Continuing Bonds designates the theoretical position — advanced most influentially by Klass, Silverman, and Nickman in 1996 and subsequently elaborated across the bereavement literature — that the relationship between the bereaved and the deceased does not terminate with death but undergoes transformation, persisting in forms that may be adaptive or, under certain conditions, pathological. The corpus positions this concept in direct opposition to the older Freudian injunction to withdraw libidinal investment from the lost object as a precondition for healthy mourning. Worden’s clinical handbook stands as the primary site of sustained engagement, framing the debate around four unresolved empirical questions: which types of bonds prove most helpful, for whom they are salutary versus harmful, whether they change over time, and how cultural context shapes their expression. The neuroscientific voice of O’Connor complements this clinical literature by grounding the felt sense of closeness with the deceased in identifiable neural architecture — specifically the posterior cingulate cortex — lending the concept a somatic and measurable substrate. Neimeyer’s constructivist tradition approaches continuing bonds through narrative and meaning-reconstruction, treating the inner representation of the dead as an ongoing relational presence that the bereaved actively maintain and revise. Attachment theory, invoked across multiple authors, supplies the metapsychological scaffolding: the bond persists because it was never merely behavioral but was internalized as a working model. The central unresolved tension concerns adaptive versus maladaptive instantiations, a question the corpus treats as empirically open.