Euphoric Conduit

The euphoric conduit is the channel anima travels along, and the second sentence of the definition records a change of vocabulary rather than a distinction. What The Creation of Me, Them and Us called euphoric conduits are called anima conduits in Abstracting Divinity, and the two terms name the same thing. The conduit is not a metaphor for closeness. It is the path, and a self is built out of a network of them, which is why Marsh defines integrity structurally: integrity is obtained through maintenance of a wide network of euphoric conduits and balanced interactions, and a person with integrity has the strength to be trusted even under pressure. Breadth is what supplies the strength, since a self supported by many conduits does not depend on any one of them. Everything in the emotional system is indexed to these channels. Every emotion is a response to anticipation or experience of euphoria, or to anticipation or experience of an attack on a euphoric source, and even guilt and shame relate to shunning and inclusion from a euphoric source or a protective group membrane. Where a person is primarily exosocial the emotion concerns a conduit or a source, and where they are primarily endosocial it concerns the endogroup or endo-ideal instead. Blockage is the pathology. An endoself has blocked or inhibited conduits and cannot access primary euphoria, and depletion of a personal membrane's euphoric content is an existential threat to the person inside it.

Social network analysis studies ties and measures their strength, number and structural position, and Mark Granovetter's weak ties argument concerns what different kinds of connection deliver. Social support research links network breadth to health outcomes with a substantial evidence base, which is the closest empirical parallel to Marsh's claim about integrity. Psychology has no term for a channel carrying a quantity between people, since the discipline treats relationships as states rather than as conduits. That is the substance of the difference. A tie in network analysis is a relation that exists or does not, while a conduit is a path along which something moves, which allows it to be blocked, ruptured or redirected as a tie cannot be.