Mary-Frances O'Connor

And there's all this interesting research in people who are stuck in an emotional state, like complex grief, for example.

Mary Frances O'Connor and her group at Arizona have studied this extensively.

And people who get stuck in, like they lose a spouse, for example.

And you know somebody like this.

to the grief experience.

In fact, I don't know if you've seen or not, but Prince Harry has just partnered up with Mary Frances O'Connor, who is a acclaimed grief author.

And I saw they had just had a little snippet and Prince Harry said, the grief journey is a learning journey.

And I said, yes, it really is.

He looked older and schlubbier, don't we all? The difference of youth replaced by something more pompous and belligerent, undergirded by what in recent years has appeared to be his bottomless well of hurt feelings.

Harry was promoting something, a masterclass on grief science, which he has undertaken with Dr. Mary Frances O'Connor.

But the question of why on earth he would double down on previous US media appearances, none of them successful, sat alongside the bigger royal question of the season, namely, what are he and his wife, Meghan, going to do? In this, the Sussexes are no different to any other creators endlessly raking over their own lives for content.

The difference, of course, is that Harry, with a lofty mindset inculcated from birth, and which is presumably incredibly hard to shake, presents his every gesture as automatically belonging to that higher calling public service.

And so there's an untethering of this map.

And so there's been brain imaging studies Beautiful work by Mary Frances O'Connor, University of Arizona, showing that if you look in the brain and people that are in grief from loss of a really strong attachment, the state of brain and body that gets flipped on is a motivational state.

It's exactly the same circuitry in the brain that one sees active if someone very hungry is put just outside the wall of some delicious food, or if an animal that really wants to mate, I guess mate, with animals you call it copulate, they really want to copulate with another animal, is put just beyond the wall of that animal, but they can smell them.

I mean, these are highly motivated, desiring states.

This was in addition to other very visceral physical symptoms like profound exhaustion and brain fog.

I don't know if you've ever read Mary Frances O'Connor, but she just released a book called The Grieving Body.

Oh, no, I would...

I'm fascinated by this.

Must be a special.

Harry joins neuroscience Mary Frances O'Connor to explore how loss impacts the brain and body and how people move forward pairing O'Connor's research with his own experience of losing his mother Princess Diana at age 12 for years Harry says allowing himself to be happy felt like a betrayal I felt disloyal and guilty for the possibility of being happy and joyful without her I felt like I had to be sad and I had to be emotionally numb in order to prove to her that I missed her The reflections come as Harry's uncle, Charles Spencer's new memoir, Swan Song, puts Diana's life and death back into focus.

On Masterclass, Harry says he didn't cry when told his mother had died, but broke down at her burial and then didn't cry over her again for nearly two decades.

I was convinced that was strength, but it wasn't.

taking in any extra anything because my brain was shutting down.

So what our brains do, and Mary Frances O'Connor talks about this in The Grieving Brain and The Grieving Body.

Okay, Mary Frances O'Connor is a researcher, PhD, and she I learned about her material.

She wrote her books after 2021.

I don't know exactly the dates.

Yeah, he says, "I'm the mas- I'm in the Masterclass series.

I say I am a student of grief, and the expert is Dr. Mary-Frances O'Connor." Then why are you there promoting it for GQ? Why are you the face of it? I mean, again, it's just Harry's constantly being propped up as an authority on something that he has no business being an authority on, like AI or protecting children online.

[laughs]

But you were talking about his relationship with his father earlier.