Negative epiphanies can certainly be disruptive, but so can positive epiphanies. The notion of ‘dysepiphany’ is also not to be confused or equated with the notion of disruptive epiphany. Footnote 8 For a brief moment you come to have an important new insight, but the vision fades quickly and you return to your old ways, more or less unaffected and unchanged. The latter, Chappell explains, occurs when an epiphany proves only temporarily successful. Footnote 7Ī dysepiphany is to be distinguished form a ‘failed epiphany’. Footnote 6 Another example she gives is that of seeing a particularly bleak film such as Amadeus, which left her deeply downcast when she first saw it. These count as a kind of ‘dysepiphany of what we did not already know, and naturally have no wish to know, about pain or discomfort or malfunction’. Later in the book she also discusses episodes of illness, when our body is broken, injured or diseased. Those are standard dysepiphanic experiences. Footnote 5 Chappell gives the example of realizing that in truth somebody has never loved you, or that you can no longer believe in God. If a positive epiphany feeds the psyche and ‘makes us glad to be alive’, Footnote 4 a negative epiphany does the opposite: it is ‘profoundly bleak and upsetting, sapping our psychic resources rather than refreshing them’.
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