Endosocial Membrane

The endosocial membrane is the physical part of the framework, and almost everything else depends on it existing. It blocks two kinds of conduit, empathic and euphoric, and the blockage is what produces both an endoself and an endogroup, since a person cut off from primary anima becomes the first and a bounded set of people cut off together becomes the second. An animus is life contained within such a membrane for the use of an individual or group, which makes the membrane the container that individuates life in the first place. It is not the same thing as a personal membrane. A personal membrane is resilient, permeable and strong through relationships, protecting a self while letting conduits through. An endosocial membrane blocks them, which is the difference between a boundary and a wall. Marsh wrote the consequence as plainly as she wrote anything. Hate is the creation of endosocial membranes and love is the creation of connections, and endosocial membranes create one dominant will around a person or group of people. The dissolution case makes the same point from the other side, since accounts of the experience of death describe all endosocial membranes being gone and full connection resulting, with no others left and therefore nothing to hate. The membrane is also what has to be held in place against pressure, since exosocial expansion pushes outward continuously and maintaining the blockage costs energy without pause.

Boundaries in psychotherapy are usually treated as healthy and their absence as enmeshment, which inverts Marsh's usage, though the distinction she draws between the personal and the endosocial membrane restores most of the agreement. Group boundary maintenance is well studied in anthropology after Fredrik Barth and Mary Douglas, and Norbert Elias and John Scotson's account of the established and the outsiders describes the same exclusion sociologically. What none of these supply is a substrate. Marsh's membrane is not a metaphor for social distance but a thing that blocks specific channels, which is why it can create an endoself in one person and an endogroup in many by exactly the same action.