/tag/amnesia

4 quotes tagged 'amnesia'

Publisher: kindle import (0)

How Our Lives Become Stories: Making Selves

Publisher: Cornell University Press (1999)

140

In speaking of amnesia and autism as pathologies, I want to get at the psychological rather than the neurological dimension of these phenomena, the strange absence or loss of affect in such individuals that in case after case makes so deep an impression on the clinicians who study them. This sense of something missing, an inner chill or deadness, seems to be associated with a 'dysnarrativia' that bespeaks a damaged identity. Who can say for sure, however, that the identities in question are truly damaged? It is the fact that those who observe such individuals should think so that interests me, suggesting that we live in a culture in which narrative functions as the signature of the real, of the normal. (I should add that, given the opportunity for first-hand observation, I suspect that I would agree that identity has been damanged in these cases.) In a remarkable essay that I keep going back to, 'The Value of Narrativity in the Representation of Reality,' Hayden White makes this point in connection with history, whereas I want to apply it here in connection with identity. Social accountability requires identity narrative; in The Woman Warrior, Maxine Hong Kingston gives a nice rendering of a child's perception of this requirement: 'I thought talking and not talking made the difference between sanity and insanity. Insane people were the ones who couldn't explain themselves' (216).

129-130

Certainly a continuing refrain in the clinical accounts of amnesiacs and autistics is the clinician's distress over the subject's apparent loss of affect, confirming that one of the important adaptive functions of narrative identity and the exchange of identity narratives is the enhancement of bonding and social solidarity. Sacks's remark testifies to the working of social accountability: to achieve a socially recognized identity, individuals need to display 'that range of emotions and states of mind that defines a 'self' for the rest of us.

125-126

...there is no question that the self of the amnesiac is radically altered by the loss of explicit memory. Sacks registers the jolt such cases give to the sense of identity that we usually take for granted when, contemplating the ravages of Korsakov's syndrome on 'Mr. Thompson's' personality, he asks, 'has he been pithed, scooped-out, de-souled, by disease?' (Man 113). Would we be prepared, though, to follow Sacks in question whether 'There is a person remaining' (115) in 'Mr. Thompson'? That we do instinctively ask such a question reveals the importance we attach to our identity conventions and narrative practices. How often have we said, or heard it said, for example, after visiting a friend or relative slipping into senility, 'She was not herself today' - an arresting thing to say, on the face of it, yet we know what we mean when we say it.\r\n\r\n\r\n*Man*: Oliver Sacks, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Tales, Harper, 1985