page of The Citizen, was a story about Earl, the Great Dane whose portrait I painted recently; he had found a headless body in the bushes in Durban — a location 500m from the home of murder accused and former Blue Bulls player Joseph Ntshongwana. Earl’s owner, Paul Kirk, just happens to be a journalist who specialises in reporting on crime (what are the chances?) Reflecting on this strange turn of events, Kirk wrote that his dog’s discovery “ensured a murder victim would get a decent burial and brought closure to the victim’s family”.

“Closure” has become one of those concepts from the world of psychology that have become rather curiously entrenched in South African discourse of crime and justice in the past five years or so. The families of victims — most recently that of Anni Dewani — often speak of a desire for closure. When the police issue a statement about the search for a missing person or the identification of remains, the notion of closure for their families is frequently mentioned.

The concept of closure has been used in connection with the Arms Deal; in dealing with what can be the emotionally wrenching experience of surrogate births; even when tackling problems with poor customer service. It is perceived to be a desirable state of affairs. We seem to agree that closure, regardless of what it is used in connection with, is a good thing.

“Closure” as it was originally defined in 1923, had a somewhat different meaning. The founder of Gestalt psychology, Max Wertheimer, used it to describe our tendency to “fill in the gaps” and perceive an incomplete stimulus as though it were whole — an innate tendency to join the dots, as it were. Over time, “closure” came to refer to what we would be familiar with today, as the conclusion to a negative event, which can range from the death of a loved one to the end of a relationship. In 1993, Arie Kruglanski, Donna Webster and Adena Klem devised a Need for Closure Scale. A high score on this scale is associated with authoritarianism and dogmatism; conversely, a low score is associated with creativity. Closure in this sense has negative connotations as well as positive.

The concept of closure was popularised by the US media in the 1990s. When the Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh was convicted, a Texas paper ran the headline, “Verdict brings a sense of closure for families”. The word means different things to different people: revenge, comfort, certainty, finality. “Its many meanings now fill the air around us,” Robert Fulford reflected in this column from 2001.

So it seems we are simply following the US and other countries in embracing the concept of closure, though it’s still not clear why it should have become part of the standard vocabulary of law enforcement and the justice system in a country that has never embraced psychotherapy with the enthusiasm found in other parts of the world. South Africa is a hard place, witness to body counts unimaginable in gentler societies. You’d think we’d have become inured to it all. Somehow, though, we seem to have agreed, collectively, that finality and certainty are both desirable and worthy — though whether anything is truly final is debatable. I think that we may have taken so readily to the idea of closure because it is a way to put a positive spin on the conclusion to a negative event. It is comforting, not so much for those who are directly involved, but for the others who stand on the sidelines and watch. In the end, talking about closure allows us to tell ourselves that we have permission to move on.