Sorrow (emotion)

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Sorrow, drawing by Vincent van Gogh, 1882

Sorrow is an emotion, feeling, or sentiment. Sorrow 'is more "intense" than implies a long term state'.[1] At the same time 'sorrow - but not unhappiness - suggests a degree of resignation...which lends sorrow its peculiar air of dignity'.[2]

'In terms of attitude, sorrow can be said to be half way between sadness (accepting) and distress (not accepting)'.[3]


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'[4] - up to W. B. Yeats in 1889, still 'of his high comrade Sorrow dreaming'.[5] While it may be that 'the Romantic hero's cult of sorrow is largely a matter of pretence',[6] as Jane Austen pointed out satirically through Marianne Dashwood, 'brooding over her sorrows...this excess of suffering'[7] could have serious consequences.

Partly in reaction, the 20th century has by contrast been pervaded by the belief that ' acting sorrowful can actually make me sorrowful, as William James long ago observed'.[8] 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'.[9] 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"';[10] 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'.[11] Perhaps only the occasional subculture like the 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"'.[12]



'Not feeling sorrow invites fear into our lives. The longer we put off feeling sorrow, the greater our fear of it becomes. Postponing the expression of the feeling causes its energy to grow'.[14] 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'.[15]


Shand and McDougall[edit]




See also[edit]


  2. ^ Wierzbicka, p. 66
  3. ^ Wierzbicka, p. 66
  4. ^ In Memoriam (London 1851) p. 84
  8. ^ Jenefer Robinson, Deeper than Reason (2005) p. 82
  9. ^ Wierzbicka, p. 67
  11. ^ Günter Grass, The Meeting at Telgte (London 1981) p. 94
  12. ^ Robert Bly, Iron John (Dorset 1991) p. 239
  15. ^ Otto Fenichel, The Psychoanalytic Theory of Neurosis (London 19460 p. 395
  16. ^ Kristeva, p. 84-5

Further reading[edit]
