Overview…
In this chapter, Daniel Heller-Roazen discusses two phenomena: Phantom Limb Syndrome (the felt presence of an absent limb), and Cotard’s Syndrome, also called “Negation Delirium” (the felt absence of a present limb, organ, vital fluid or an entire body). Ostensibly, these two pathologies are opposites: one is neurological, the other psychological; one recognizes a false presence, the other a false absence. But Heller-Roazen insists that despite their differences, they represent two sides of the same coin–that coin being the primary sensory apparatus that is “the inner touch.”
It is as if Heller-Roazen anticipates that for his readers, it may be difficult to identify and accept the existence of this so-called “common sense” or “inner touch”–even when it is fully functioning. He demonstrates that is actually easier to recognize this inner touch when it is NOT working. That is to say, the existence of the inner touch is made manifest through its dysfunction and displacement in the phenomena of Phantom Limb Syndrome and Negation Delirium.
These two pathologies are illustrative of a displacement in the sensory apparatus. The very fact that they exist troubles the preconceived notions that sensing our aliveness is a symptom of reason, rationality and/or consciousness. And while those who suffer from these sense disorders are indeed disordered, their experience nevertheless suggests that our sense of sensing is always already displaced. It is displaced in the sense that it is de-localized; it cannot be confined to a particular region of the body or one of the five established senses.
The Curious Case of George Dedlow…
Heller-Roazen begins the chapter with the story of an American medical student turned war veteran, George Dedlow, whose story was published in The Atlantic Monthly in 1866. Due to serious injuries during the American Civil War, Dedlow lost his right arm and both his legs. He later lost his remaining arm due to a gangrene outbreak while convalescing. As he recovered from his amputations he repeatedly felt sensations in his lost limbs and noticed that other amputees reported similar experiences (itching, paining or cramping in limbs that were no longer attached). He deduces that it is a result of neuralgia, an irritation of the nerves that ultimately muddles the communication between the body and the brain.
But after awhile, Dedlow no longer feels the phantom limb. The neuralgia subsides, and in its place a pervasive feeling of alienation overcomes him. He suddenly feels less conscious of himself and his very existence. Not only is he missing his limbs, he is also missing half of the sensing surface of his skin—his relation to the world. Meanwhile the majority of his brain that was once concerned with movement and locomotion has begun to atrophy due to the fact that it is no longer used. He feels his very physiology changing. His very essence changing.
He is listless and depressed. A fellow patient invites him to attend a séance where he thinks he will find comfort in talking with ghosts. During the séance however, the medium summons the spirits of his missing legs. Briefly, Dedlow is able to walk again on invisible legs, albeit temporarily.
In the end, this fantastical story is revealed to be just that: a fantastical story. George Dedlow does not actually exist. The writer, Silas Weir Mitchell was a surgeon however, and did study amputees–so there is still something to be gleaned from the story. When the story first appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, it was framed as a true story. It was only discovered after the fact that it was a fabrication. Interestingly, Heller-Roazen presents this story in a similar fashion–as if it were true. He waits until he has finished recounting it before he gives the big reveal. This is most likely to grant the story the same metaphysical power that the first readers had invested it with. The curious case of George Dedlow is a short story, but it persists not because of its contribution to medicine, but because of the way it engages the senses and raises questions about the metaphysical nature of being.
Thus for Heller-Roazen, what is so salient about Weir Mitchell’s short story is not that it introduces the notion of phantom limbs (the phenomenon had been introduced prior to this) but rather that it intimates the spectral quality of lost limbs: that they manifest, but do not actually exist. They are felt, but like ghosts, remain nebulous, immeasurable, intangible, inconstant and volatile.
The Night of the Living Dead…
Heller-Roazen ends the chapter with a discussion of the work of Jules Cotard, a French psychiatrist who studied what he termed “Negative Delirium,” later called “Cotard’s Syndrome.” This phenomenon is characterized by patients feeling as though they are missing something when they are clearly not. Heller-Roazen includes excerpts from several of Cotard’s case files. Some patients report that they do not have a name, an age, a birthplace, or even parents. Others report that they are missing a body part like their throat, missing a vital organ like their stomach and insist they have no longer the need to eat. Some even report that they lack their own bodies, that they are in fact dead.
Regardless of what they are negating, these patients all suffer from a single sensory illusion: that they are lacking something they do evidently posses. This pathology intimates by contrast the prevailing sense of numbness and anesthesia spreading across the modern world.
Concluding thoughts….
What these patients know about themselves–their bodies, their beings, their lives–does not come from a cognitive or conscious process within them. But nor does it come from some sort of apparatus external to them or an input from their sense of taste, smell, sight, sound or touch. The location of their feelings cannot be demarcated, but in general terms, they feel more than they are or less than they are and this is due to a dysfunction or disturbance in their “common sense” or “coenesthesis.” For if living beings are conscious and cognizant, and their five senses are for all intents and purposes functioning–how can such sensory delusions be accounted for? They cannot. The fact that Phantom Limb Syndrome and Cotard’s Syndrome exist, must mean that there is an underlying general sense of sensing that informs the mind what the body is doing, and that instills a sense of being alive.
But ultimately these patients show that perception is in fact a delusion: it manifests but cannot be located anywhere nor measured by any scientific standards. Furthermore, these two case studies–particularly that of Cotard’s syndrome–are presented here as particularly modern disorders. This displacement in the general sensory apparatus responsible for our “sense of sensing” is very much a consequence of the modern condition of being alienated from our sense perception. The felt absence of limbs, organs and bodies that are nonetheless present is a portent of the potential problems imposed by the modern emphasis on cognition and reason. But the reduced importance placed upon the senses, and the “common sense” especially, does not mean that they will go away. Sensation cannot be fully repressed–we after all, are sensing beings. Sensation thus returns in typical uncanny fashion: in pathological ways. Phantom limbs and missing bodies are ultimately the overdetermined manifestations of what happens when we lose sense of our sense of sensing.
Musings…
Upon reading this chapter, I was reminded of Brian Massumi’s discussion (in Parables of the Virtual) of Ronald Reagan’s experience of playing an amputee in the film, Kings Row (Sam Wood, 1942). Massumi conducts a close reading of Reagan’s autobiography, where he recounts the story in detail.
In the film, Reagan’s character awakens to find that his legs have been amputated. This scene is posited as the cathexis of the film; of the character, and ultimately, of Reagan himself. With so much emphasis placed on this scene, Reagan prepares for the role accordingly. He emotionally readies himself for the feeling of having his legs amputated: he rehearses in many different ways to different people, in different places at different times of day, while he is awake and while he is sleeping. He becomes consumed by the feeling and the anticipation of the feeling of having his legs removed.
On the day of the shoot he shows up on set to find that the crew have designed a special contraption for him. His bed has a whole in it so that he may slip into it, and thereby create the illusion that his legs are indeed gone. He crawls into the bed, closes his eyes and mentally prepares. Once the camera starts rolling, he opens his eyes and looks down…to see finally after much anticipation, that half of him is missing. The weeks of anticipation, coupled with this altered reality contribute to an acute sensation that half of him is really in absentia. Later, watching the scene onscreen, Reagan claims that does not recognize himself. Reagan relays in his autobiography that he really felt like he lost half of himself that day for he never felt the same thereafter. And he admits, he spent the rest of his career searching for the remaining half of himself–only to find it in politics. The event was so formative in his conception of himself that he titled his biography Where is the Rest of Me?, which is a line taken directly from his pivotal scene in the movie.
Massumi’s point is that Reagan’s anticipation of the sensation of being amputated, coupled with the image of himself seeming to be amputated, made a virtual (possible) event become actual. It created an affective response that blurred the boundary between the sensation of the potential and the actual. While Reagan didn’t actually lose his legs, his sense perception changed as a result of imagining it in a really intense way. This particular incidence of affect only serves to strengthen Heller-Roazen’s notion that there is indeed a” sense of sensing,” and it is set apart from cognition, consciousness and even the locative sensory input of our five senses.
