The Law of Closure
In the preceding sections, I have discussed the lawful determination of emotional reactions, mentioning the determinants of situational meaning, concerns, apparent reality, change, and momentum. Emotional response itself, too, has its lawful properties~ which ~an be subsumed under the law of closure." Emotions tend to be closed to judgments of relativity of impact and to the requirements of goals other than their own. They tend to be absolute with regard to such judgments and to have control over the action system.
It may be, according to the law of change, that the causes of emotion are relative ones, relative, that is, to one's frame of reference--emotional response does not know this relativity and does not recognize it. For someone who is truly angry, the thing that happened is felt to be absolutely bad. It is disgraceful. It is not merely a disgraceful act but one that flows from the actor's very nature and disposition. Somebody who has acted so disgracefully is disgraceful and thus will always be. The offense and the misery it causes have a character of perpetuity. In strong grief the Person feels that life is devoid of meaning, that life cannot go on without the one lost. Each time one falls in love, one feels one never felt like that before. One dies a thousand deaths without the other. Every feature or action of the love object has an untarnishable gloss for as long as the infatuation lasts. In the presence of strong desires--think of trying to lose weight, stop smoking, or get off drugs~one feels as if one will die when they are not satisfied and that the pain is insupportable, even while one knows that the pang of desire will be over in a minute or two. Verbal expressions of emotions tend to reflect this absoluteness in quality and time: "I could kill him" or "I cannot live without her."