A Deeper Feeling of Grief

Journal of Consciousness Studies 29 (9-10):84-104 (2022)
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Abstract

Since Erich Lindemann's seminal work on 'the symptomatology and management of acute grief' from 1944, it has been common to define grief through its particular emotional structure and dynamics. According to this perspective, grief announces itself in socalled 'pangs of grief' in which the bereaved is occasionally flooded by waves of emotions. This picture has become so ingrained in our understanding of grief that it has defined both public discourse on grief and contemporary clinical constructs. In this paper, I propose that underneath grief's fluctuating emotivity, there is a deeper feeling of grief. This deeper feeling reflects an altered mode of being in the world in which the bereaved experiences herself as 'at a distance' from the worldly. I will refer to this state as world-distancing and emphasize it as a protective affective state that shields the bereaved from a limit situation in which the world has become overwhelming in the absence of the deceased. It is experienced as being in a bubble or as if enclosed in a kind of membrane that shields the bereaved from the intrusiveness and penetrating character of the world. Worlddistancing, however, comes with significant perils if the bereaved are unable to reattach to the world. I outline this danger as a state of existential loneliness that follows from what Eugené Minkowski termed a felt lack of vital contact with the world.

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Allan Køster
Aalborg University

Citations of this work

Transformative grief.Jelena Markovic - 2024 - European Journal of Philosophy 32 (1):246-259.
Existential phenomenology and qualitative research.Anthony Vincent Fernandez - 2024 - In Kevin Aho, Megan Altman & Hans Pedersen (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Contemporary Existentialism. Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge.

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References found in this work

Temporality and psychopathology.Thomas Fuchs - 2013 - Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 12 (1):75-104.
Presence in absence. The ambiguous phenomenology of grief.Thomas Fuchs - 2018 - Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 17 (1):43-63.
Grief and the Unity of Emotion.Matthew Ratcliffe - 2017 - Midwest Studies in Philosophy 41 (1):154-174.

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