Dependency and Grief

Doesn’t our essential dependency on others entail that we cannot be authors of our emotional and conative lives, and so mean that we are condemned to be passive? This chapter responds by explaining why and how we can be active even though we are dependent. It reveals that there are two kinds of dependency, passive and active, and that we can be actively dependent as well as passively so. This chapter also investigates in detail one of the most potentially subjugating emotions that we can feel: grief. How can we transform an emotion that is the paradigm of an emotion overwhelming us and thereby rendering us passive into an active emotion? The chapter explores in detail how grief can be transformed from something that is passive into one that is active.