ABSTRACT
Regret keeps at bay the blanket of gloom that depression throws over the sufferer’s life-space. Within the economy of human melancholy, the phenomena of sorrow, grief, depression, and regret are kindred. Regret is a dynamic life-orienting posture in the face of some significant melancholic situation. Regret resembles jealousy, humiliation, revenge, and self-pity because it percolates inward and in-depth. As a unified gestalt, a constitutive-unit of a cluster of experiences, regret combines heterogeneous contents such as love, hatred, guilt, and loneliness spread out over completely different points of objective time. As a dynamic life-orienting disposition, regret is embedded within a total situation. The obsessive review, one hallmark of the hyper-investment stage of grief-work, oozes with regret. The god-awful struggle to balance forgetting and remembering hallmarks both that stage and the “moment” of regretful sorrow. Because of the in-between status, regret is a central phenomenon in the drama of human loss and lingering hurt.
