The Grieving Body

by Mary-Frances O'Connor

An Amazon.com review (June, 2025)

Mary-Frances O’Connor’s way of weaving science, research, and personal experience struck a deep chord.

From an attachment perspective, John Bowlby’s pioneering work in attachment theory showed that our earliest emotional bonds—especially with caregivers—are for building internal models of safety, trust, and connection. These attachment systems remain active throughout life, not just in infancy. When we lose someone central to that system, the mind does not merely register “absence”—it initiates a complex, adaptive process of protest, yearning, despair, and—eventually—reorganisation.

And this reorganisation is not abstract. It must extend across every neural layer of association and anticipation. All our future memories—prospective memories—all our plans, all our expectations, all our longings must be revised. Every time we recollect or encounter something that touches upon the person we have lost, the brain must engage again in this painful act of reorientation. Grief, in this sense, is recursive: a sustained effort to metabolise absence in the very circuits that were once shaped by presence.

In Bowlby’s terms, grief is not a pathology but a signalling system gone searching: an expectant brain still anticipating reunion, still activating the attachment bond in the face of its impossibility. What we call despair might, then, be a part of this neurological and psychological reprogramming—a temporary collapse of orientation while the system scrambles to update its predictive map of closeness and care.

What if despair, then, has a function in the awake brain—not merely suspending executive operations because of suffering, but enabling the reconfiguration of the attachment system, the reconsolidation of memory, and a kind of relational clearing?

O’Connor’s work, together with Lisa Feldman Barrett’s theory of constructed emotion and Bud Craig’s account of the interoceptive pathway terminating in the posterior insula and its relation to psychic pain, provides partial frameworks for approaching these questions. Research on memory reconsolidation by Karim Nader, Glenn Schafe, Joseph LeDoux, Marie Monfils, Johannes Björkstrand, Merel Kindt, Emily Holmes and many others further deepens the picture, showing that emotional memories are actively rewritten each time they are recalled—rendered labile and open to revision before being stored again.

Taken together, these perspectives suggest that what we call emotion is not merely reactive but predictive, embodied, plastic and metabolically grounded. And that led to speculate and wonder: could despair be a kind of cognitive hibernation?—a neuropsychological function—a temporary retreat into an awake, slow-wave, glymphatic terrain, where the mind disengages from the external world in order to redraw its models of meaning, belonging, and self. It's hard to know, of course. Perhaps it is more a metaphor than mechanism. Perhaps the distinction doesn’t matter. But it is work like O’Connor’s that helps begin to give form to the aching complexities of loss.

Barry Karlsson

June 2025