The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat

What is more important for us, at an elemental level, than the control, the owning and operation, of our own physical selves? And yet it is so automatic, so familiar, we never give it a thought.

But have you ever seen a hysteria like this? Think phenomenologically – take what you see as a genuine phenomenon, in which her state-of-body and state-of-mind are not fictions, but a psychophysical whole. Could anything give such a picture of undermined body and mind?

Our other senses – the five senses – are open and obvious; but this – our hidden sense – had to be discovered, as it was, by Sherrington, in the 1890s. He named it ‘proprioception’, to distinguish it from ‘exteroception’ and ‘interoception’, and, additionally, because of its indispensability for our sense of ourselves; for it is only by courtesy of proprioception, so to speak, that we feel our bodies as proper to us, as our ‘property’, as our own (Sherrington 1906, 1940).

This “proprioception” is like the eyes of the body, the way the body sees itself. And if it goes, as it’s gone with me, it’s like the body’s blind. My body can’t “see” itself if it’s lost its eyes, right? So I have to watch it – be its eyes. Right?

is this narrative or symbolic power which gives a sense of the world – a concrete reality in the imaginative form of symbol and story – when abstract thought can provide nothing at all.

We paid far too much attention to the defects of our patients, as Rebecca was the first to tell me, and far too little to what was intact or preserved

‘It is winter. I feel dead. But I know the spring will come again.’

Our tests, our approaches, I thought, as I watched her on the bench – enjoying not just a simple but a sacred view of nature – our approach, our ‘evaluations’, are ridiculously inadequate. They only show us deficits, they do not show us powers; they only show us puzzles and schemata, when we need to see music, narrative, play, a being conducting itself spontaneously in its own natural way.

had done appallingly in the testing – which, in a sense, was designed, like all neurological and psychological testing, not merely to uncover, to bring out deficits, but to decompose her into functions and deficits. She had come apart, horribly, in formal testing, but now she was mysteriously ‘together’ and composed.

man may be very ‘low’ intellectually – unable to put a key to a door, much less understand the Newtonian laws of motion, wholly unable to comprehend the world as concepts, and yet fully able, and indeed gifted, in understanding the world as concreteness, as symbols.