Grief and the Unity of Emotion
September 1, 2017 M. Ratcliffe
Grief is not a single emotional episode but a temporally extended process that nonetheless forms a unified whole. The unity of grief does not come from its narrative structure, as some have proposed, but from the way its diverse aspects all involve recognizing and responding to a wide-ranging, dynamic disturbance of life-possibilities—a disturbance held together by relationships of non-propositional implication. This recognition and response are inseparable from each other. The same approach may apply to emotions more generally, challenging the view that emotions are unified psychological states.