Tear

Her tears are a germination of that which preserves her, that which purifies the wound she has received... Tears, in mythos, melt the icy heart... All through history, tears have done three works: called the spirits to one's side, repelled those who would muffle and bind the simple soul, and healed the injuries of poor bargains made by humans.

Estés advances the foundational archetypal thesis that tears perform three simultaneous psychic and mythic functions — summoning, protecting, and healing — making them active agents rather than passive byproducts of suffering.

Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Ph D, Women Who Run With the Wolves Myths and Stories of the Wild, 2017thesis

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She is waiting for the signal of deep feeling, that one tear that says, 'I admit the wound.' This admission feeds the Life/Death/Life nature, causes the bond to be made and the deep knowing in a man to begin.

Estés identifies the single tear as the decisive psychic threshold-crossing, the moment of authentic self-confrontation that initiates genuine relational and intrapsychic transformation in the masculine psyche.

Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Ph D, Women Who Run With the Wolves Myths and Stories of the Wild, 2017thesis

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There is drawing power in tears, and within the tear itself, powerful images that guide us. Tears not only represent feeling but are also lenses through which we gain an alternative vision, another point of view.

Estés argues that tears possess an epistemological function as perceptual lenses that reveal alternative perspectives, rendering them instruments of psychological insight rather than merely expressive phenomena.

Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Ph D, Women Who Run With the Wolves Myths and Stories of the Wild, 2017thesis

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Some 2,500 years ago, scholars offered one taxonomy of the tears of emotion: we shed tears of sorrow, gladness, contrition, and—closest to awe—of our experience of grace, the feeling of Divine provenance of the kindness and goodness of life.

Keltner maps tears onto a classical fourfold taxonomy anchored by the vagal nervous system, arguing that 'sacred tears' of grace represent the form closest to awe and to a sense of divine connectedness with life.

Keltner, Dacher, Awe The New Science of Everyday Wonder and How It Can, 2023thesis

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These tears give wings to our soul; they become one with it; they brighten and cleanse it... a prostitute once knelt before Jesus as He sat at table... She washed His feet with her tears of repentance and wiped them with her hair.

Within Orthodox spirituality, tears of compunction and repentance are understood as purifying and elevating agents for the soul, figures both of blessed mourning and of transformative encounter with the divine.

Coniaris, Anthony M., Philokalia: The Bible of Orthodox Spirituality, 1998thesis

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A tear welled up in her eye, just a single tear, and ran down her cheek. He stopped cold... This tiny spot of wetness communicated to him very clearly what he otherwise had not seen. He started backpedaling so fast, apologizing like crazy.

The functional-emotion literature demonstrates empirically that a single tear operates as a potent social signal capable of instantly inverting an aggressor's affective state, shifting the intersubjective field from dominance to compassion.

Lench, Heather C., The Function of Emotions: When and Why Emotions Help Us, 2018supporting

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The parents stumbled home, weeping tears on all their finery.

In fairy-tale amplification, tears accompany the recognition of a catastrophic psychic bargain, marking the moment of awakening to the cost of unconscious complicity with destructive forces.

Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Ph D, Women Who Run With the Wolves Myths and Stories of the Wild, 2017supporting

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Amussein, 'to lacerate, scratch, tear,' is used of animal claws... Mourning women 'tear' their breasts with their nails. This, apparently, is what passion does to innards.

Padel's reconstruction of Greek tragic psychology shows that 'tearing' as physical self-laceration in mourning mirrors the interior psychic vocabulary of emotion as animal attack upon the organs of feeling.

Padel, Ruth, In and Out of the Mind Greek Images of the Tragic Self, 1994aside

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