Interaction

The interaction is the base unit of the universe in this framework, and every other term is built from it. Four conditions define one: two entities, initiation by will, energy drawn from life and occurrence in a single spacetime. Calling them irreversible units of conscious places them alongside physical events rather than social ones, since irreversibility is what gives time its direction. The third sentence is the one that reorganizes everything. Selves are not the things that have interactions but the things interactions are clustered into, and the clustering is done by endosocial membranes which exist only in endoreality. So the individual is a product of the units rather than their source, and the boundary that makes a person separate is a group construct rather than a fact. The last sentence supplies the taxonomy the rest of the framework runs on. All interactions are animated and all permit or attempt some form of anima transfer, and there are four outcomes. A balanced interaction settles and builds connection. A rebuffed one is refused. An unrequited one gives without return. A predatory one takes. Those four produce the three relationship types, connection, sublation and violation. The emotional results indicate which occurred, which is why Marsh can treat feelings as diagnostic, and it is why she says the self needs balanced interactions in the same way the body needs healthy food.

Symbolic interactionism in sociology, from Mead and Blumer through Goffman, treats social reality as produced in interaction and the self as arising from it, which is close to Marsh's third sentence. Process philosophy after Whitehead makes events rather than substances the basic constituents of reality, which is close to her second. Relational sociology and actor-network theory both decline to start from bounded individuals. Marsh's version differs by unifying the physical and social claims in a single unit, since her interaction is simultaneously an event in spacetime and a social exchange, which lets one definition serve as the base of a metaphysics and a sociology at once.