Secondary euphoria

Euphoria is the emotional experience of anima, so secondary euphoria is what secondary anima feels like, and the two named routes are sublation, in which the will of another is dominated, and violation, in which the animus is attacked directly. The reason the entry matters is that this experience is indistinguishable from the other kind while it is happening. Both feel like euphoria, and only the source and the aftermath differ, which is the whole difficulty the framework is built around. Marsh draws the strong inference from that. If the sublation of others produces euphoria or a substitute for it, that would account for a great deal about theorists who took domination to be the fundamental human relation, since they may have been describing accurately what they experienced. The ordinary cases are what make the point uncomfortable. The rush most people know on the achievement of a child, a student or a teammate is secondary euphoria, as is what an audience takes from watching suffering, so this is not an exotic appetite belonging to unusual people. The endoself is defined by having only this route available, and the closest thing to joy such a person can experience is the secondary euphoria obtainable through cruelty and destruction, which is why Marsh describes an endoself as existing in a nearly joyless state rather than in a pleasureless one.

Schadenfreude has an established research literature measuring pleasure at others' misfortune and linking it to envy and to group rivalry. Sadism is studied as a personality dimension, with everyday sadism recently added to the dark triad. Neuroscience finds reward activation when a rival is harmed. Nietzsche's account of ressentiment and cruelty in the genealogy of morals is the philosophical antecedent. Marsh's version differs by treating the pleasure as the ingestion of a substance rather than as an emotional response, which is what allows her to place schadenfreude, pride in a teammate and torture on one continuum distinguished by degree rather than by kind.