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Sociology 3308: Sociology of Emotions
Prof. J. S. Kenney
Lectures 20-22: The Phenomenological Approach
In this class we will discuss the phenomenological approach to emotions. This is an approach that generally stresses the subjective meaning of emotions, linking the various ways they are experienced with our perceptions, beliefs, and bodily ways of “being” in the world. We begin with a very general overview of the work of Norman Denzin, who is perhaps the best known sociologist in this area. I then move on to consider a couple of samples of my own work in this vein: (1) my review of the experience of the human emotion of happiness; and (2) my research on the metaphors used by victims of crime to express the impact of homicide in their lives. Norman K. Denzin : Introductory Remarks:
Denzin’s approach to emotion can be conveniently introduced by attending to the following postulates:
- Emotion must be studied as a lived experience by interacting individuals;
- Emotion must not be studied as a social fact that is episodic, accidental or incidental to social experience;
- The natural scientific attitudes regarding emotions must be suspended. This includes whether they are naive, real, coarse, subtle, spurious, rational, irrational, conscious, unconscious, subconscious, physiological in origin, or the products of social and cultural forces;
- Emotion must be grasped in its entirety, as fully and as clearly as possible, although the grasping will involve successive glimpses, interrogations and judgements;
- The essence, core, or kernel of emotion as a process must be captured and carefully described. The universal or generic features of emotion must then be interpreted;
- Emotion must be understood from within, as a process that has its own trajectory, or stream of experience. As a phenomenon it dwells within its own dwelling;
- Emotion is a process that turns on itself, elaborates itself, gets out of hand. It requires what came before it in time for what follows in its development;
- The phenomenological understanding and interpretation of emotion will not be causal. It will be descriptive, interpretive and processual. Variables, factors and causal agents will not be sought;
- Phenomenological interpretation proceeds neither from strict induction (the gathering up of facts for theory) nor from deduction (theory to facts to hypotheses), but moves forward carefully, through rigorous intuition, abductive interrogation, and understanding. The phenomenon itself is uncovered and interpreted in consciousness and in the world of lived experience;
- Theory testing is not the goal. The intention is descriptive interpretation; the goal is seeing, inspecting, and studying the interiority of emotion as lived experience. Social phenomenology is a descriptive, interpretive discipline. As such, it seems particularly well-suited to the study of emotion and emotionality.
Emotion and Social Interaction:
Given this general introduction, Denzin moves on to outline his conception of emotion and social interaction. He basically argues that the dwelling place of emotion is the self, and that emotion is self-feeling (this term will be elaborated later). More specifically, he says that “ emotions are temporally embodied, situated self-feelings that arise from emotional and cognitive social acts that people direct to self or have directed toward them by others .” This view indicates that emotions are processes, not static things.
If emotions are conceptualized as processes of self-feeling, then it can be seen as arising out of the self-interactions that individuals direct toward themselves and out of the reflected appraisals of others, both imagined and real. Using Denzin’s example (and Chart), imagine an argument between two persons, A and B. It starts by A saying something critical to B (#1). That statement is heard by B and enters her phenomenological stream of consciousness (#2-6). She takes her own attitude toward herself (B-B) and toward A. She turns that attitude back from A to herself. She calls out an angry response to A and directs that to him (6-7) in the interactional stream that connects both of them. A receives that action, and it enters his side of the phenomenological stream (9-12). Here it calls out an angry reaction to B’s angry reaction to his initial critical statement. This attitude is reflected back to B in his final action (13).
Stated more abstractly, the phenomenological stream describes the inner side of interaction that occurs when the person interacts with himself and with another in a social situation. In the phenomenological stream the person takes his own attitude towards self (A-A) and toward the other (A-B), and turns the imagined attitude of the other toward himself (B-A). The interactional stream points to the co-present, or imagined, situation. Here, the actual utterances and actions of the other are available to both parties. Emotional self-interaction involves person A’s initiating a line of action toward B (act 1), which calls out in B (act 2) a significant emotional gesture that is present in A’s action and thought. A turns this emotional gesture inward (act 8), judging and interpreting B’s actions in light of A’s own incipient emotional attitudes (A-A, A-B, B-A). This interpretation becomes part of A’s emotional self- feeling, which is then incorporated into A’s next gesture or statement to B (acts 12-13). A’s self- feeling becomes part of an emotional social act, which enters B’s inner phenomenological stream and becomes part of B’s emotional social act (both towards B and toward A). For both A and B, emotional self-feelings are lodged in the interactional stream that connects them and in their inner phenomenological streams of consciousness. They both feel inwardly what they may or may not express outwardly in the interactional stream.
Thus, the sequence of emotional self-interaction appears to have the following trajectory:
- The person is interactively located in the world with others, engaged in an interpretive practice, however mundane or problematic;
- An interaction occurs between the person and a social object (including another person), which brings the object into the person’s phenomenological field;
- As the object enters the person’s field, it is defined in self-feeling terms such as anger, fear or
feeling for the self and its on-going plan of action. Hence, a circuit of selfness attaches the person to the world. In that circuit, emotionality, self, and meaning are revealed. The subject is anchored to the world through this interactional circuit that joins his inner and outer streams of experience with the experiences of others. Deep and surface meanings of the person are thereby revealed in this interaction process (i.e. the private, inner self vs. the public, observed self).
According to Denzin, then, emotionality is a social process, while emotion is self feeling grounded in the social acts the subject directs to his self and has directed to her by others. It has the three-fold structure as outlined before: that is, a sense of feeling, a sense of self feeling that feeling, and a revealing of the interactional meaning of the feeling to the self. As such, there is a double structure to emotion's movement: a feeling of self that emotion reveals to the self, and the movement into a line of action that enacts emotionality and feeling. On the basis of emotionality the subject is led to act morally, on behalf of himself, and on behalf of others. Emotionality draws the subject into social, moral, and emotional relations with others.
Importantly, in Denzin's formulation, emotion and emotionality are neither in the subject nor in the body. Rather, following Scheler, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty and Sartre, they are to be seen as located in the relationship the subject has with himself and with his lived body. This is the body as experienced , which, while a physical reality, is also an existential reality. The physiological body is not just a structure of sensations, but it is a lived body that is given meaning by the subject in the world of interaction. "The subject has a three-fold relationship to his body: he is his body, he is in his body, and he is outside his body" (the latter two can be understood through the extreme situations of either "losing oneself" in one's embodied emotion, or "rising above" one's emotional experiences and bringing reflective, interpretive meaning to one's emotionality and attendant bodily sensations).
Thus, Denzin asserts that the social phenomenological study of emotionality begins with the " lived experience " of the subject in the social situation. The phenomenologist and the interactionist share a commitment to understand emotionality from within as lived experience. The resources for empirical analysis are drawn from the lived experiences of interacting individuals, and the experiential structure that stands at the centre of every emotional experience is the self.
Given his phenomenological extension of the concept of self, Denzin moves to discuss " emotion's body " in more detail. He states that this is at the heart of embodied experience, providing the "point of reference" for all lived emotional experience. According to Denzin, it has a four-fold structure :
"It is a physical body for the person; a lived presence for the subject in his inner field of experience ; an enacted ensemble of embodied action for others ; and an ensemble of moving action for the subject. Each of these four forms of emotion's lived body provides a distinctly different mode of lived emotion : (1) sensible feelings of sensations; (2) feelings of the lived body; (3) intentional value feelings; and (4) moral feelings of self."
Denzin devotes the remainder of his paper to the discussion and elaboration of these four modes of lived emotion, which are rooted in the phenomenological expansion of the concept "self " to include different dimensions of the "lived body."
First, according to Denzin, sensible feelings refer to sensations felt in the lived body, but they are not deliberately produced. They are located in the body, as physical pain is, for example, but they do not originate in the self-conversations of the subject. They are part of the lived body that others cannot share, or know how they are felt by the person. They are not the emotion, but "ratify for the subject the emotionality that is felt."
Next, Denzin considers feelings of the lived body. These, while accompanied by complexes of sensible feelings, "cannot be reduced to sensible feelings for they are feelings of the lived body as a totality. They are not located in a particular part or section of the subject's body, but are given in the total extension of the body as a unitary field of experience" (e.g. profound sorrow, sadness, happiness, or anger). Significantly, because feelings of the lived body express an orientation to the interactional world of experience, they are accessible to others and they can furnish the foundations for socially shared feelings. Once expressed, others are able to vicariously share in the subject's feelings. "Lived feelings communicate an emotional definition of the situation that others can enter into. Hence they move emotionality out of the private, inner world of pure sensations into the public realm of interaction and emotional intersubjectivity. The subject can communicate and "give" these feelings to others, thereby allowing them to enter into a field of emotional experience with him."
Third, Denzin discusses intentional value feelings. These, quite simply, are "feelings about feelings." They are symbolic objectifications of emotional experiences the subject has felt or will feel in the future. They are not separated from experience as such, but often transcend specific interactional emotional episodes. "In intentional value feelings the subject seeks to isolate the core meanings an instance of emotionality has for him. He interprets that meaning and the feelings he has about that feeling." Intentional value feelings reference values, or inclinations to feel in a specific way, but they are not the actual feelings. They go beyond specific emotional experiences, and this trans-situational, atemporal quality allows them to reference emotional careers, or emotional ways of being in the world. Their meanings and values are often rooted in the culture or the group of the subject. They are part of the subject's interpretive framework and exist as orientations toward the world, independent of specific interactional experiences. Of course, "the ideal always eludes the subject" in this regard.
Finally, Denzin discusses feelings of the self and the moral person. In contrast to intentional value feelings, which originate in the culture or the interpretive framework of the subject, "feelings of the self or the moral person originate in the self of the subject, although they are interiorizations of these broader interpretive schemes." According to Denzin, these feelings are lodged in the inner stream of consciousness. The self is consciousness conscious of itself, and "entails inner moral feelings the person directs toward herself as a moral object in her own world and in the world of others. Feelings of the self cluster around these moral feelings, for the
- The sociology of emotions must connect the emotions to the study of social relationships;
- It must begin by focusing on specific, gendered relational forms (e.g. marriage, family and intimacy);
- It must enter the field of cultural studies;
- Film is an excellent research site for the merger of these three concerns.
Five general theses organize Denzin’s discussion. These deal with film and the cultural reading of emotionality and intimcy:
- Emotionality is shaped by culture-making institutions. More specifically, each of the forms of emotional experience discussed earlier (e.g. sensible feelings, feelings of the lived body, intentional value feelings and moral feelings of self) are influenced by cultural representations in film of emotional experience.
This has two aspects. On the one hand, the film’s meanings are emotional and rooted in the viewer’s biography, working to the degree that it resonates with the experiences of the viewer and creates an emotional relationship. On the other hand, the story told is itself emotional, involving larger than life, symbolic and imaginary representations of “real life” emotional experiences.
- Emotional practices represented in film are gender-specific, moulded by the ideological structures of domination and gender stratification that exist in the social structure. These practices are codified in social and cultural texts that represent the emotional relations between men and women in intimate, friendly, and marital relationships.
- It is necessary to study how culture-making institutions, including the news, the mass media, but especially film and television ideologically represent love, desire, sexuality, intimacy, marriage, emotionality and emotional bonding. Hollywood, for example, has a long list of classic male-female intimate relationships, and these depictions become cultural representations of gendered intimacy in our society.
Denzin, in an aside, comments how intimacy refers to what each of two persons in a dyad give or show only to the other person and to no one else. It is a gendered production, involving the exchange of sexual self-identities - often drawn from the body of understandings that operate in the culture at large.
He also weighs in on desire, asserting that it refers to that mode of self-consciousness, or self-awareness, that seeks to realize and lose itself in its own self-centredness. Desire is self- desire, is insatiable, and is its own object. Yet it requires another for its realization, and in the process often commodifies the other, turning he or she into an object of desire or pleasure. While it can take many forms, it stands at the centre of any intimate relationship, for what is desired is self realized through the intimacy offered by the other.
Given these definitions, Denzin asserts that representations of desire connect self and
other in real and imagined embodied interactional states. Films often involve viewers identifying with the symbolic, the imagined, the ideal stories told on the screen. Viewers emotions and self- understandings are often shaped by these cultural representations of love, desire and sexuality. People may fantasize about being the heroine, making love like him or her, making love to a person like him or her - and, in so doing, their emotional and sexual desire are both awakened and shaped by these experiences. Moviegoing experiences may shape the four elements of emotional experience as they relate to love, desire, and one’s relationship to one’s lovers.
- The contemporary study of emotionality must be historical and culturally grounded in the postmodern, postwar period of American life. On the one hand, this means that attention must be given to the structures of late capitalism including commodification, bureacratization, the production of mass-mediated realities, the decline in power of the metanarrative myths of truth, science, freedom, and democracy, and the rise of hyperreal media representations of real life experiences.
These structures, in our "post-modern" culture, have "cultural" effects: they provide a set of meanings embodied in cultural productions - such as movies and TV - that set forth models of action and emotionality. These reflect the political economy of postwar, late capitalist America, whose elements include: (a) bureaucratization, which organizes individuals into compartmentalized roles and interaction opportunities; (b) commodification, which translates all human interests, including desire, sexuality, and eroticism, into marketable goods; (c) mass- mediated reality, which removes individuals from direct encounters with the world, but overloads the senses with pseudoreality; and (d) the deconstruction of (or concentration of extreme skepticism on) major sustaining "myths" such as the value of science and/or religion, the prevalence of freedom, and the efficacy of democracy in favor of a focus on scandal, hypocrisy, conspiracy, and obfuscation.
To elaborate on just one of these, commodification means that everyday life in the postmodern world is shaped by tendencies to turn people and experiences into objects that can be purchased and consumed. Moviegoers pay money to be entertained, to have their fantasies fed, and to learn how to be lovers. The mass media mediate lived cultural experiences. They objectify and make commodities out of the very experiences they represent to the viewing public. In so doing, the media create “needs” and desires that might not otherwise exist. As such, these institutions shape intentional value feelings as well as moral feelings of self.
Indeed, Denzin feels that it will also be important to examine how the media represent important emotional sites (e.g. home, work, leisure, sexuality, sport, etc.) These sites are structured as “ideological state apparati,” places where concrete and imaginary individuals are constituted as subjects who have emotions, beliefs and social relationships with others. In these sites, ideology - those beliefs about the way the world is and ought to be - operates. This ideology is multifaceted. It includes beliefs about gender, love, intimacy, sexuality, the value of work, family, religion, education, money, freedom, and other cultural ideals. This ideology represents not the system of real relations which govern the existence of individuals, but the imaginary relation of those individuals to the real relations in which they live.
(1) Definitions: I define emotion as a "perceptual judgement in relation to one's previously internalized moral and interpretive beliefs, one's self-identity as a moral object occupying particular roles, and the social context of the present interaction, which may be accompanied by pronounced physiological sensations in the subject."
Belief , which is central to both my definition of emotion and my definition of happiness, is defined as "that ongoing, symbolic combination of previously internalized, involuntary systems of perception, conscious rules of moral evaluation and those meanings generated by the present social interaction and structural setting."
The self is defined as "a combination of various creative I/me components or role sets, organized in a hierarchy of various internalized role designations, that is related to commitment to various interactional relationships, beliefs, and values in the social structural network.
Happiness , finally, is defined as "that emotion that perceptively evaluates an individual's overall self past, present, and future, positively in relation to: (a) his/her internalized moral beliefs; (b) the accumulation of past actions and interactions; and (c) current definitions of the situation, that (d) has not been disconfirmed in the present."
Now that the four central concepts in my theory have been defined, I move on to illustrate their operation in a simple model interaction. I used the example of an eager young advertizing executive who encountered two scenarios: (1) where she received praise from her boss for highly successful work, along with an immediate raise and promotion; and (2) where she experienced a "dressing down" from her boss over the loss of a contract, emotional support from a co-worker who helped her see the situation differently, and subsequently developed an interactional tactic to deal with the situation.
In this model, the starting point is always the pre-internalized system of beliefs that any individual brings to an interaction. These, which are intimately associated with the "me" component of one's internalized role-set, arise partly out of ideological socialization, partly as a result of individual actions (or "I's") and partly as an accumulation of positive and negative interactions throughout a person's lifetime. Fundamentally these beliefs define who and what an individual is within a social context. They perform three basic functions: (a) perceptual definition of reality; (b) moral definition of identity; and (c) what I term "identity maintenance strategies." Once entering a social interaction, these beliefs, as the "past" component of the present, play a major role in shaping one's definition of the situation. The rest is filled out by the contents of the interaction itself.
Now, if the messages objectified in interaction affirm one's positively defined moral beliefs about one's self and role identity, one's internal conversation between the "I" and the "me" will be coherent , not only among these components of self, but also with reference to the beliefs themselves. The "I" response shows a positive emotional assessment of happiness, which is then tucked away as part of the "me" in the individual's emotional memory, ready to be brought to future interaction. One's overall self, past, present, and future takes on a brighter
interpretation, and one is thus happier.
If, however, the messages objectified in interaction disconfirm one's positively defined moral beliefs about oneself, one's internal conversation will be incoherent. Specifically, one's pre-existing attitude toward self and imagined attitude of other toward oneself do not match the incoming message as soon as one takes the role of the other. However, the negatively assessed individual can do a number of things such as: (a) searching his/her system of belief for an "escape route," past similar occurrence or label that enables the potential disconfirmation or perpetrator to be defined away; (b) seeking out social support for one's favoured self-definition; (c) utilizing self-presentational emotional micropolitics, accounts or disclaimers to restore sense of self as a moral person; (d) resort to emotion management, feeling rules and intentional-value feelings; or, as a last resort, (e) change one's self-definition into another morally acceptable one for that role. One, or a combination of these "identity maintenance strategies" then forms the individual's "I" response, feeds back into his or her overall moral assessment of self, past, present, and future, and his hence reflected in his/her degree of happiness.
On this model, the happiest individual could likely be characterized as one whose positive perceptual and evaluative beliefs about him/herself in relation to various roles are continually confirmed in interaction, but who is also embedded in a system of beliefs that enables him/her to define away any potentially negative situation in a way that leaves him/her morally blameless. Conversely, there are three possibilities for the least happy individual: (1) a self-perpetuating negative assessment of self cutting across roles that is (a) continually reinforced in interaction and (b) cannot be perceptually disconfirmed in present experience; (2) an anomic individual without any firm self-concept, no significant belief about his/her moral identity, whose unidimensional attempts at self-definition continually pass through series of disconfirming or negatively assessing social interactions such that a positive self-evaluation never has a chance to develop socially; or (3) a person with well-developed identities which are based on structural roles, beliefs, and obligations that are in conflict with each other.
After noting that these latter situations are more likely to be found in societies approximating Durkheim's "organic solidarity," with an extensive division of labour, interdependence, and conflicting beliefs, I go on to examine various types of belief about happiness that not only feed into this model, but that are differentially embedded in both social and self-structure. The two most important analytical dimensions that demarcate each type from the others are: (a) present vs. future temporal orientation or "point of reference"; and (b) "individual centered" vs. "other directed" activity and involvement. These dimensions, when arranged in a table, produce four categories or types of belief in relation to happiness.
The first, which I label "transcendental beliefs," are primarily future-directed and self interested in nature. In such beliefs, future ends or perceived rewards that will purportedly transcend present circumstances give both positive meaning and motivation to present activities, and, as such, an individual's moral assessment of self. In such beliefs, there are often individual- directed meanings telling one how to find happiness, and those individuals holding the beliefs frequently hold them as a conscious means thereto. In such beliefs, happiness is conceived of as
interaction (i.e. of one's beliefs, or of oneself in light of one's beliefs); and (b) identity maintenance strategies for maintaining belief and sense of self have broken down. Also relevant here are factors such as (c) frequency; (d) intensity; and (e) whether or not the disconfirmation occurred in interaction with significant others. In the event that disconfirmation challenges an identity or belief, and cannot be salvaged through some strategy, then one must either adapt, take on a different perceptual and evaluative outlook and/or identity, or become unhappy in one's own terms. However, considering that individuals' selves are made up of a variety of identities and interactional role-commitments, it becomes clear that, aside from the ultimate disconfirmation of one's perceptual and evaluative beliefs with regard to a master status, most disconfirmations will be role-specific : not affecting one's total identity. There are several important implications:
First, it is possible that so long as one's cumulative beliefs about one's moral self are not inconsistent and not perceived as such by oneself or by one's interactants, one may entertain and adaptively move between different approximate types of belief about happiness with regard to the different social roles that one occupies. So long as this mosaic of beliefs defining self do not conflict, perceptually or morally, in any fundamental way, and are not held up to one as such in interaction, one's happiness will consist, at bottom, in adapting the most favourable mix of the previously outlined types of belief to the roles one fills in order to maximize positive interactions, and, thereby, positive accumulations of oneself.
Secondly, since many actual systems of belief in society have diverse elements that may fit, depending on the emphasis, into several of the above categories, to maintain happiness one can frequently merely make an adaptive change in emphasis within a given system rather than an outright change to another. Thus, one may have an overall, integrated system of beliefs about happiness that approximates one or several of the types outlined above for all or the majority of one's roles, or one may hold a variety of more diverse beliefs relating to happiness for different roles that, so long as they are perceived consistent, and not held up as inconsistent in interaction, can be maintained to achieve the most favourable mix of positive moral assessments of self in interaction.
Finally, short of any disconfirmation of one's "root" moral belief about oneself, nor of those roles that one considers important to one's sense of self, it may be that, when pressed, one can tactically sacrifice one of one's "less important" role identities to disconfirmation in order to maximize positive cumulative moral assessments of self and minimize negative ones.
In short, by remaining thus internally consistent and externally harmonious, one is happy. In these ways, culture, society, and the endlessly creative process of the human mind guide us in both experiencing and creating what we feel.
J. S. Kenney (1998): Metaphors of Loss:
In 1994-1998 I conducted a study of the family and loved ones of homicide victims. This involved the collection, transcription, and analysis of:
(i) 32 interviews; (ii) 22 surveys; and (iii) 108 Criminal Injuries Compensation files.
Two of the questions I examined were:
(1) How such crimes impact on the selves of family and loved ones; (2) The meanings disclosed to these individuals by their emotional experiences
I discovered that survivors articulated a rich series of metaphors to illustrate the impact of the crime, which were termed metaphors of loss.
These attempted to convey, insofar as words may, the effect of homicide on those close to the deceased.
They constitute typical ways survivors use to express both their loss of self, and the existential meanings disclosed to them by the emotions inherent to their experiences.
This section reviews and compares survivors’ use of these typical metaphors as follows:
(1) The various metaphors are illustrated and discussed in relation to survivors gendered identities in descending order of frequency in the data ;
(2) The contexts in which survivors utilize these metaphors will be examined, with an emphasis on when they were used, how, with what purpose, and whether they varied according to specific type of loss. (i) Loss of Self:
*The single most common metaphors expressed by survivors were those indicating a generalized loss of self. Subjects using such metaphors typically asserted that they " lost part of themselves " when the deceased was killed.
Examples: ”Like an amputation”; “Having one's heart torn out"; “I feel like I’m half gone"; "A void," "vacuum," "a hole," "blackness," having an "empty heart," feeling "hollow" and “dead inside."
- It is significant to note that these general metaphors were frequently generalized beyond survivors alone
Examples: To family; To an intimate group that had included the deceased; To the community at large (e.g. “ripple effect”)
- Survivors referred to "personality changes"
- Newfound difficulty with concentration and memory.
- Becoming uncharacteristically cautious of others and protective of their children.
- Having different and diminished interests, goals, priorities and involvements since the murder.
- Mood swings emphasizing increased anger (men) and emotional expression (women)
(v) Loss of Control:
Going hand in hand with these other losses is the fifth metaphor: loss of control.
Example: “It all began for us when our 19 year old daughter was brutally murdered. From our perspective, we had suddenly lost control of our lives."
- While all of the other metaphors showed a clear majority - often an overwhelming preponderance - of expression by females, the reverse was true here, with men emphasizing a sense of personal failure.
(vi) Lost Innocence:
Finally, there is the metaphor of lost innocence which underlies radical changes in survivors' sense of reality. This appeared in several variations :
(1) Survivors' shock and incomprehension that such a thing could happen.
"We lived in a good area. We taught our kids to do unto others. So, I mean, for someone just out of the blue to do something like this for no reason, is just horrifying."
(2) In relation to the cherished characteristics of the deceased as a person, as in “the loss of an innocent,” and in relation to the effect of the murder on surviving children where they were characterized as having their " childhood" taken from them.
(3) In relation to one's prior ideals of justice , which were reinterpreted as being naive under the circumstances.
Example: one man, who, throughout the offender’s trial professed his faith that the justice system would see to it that justice was served, immediately collapsed in a “nervous breakdown” when the verdict was read and the offender convicted of a much lesser offence.
(b) Metaphorical Context:
Simply describing survivors' typical metaphors of loss tells us little if we neglect the social contexts in which they are expressed.
- It was clear that the majority of survivors expressed these metaphors either in response to
specific questions , as in the interview and survey data, or in the context of certain specific types of interactions with officials , as in the Criminal Injuries Compensation data.
- With regard to the former, for example, the vast majority of metaphors were expressed in relation to questions:
Examples: asking respondents how they would describe losing a loved one in this way, or whether they now saw themselves as victims of crime.
With the Criminal Injuries Compensation data, metaphors were primarily expressed in response to either requests for documentation , or in response to official skepticism or unfavorable rulings. Indeed, respondents also expressed these metaphors in response to interactions with the Board that they found inappropriate or unwelcome.
- Survivors used these metaphors in two ways :
(1) To express the unexpressible , to convey, inasmuch as possible through the limited medium of language, their pain, loss, and the various meanings disclosed in their lives by same.
(2) When their status as victims was questioned, they enunciated these metaphors as a means of reinforcing this definition of the situation when something was at stake.
-While there was no pattern linking any specific metaphors more or less to particular losses (e.g. parental vs. sibling bereavement), it appeared that the metaphors as a group were expressed disproportionately by bereaved parents.
Discussion and Conclusion:
Each of these metaphors constitutes an existential meaning, disclosed in emotion, that sheds light on various, fundamental dimensions of the self. These signify a loss of not only subjects' relationship with the deceased and various integral aspects of their prior identities, but express the structure of a self struggling to make sense of itself in a world where people get murdered.
These metaphors contribute to the literature as follows:
(1) They systematically elaborate the various dimensions in which individuals' background assumptions are violated;
(2) The dimensions discussed corroborate, yet empirically elaborate earlier positions on bereavement and loss of self that were either only implicit before, or discussed in a fragmentary fashion;
(3) These emphasize how the existential self, through emotional struggle, incorporates present
