{"title":"Mourning a death foretold: memory and mental time travel in anticipatory grief","authors":"","doi":"10.1007/s11097-024-09956-z","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"<h3>Abstract</h3> <p>Grief<?tk 4?> is a complex emotional experience or process, which is typically felt in response to the death of a loved one, most typically a family member, child, or partner. Yet the way in which grief manifests is much more complex than this. The things we grieve over are multiple and diverse. We may grieve for a former partner after the breakup of a relationship; parents sometimes report experiencing grief when their grown-up children leave the family home. We can also experience grief for people we have never met. Indeed, it is not just persons that we may grieve for. People report feeling grief over the death of their pets, or about the destruction the natural environment. In all these cases one factor that seems to stand out is <em>loss</em>. Despite being about very different things, these various forms of grief all involve a loss of some sort. Yet there is a further aspect of grief, which, on the face of it, does not quite follow this pattern. Grief can also be experienced before a loss has occurred. Grief can be experienced while the person that one is grieving for is still living and before one has (fully) suffered the loss. This phenomenon is known as <em>anticipatory grief</em>. The experience of anticipatory grief is a complex phenomenon, which resists easy classification. Nonetheless, we suggest that mental time travel, our ability to mentally project ourselves into the personal past (episodic memory) and personal future (episodic prospection), is a key mechanism that underpins experiences of anticipatory grief. Anticipatory grief can still be understood in terms of loss, but it is a loss that is brought to mind through memory and imagination.<?tk 0?></p>","PeriodicalId":51504,"journal":{"name":"Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences","volume":"1 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.0000,"publicationDate":"2024-01-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences","FirstCategoryId":"1085","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-024-09956-z","RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"0","JCRName":"PHILOSOPHY","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
Grief is a complex emotional experience or process, which is typically felt in response to the death of a loved one, most typically a family member, child, or partner. Yet the way in which grief manifests is much more complex than this. The things we grieve over are multiple and diverse. We may grieve for a former partner after the breakup of a relationship; parents sometimes report experiencing grief when their grown-up children leave the family home. We can also experience grief for people we have never met. Indeed, it is not just persons that we may grieve for. People report feeling grief over the death of their pets, or about the destruction the natural environment. In all these cases one factor that seems to stand out is loss. Despite being about very different things, these various forms of grief all involve a loss of some sort. Yet there is a further aspect of grief, which, on the face of it, does not quite follow this pattern. Grief can also be experienced before a loss has occurred. Grief can be experienced while the person that one is grieving for is still living and before one has (fully) suffered the loss. This phenomenon is known as anticipatory grief. The experience of anticipatory grief is a complex phenomenon, which resists easy classification. Nonetheless, we suggest that mental time travel, our ability to mentally project ourselves into the personal past (episodic memory) and personal future (episodic prospection), is a key mechanism that underpins experiences of anticipatory grief. Anticipatory grief can still be understood in terms of loss, but it is a loss that is brought to mind through memory and imagination.
期刊介绍:
Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences is an interdisciplinary, international journal that serves as a forum to explore the intersections between phenomenology, empirical science, and analytic philosophy of mind. The journal represents an attempt to build bridges between continental phenomenological approaches (in the tradition following Husserl) and disciplines that have not always been open to or aware of phenomenological contributions to understanding cognition and related topics. The journal welcomes contributions by phenomenologists, scientists, and philosophers who study cognition, broadly defined to include issues that are open to both phenomenological and empirical investigation, including perception, emotion, language, and so forth. In addition the journal welcomes discussions of methodological issues that involve the variety of approaches appropriate for addressing these problems. Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences also publishes critical review articles that address recent work in areas relevant to the connection between empirical results in experimental science and first-person perspective.Double-blind review procedure The journal follows a double-blind reviewing procedure. Authors are therefore requested to place their name and affiliation on a separate page. Self-identifying citations and references in the article text should either be avoided or left blank when manuscripts are first submitted. Authors are responsible for reinserting self-identifying citations and references when manuscripts are prepared for final submission.