Sorrow

Four words placing an emotion in the energy system rather than in a psychology. Sorrow follows loss of life from an animus, which means it is a reading of depletion rather than a response to an event, and the event matters only because of what it took. That accounts for the range of things that produce it, since bereavement, the ending of a relationship, loss of a place and loss of work all remove conduits and all produce the same state. Marsh treats it as informative rather than as something to be resolved. Sorrow, like all pain, is a signal to repair what is damaged, so it points at a conduit that has been lost and needs replacing rather than at a feeling that needs managing. Depletion is what is being reported. She also identifies a variety that is not about another person at all, since grief can be felt at a loss of self, commonly depicted as a loss of innocence, which occurs when the self endures something traumatic, and that too is deanimation by the same account. Her most striking line about it concerns what follows, since sorrow is ultimately the pain that dissolves, and grief precedes and may initiate the energy required for subsequent expansion. So the state is transitional in a way that the endoself condition is not, which is the difference between losing a conduit and being unable to form one. An endoself who possesses no or few euphoric conduits has nothing to lose and lives in a nearly joyless state instead.

Grief research has moved away from stage models towards continuing bonds and the dual process model, in which oscillation between loss and restoration is the healthy pattern rather than progression through phases. Attachment theory locates grief in the disruption of a bond. Freud's mourning and melancholia distinguished normal grief from depression by whether the loss can be identified. Marsh's account converges with the continuing bonds literature, since a framework in which interactions persist in their spacetime has no requirement that a bond be severed, and her signal reading matches the current view that grief is a response to be understood rather than a disorder to be treated.