Post by Admin on Jun 21, 2022 11:09:22 GMT
The philosophy of selfhood became real when my mother got dementia
psyche.co/ideas/the-philosophy-of-selfhood-became-real-when-my-mother-got-dementia
There are times when life interrupts one’s best efforts at contemplating it from a safe distance. So I wrote, in the opening pages of a book into which I gathered the stories of patients I had witnessed being examined over 18 months, as an anonymous onlooker of weekly sessions in a neuropsychiatry clinic. Sitting in on these sessions, I wanted to understand how the self studies itself, and how it loses itself: how disruptions of the sense of self can throw light on what it takes for there to be a sense of self in the first place.
As a philosopher and historian who has long studied ideas about the mind, I wasn’t looking at extremes of psychopathology, or the follies underlying our most destructive actions. I was interested in gradations of ordinary confusion – the porous border between normality and pathology. Since anyone is a potential patient, I wanted to know how each clinical patient I saw seemed, on entering the consulting room, to be a quite ordinary, healthy person, their sometimes terrible difficulties revealed only once doctors had poked around for a while, asking questions, enquiring like empathic detectives.
Some patients stood out. One awoke from a coma having forgotten 10 years of her life. Another could not take the glove off her chronically painful hand. One man heard voices and couldn’t sleep. Another felt too guilty to live. Some ailments were clearly neurological. Others resisted diagnosis, even categorisation. Once I’d stopped attending the sessions, I wrote up these stories, trying to understand their disrupted selves with the tools of experimental psychology.
That perspective was upended when my mother, with whom I was close, began developing signs of dementia. I was now the family of the patient, helpless before the inevitable unravelling of my closest kin, and trying to make sense of ailments of the mind when there was no safe distance to be had.
At first, my mother, the poet Anne Atik, had seemed just ordinarily confused. Then, very gradually, the confusion took on a pathological aspect. She awoke in the middle of the night thinking it was morning. On what turned out to be her last Eurostar journey, she thought she had arrived in London when we had just left it. Though her sentences remained grammatically coherent, they stopped making sense. A poet and writer, she became unable to write, even to read. But she remained a poet, distilling her emotions and humour into one-liners that I took to writing down. It was as if the confusion bred by the dementia had set her free, distilling her poetic fire.
It was a bewildering experience – dementia always is. But my questions about the self, and the loss of self, became all the more poignant now that I could see what in my mother remained, and what was disappearing. I also better understood the patients whose stories I was writing about – while their stories helped me better understand her.
This was the perspectival shift: from third-person reader, thinker and onlooker, to a feeling, second-person interaction. I had been observing doctors observing patients, but once my mother started entering the text, re-shaping the stories I was telling, the patient ‘out there’ became a ‘you’. And not any ‘you’: the mother is begetter, within whom, and then in whose arms, one first interacts as a developing ‘I’, and without whom there would be no ‘I’ at all.
psyche.co/ideas/the-philosophy-of-selfhood-became-real-when-my-mother-got-dementia
There are times when life interrupts one’s best efforts at contemplating it from a safe distance. So I wrote, in the opening pages of a book into which I gathered the stories of patients I had witnessed being examined over 18 months, as an anonymous onlooker of weekly sessions in a neuropsychiatry clinic. Sitting in on these sessions, I wanted to understand how the self studies itself, and how it loses itself: how disruptions of the sense of self can throw light on what it takes for there to be a sense of self in the first place.
As a philosopher and historian who has long studied ideas about the mind, I wasn’t looking at extremes of psychopathology, or the follies underlying our most destructive actions. I was interested in gradations of ordinary confusion – the porous border between normality and pathology. Since anyone is a potential patient, I wanted to know how each clinical patient I saw seemed, on entering the consulting room, to be a quite ordinary, healthy person, their sometimes terrible difficulties revealed only once doctors had poked around for a while, asking questions, enquiring like empathic detectives.
Some patients stood out. One awoke from a coma having forgotten 10 years of her life. Another could not take the glove off her chronically painful hand. One man heard voices and couldn’t sleep. Another felt too guilty to live. Some ailments were clearly neurological. Others resisted diagnosis, even categorisation. Once I’d stopped attending the sessions, I wrote up these stories, trying to understand their disrupted selves with the tools of experimental psychology.
That perspective was upended when my mother, with whom I was close, began developing signs of dementia. I was now the family of the patient, helpless before the inevitable unravelling of my closest kin, and trying to make sense of ailments of the mind when there was no safe distance to be had.
At first, my mother, the poet Anne Atik, had seemed just ordinarily confused. Then, very gradually, the confusion took on a pathological aspect. She awoke in the middle of the night thinking it was morning. On what turned out to be her last Eurostar journey, she thought she had arrived in London when we had just left it. Though her sentences remained grammatically coherent, they stopped making sense. A poet and writer, she became unable to write, even to read. But she remained a poet, distilling her emotions and humour into one-liners that I took to writing down. It was as if the confusion bred by the dementia had set her free, distilling her poetic fire.
It was a bewildering experience – dementia always is. But my questions about the self, and the loss of self, became all the more poignant now that I could see what in my mother remained, and what was disappearing. I also better understood the patients whose stories I was writing about – while their stories helped me better understand her.
This was the perspectival shift: from third-person reader, thinker and onlooker, to a feeling, second-person interaction. I had been observing doctors observing patients, but once my mother started entering the text, re-shaping the stories I was telling, the patient ‘out there’ became a ‘you’. And not any ‘you’: the mother is begetter, within whom, and then in whose arms, one first interacts as a developing ‘I’, and without whom there would be no ‘I’ at all.