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After class on Monday night, I was musing to Judie that her story of the tripartite brain might prove more "useful" than the account Paul had given of two severely separated sections of the nervous system-- more useful because it actually locates a third "place" where therapy and change can occur, rather than highlighting the existence of an unconscious that works tacitly and independently of consciousness (though I'm assuming, in the session upcoming on "the adaptive brain," there will be invitations into other avenues for changing who we are and what we do....)

Later Monday night I had a very strong (and very troubling) dream that I'm sure had been fed by our discussion: my family had organized an intervention to have me institutionalized. Surrounded by people who kept saying, "We love you," I shouted, "I will not be hamstrung by my life!" It seemed to be a dream about entrapment--about, particularly, being trapped by what has been, who has known, who I am...

and I'm (pretty obviously!) looking for a way out of that.

What interests me right now is the idea that different diagnoses, and different discourses, might offer different ways out, even different definitions of what "out" means. Brief mention was made, Monday night, of Anne Fadiman's 1998 account of a Hmong child and her American Doctors: The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down. Fadiman tells this as a story of a catastrophic collision between two very different cultural understandings: the child's parents and her doctors all take note of the same symptoms, but the parents thinks they are caused by "soul loss," the doctors by the "misfiring of damaged brain cells." Which is "right"? Which is more useful?

Dostoyevsky's Prince Myskin asked (about this same phenomenon, which we know as epilepsy): "What if it is a disease? What does it matter that it is an abnormal tension, if the result, if the moment of sensation, remembered and analyzed in a state of health, turns out to be harmony and beauty brought to their highest point of perfection, and gives a feeling, undivined and undreamt of till then, of completeness, proportion, reconcilation, and an escstatic and prayerful fusion in the highest synthesis of life?"