Sorrow (emotion)
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| ==Cult== | ==Cult== | ||
| - | [[Romanticism]] saw a cult of sorrow develop, reaching back to [[The Sorrows of Young Werther]] of 1774, and extending through the nineteenth century with contributions like Tennyson's [[In Memoriam]] - 'O Sorrow, wilt thou live with me/No casual mistress, but a wife' - up to [[W. B. Yeats]] in 1889, still 'of his high comrade Sorrow dreaming'. While it may be that 'the Romantic hero's cult of sorrow is largely a matter of pretence', as [[Jane Austen]] pointed out satirically through [[Marianne Dashwood]], 'brooding over her sorrows...this excess of suffering' could have serious consequences. | + | [[Romanticism]] saw a cult of sorrow develop, reaching back to [[The Sorrows of Young Werther]] of 1774, and extending through the nineteenth century with contributions like Tennyson's [[In Memoriam]] - 'O Sorrow, wilt thou live with me/No casual mistress, but a wife' - up to [[W. B. Yeats]] in 1889, still 'of his high comrade Sorrow dreaming'. |
| - | Partly in reaction, the twentieth century has by contrast been pervaded by the belief that ' ''acting'' sorrowful can actually make me sorrowful, as William James long ago observed'. Certainly 'in the modern Anglo emotional culture, characterized by the "dampening of the emotions" in general...sorrow has largely given way to the milder, less painful, and more transient sadness'. A latter-day Werther is likely to be greeted by the call to '"Come off it, Gordon. We all know there is no sorrow like unto your sorrow"'; while any conventional 'valeoftearishness and deathwhereisthystingishness' would be met by the participants 'looking behind the sombre backs of one another's cards and discovering their brightly-colored faces'. Perhaps only the occasional subculture like the [[Jung|Jungian]] would still seek to 'call up from the busy adult man the sorrow of animal life, the grief of all nature, "the tears of things"'. | + | Partly in reaction, the twentieth c |
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| - | [[Late modernity]] has (if anything) only intensified the shift: 'the postmodern is closer to the human comedy than to the abyssal discontent...the abyss of sorrow'. | + | |
| ==Postponement== | ==Postponement== | ||
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| - | 'Not feeling sorrow invites fear into our lives. The longer we put off feeling sorrow, the greater our fear of it becomes. [[Postponement of affect|Postponing]] the expression of the feeling causes its energy to grow'. At the same time, it would seem that 'grief in general is a "taming" of the primitive violent discharge affect, characterized by fear and self-destruction, to be seen in mourning'. | ||
| [[Julia Kristeva]] suggests that 'taming sorrow, not fleeing sadness at once but allowing it to settle for a while...is what one of the temporary and yet indispensable phases of [[Psychoanalysis|analysis]] might be'. | [[Julia Kristeva]] suggests that 'taming sorrow, not fleeing sadness at once but allowing it to settle for a while...is what one of the temporary and yet indispensable phases of [[Psychoanalysis|analysis]] might be'. | ||
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| - | ==Shand and McDougall== | ||
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| - | Sadness is one of four interconnected ''sentiments'' in the system of [[Alexander Faulkner Shand]], the others being fear, anger, and joy. In this system, when an impulsive tendency towards some important object is frustrated, the resultant sentiment is sorrow. | ||
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| - | In Shand's view, the emotion of sorrow, which he classifies as a primary emotion, has two ''impulses'': to cling to the object of sorrow, and to repair the injuries done to that object that caused the emotion in the first place. Thus the primary emotion of sorrow is the basis for the emotion of pity, which Shand describes as a fusion of sorrow and joy: sorrow at the injury done to the object of pity, and joy as an "element of sweetness" tinging that sorrow. | ||
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| - | [[William McDougall (psychologist)|William McDougall]] disagreed with Shand's view, observing that Shand himself recognized that sorrow was itself derived from simpler elements. To support this argument, he observes that [[grief]], at a loss, is a form of sorrow where there is no impulse to repair injury, and that therefore there are identifiable subcomponents of sorrow. He also observes that although there is an element of emotional pain in sorrow, there is no such element in pity, thus pity is not a compound made from sorrow as a simpler component. | ||
Revision as of 19:41, 11 December 2012
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Sorrow is an emotion, feeling, or sentiment of intense sadness, suggesting a degree of resignation.
Cult
Romanticism saw a cult of sorrow develop, reaching back to The Sorrows of Young Werther of 1774, and extending through the nineteenth century with contributions like Tennyson's In Memoriam - 'O Sorrow, wilt thou live with me/No casual mistress, but a wife' - up to W. B. Yeats in 1889, still 'of his high comrade Sorrow dreaming'.
Partly in reaction, the twentieth c
Postponement
Julia Kristeva suggests that 'taming sorrow, not fleeing sadness at once but allowing it to settle for a while...is what one of the temporary and yet indispensable phases of analysis might be'.
See also
Unless indicated otherwise, the text in this article is either based on Wikipedia article "Sorrow (emotion)" or another language Wikipedia page thereof used under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License; or on research by Jahsonic and friends. See Art and Popular Culture's copyright notice.
