Subjectivity and Suffering in American Culture: Possible Selves (Culture, Mind and Society)

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Author: Steven M. Parish

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Subjectivity and Suffering in American Culture

Culture, Mind, and Society The Book Series of the Society for Psychological Anthropology With its book series Culture, Mind, and Society and journal Ethos, the Society for Psychological Anthropology publishes innovative research in culture and psychology now emerging from the discipline of anthropology and related fields. As anthropologists seek to bridge gaps between ideation and emotion or agency and structure—and as psychologists, psychiatrists, and medical anthropologists search for ways to engage with cultural meaning and difference—this interdisciplinary terrain is more active than ever. This book series from the Society for Psychological Anthropology establishes a forum for the publication of books of the highest quality that illuminate the workings of the human mind, in all of its psychological and biological complexity, within the social, cultural, and political contexts that shape thought, emotion, and experience. Series Editor Douglas Hollan, Department of Anthropology, University of California, Los Angeles Editorial Board Linda Garro, Department of Anthropology, UCLA Catherine Lutz, Department of Anthropology, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill Peggy Miller, Departments of Psychology and Speech Communication, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign Robert Paul, Department of Anthropology, Emory University Bradd Shore, Department of Anthropology, Emory University Carol Worthman, Department of Anthropology, Emory University Titles in the Series: Adrie Kusserow, American Individualisms: Child Rearing and Social Class in Three Neighborhoods Naomi Quinn, editor, Finding Culture in Talk: A Collection of Methods Anna Mansson McGinty, Becoming Muslim: Western Women’s Conversions to Islam

Subjectivity and Suffering in American Culture Possible Selves Steven M. Parish

SUBJECTIVITY AND SUFFERING IN AMERICAN CULTURE

Copyright © Steven M. Parish, 2008. All rights reserved. First published in 2008 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN™ 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 and Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire, England RG21 6XS Companies and representatives throughout the world. PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan division of St. Martin’s Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. Macmillan® is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries. ISBN-13: 978–0–230–60538–1 ISBN-10: 0–230–60538–9 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Parish, Steven M. Subjectivity and suffering in American culture : possible selves / Steven M. Parish. p. cm.—(Culture, mind, and society) ISBN 0–230–60538–9 (alk. paper) 1. Self. 2. Suffering. 3. Existential psychology. 4. Self—United States—Case studies. 5. Suffering—United States—Case studies. 6. Existential psychology—United States—Case studies. I. Title. BF698.P254 2008 126—dc22

2007046176

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Design by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd., Chennai, India. First edition: July 2008 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed in the United States of America.

In memory of Robert I. Levy

“Murphy, all life is figure and ground.” “But a wandering to find home,” said Murphy. —Samuel Beckett, Murphy

Contents Preface

ix

Acknowledgments

Part I

xvii

Three American Selves

One

Born into Our Lives: Other People in the Work of Self

Two

What a Tangled Web She Weaves: An American Widow

Three California Dreaming: My Days on the Cancer Ward

3 35 71

Part II Self, Suffering, Subjectivity Four

Toward a Psychology of Possible Selves

125

Five

The Subjectivity of Suffering

153

Conclusion: Wandering Home

183

Notes

203

References

207

Index

211

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Preface Human beings pursue their own possible selves. It is how they enter life. I contend, simply enough, that human beings try to grasp what and who they are, could be, and must be, as they make their way into and through life. This process of self-appraisal generates what I term a possible self. Think of this as a model of the self, but one that organizes the life of the person, in a process that takes the first-person potential of subjectivity and develops it to engage actual life circumstances. This process mobilizes the existential resources of a person—their capacity to live—and gives these a raison d’etre. The possible self is a venture into life, a way of endowing life with purpose and direction, the form that the human effort to live takes. The possible selves that people assemble, their efforts to venture into life on the terms these provide, and what, in the end, they are able to do with these possibilities: all this depends very much on where and how they live, and who they already are. Possibilities abound, but there are limits. A possible self may be a key to the world’s possibilities. The possibilities assembled into a self may make possible a new way of approaching life, support new forms of experience, and guide the reflections of self into a new appreciation of existence, make it possible to engage the world on altered terms. A possible self may lay a brave new world out before the larger self. I say this with deliberate irony, but also with deliberate hopefulness. Nurturing the self and expanding the possibilities of self-awareness may offer people new avenues for living. Yet the development of a possible self does not necessarily lead to an expansion of the horizons of what people can be. Horizons can collapse—cultural worlds can constrain, limit, and crush the self. The resources needed for living can be in short supply or unjustly allocated; a person may find little support in the world. I think this provokes a search for possible selves. A person may find in some particular version of self the key to living in a hostile, painful, rejecting world. People grapple with questions of what they are, can be, and must be in the course of living. People have to test the possibilities; and the only way they can do so is by being something and seeing what happens,

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perhaps only to be beaten down, or to crash into the hard surfaces of social life. Then they still have to pick themselves up and try again. They may be diminished, brutalized, in the process. Not every one gets to step “young and lithe” into the world. Yet some do, building on their own possibilities. I should not, then, be accused of offering a vision of self that attends only to people’s possibilities of flourishing. I do take the view that the human capacity to create and pursue possibilities in the medium of their own existence can, sometimes, make possible human flourishing. Yet possible selves are also a source of suffering, often playing a central role in the tragedies people script for themselves. They can amplify the existential pain of the human condition, even if seeking release from it. After all, people are self-aware in their experience of life; they face death with self-awareness; they are self-aware as they confront the scope and the limits of human life, including all the brutality, senselessness, cruelty, and suffering the world offers. I will try to show how people suffer as possible selves. They assemble themselves, as best they can, within their experience of suffering. They try to figure out who they are, how they might go on. How we suffer or endure depends in fact on subtle exchanges we have with our own possible selves. This volume examines the cases of a young man, just entering full adulthood, who reflects on his own life in terms of his mother’s mental illness, a woman who is having difficulty coping with the death of her husband, and a cancer patient: each reflects on personal experience not to find meaning as such for their lives, but to sift through their possibilities to find a way to “go on.” My use of “possible selves” differs from the perspective of psychologists Markus and Nurius (1987), who also use the phrase, although I mean to encompass their meaning as well. They stress the ways possible selves “represent individuals’ ideas of what they might become, what they would like to become, and what they are afraid of becoming” (157). I especially appreciate the last item: people do often shrink back from what they think they might be, or can be. I use the term in a more existential and psychodynamic sense: not just to mean what people think they might become, but to designate their existential possibilities: what they might be able to become; what they have to become as they enter life or clash with existence; as well as what they desire to be or not be. These possibilities coalesce in psychodynamic processes as situated in existential settings. I am concerned with people’s ideas of themselves, but only as part of their attempts to be something, to cope with what life is for them. My view of possible selves is thus closer to the existential perspective of

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anthropologist Michael Jackson (2005) when he says, “our task is to explore human being-in-the-world” by examining “our ever-changing capacity to create the conditions of viable existence and co-existence with the potentialities of our environment” (xv). People are always dealing with the possibilities of the world and deploying the possibilities of the self, and trying to bring them into a relationship that makes life possible. This capacity to mobilize the possibilities of the self, in relation to the potentialities of the world, where such efforts collide with the hard surfaces of life, is a large part of what the self is, distinguishing it from passive “being-in-the-world.” The self is not an essence, provided by nature or culture, but rather a process of living, existing, adapting, using capacities that human beings have—most centrally, in my estimation, their powers of memory, feeling, reflexivity. Using these capacities, the human self is capable of experiencing self, and reflecting on itself, not just consciously, but in struggles to be and to adapt; and in all these ways, the human self becomes vulnerable, puts itself at risk in its efforts to live, in its reflexivity and self-awareness. As Jackson puts it, if “human existence is relational—a mode of being-in-the-world—it is continually at risk” (emphasis in original). This implies not only that our being is conditional on our interactions—bodily, linguistic, social and imaginary—with the world in which we live, but that we are involved in a constant struggle to sustain and augment our being in relationship to the being of others, as well as the nonbeing of the physical and material world, and the ultimate extinction that is death.” (xiv)

The focus of this volume is not the conception Jackson takes from Sartre, about how the world offers itself, appears or closes itself off “as a field of instrumental possibilities” (xv), but rather how we make ourselves appear, open ourselves up to, close ourselves off from, a world that offers suffering. I think the perspectives are complementary. Moreover, I think it would be a mistake not to appreciate the subjectivity of suffering: suffering is not simply something happening to us, to which we passively acquiesce, but something in which we are fully involved as selves. As this suggests, the term “possible” does not imply that selves are monolithic entities, or unchanging wholes (Ewing 1990). It implies a capacity to change and adapt but does not suggest the self can be anything at all. What is possible can narrow as well as expand. What is possible is a trade-off made in the course of living between what people

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can be and what social and cultural life supports, between what they already are, what they might be, and what they “must be” in an existential context. Thinking of possible selves opens up questions regarding how people mobilize their capacities for experiencing, feeling, and imagining, and deal with personal conflicts and social contradictions as they engage life (Ewing 1990; Hollan 2000; Obeyesekere 1981). A critical core of any human struggle to cope with the world is the capacity for reflexivity that organizes selfhood by making use of other human powers—the ability to feel, to imagine, to take meaning from other selves and culture, among these (Csordas 1994). Accordingly, this volume approaches human selfhood in the spirit of contemporary psychological anthropology, by bringing together cultural, existential, and psychodynamic perspectives. This is not a study of cultural conceptions of the self, although such concepts exert an important influence on the persons whose lives I shall describe. My goal is to try to capture some aspects of the living qualities of selfhood and to explore the subjectivity of suffering. I stress the “power of feeling” in life and culture (Chodorow 1999). I find it useful to juxtapose cases about different kinds of suffering, which show the different ways personal distress affects living. Human suffering rarely touches only a single person, or one person in only one way. The person who is dying is disappearing from the world. The illness if not the disease is shared (Kleinman 1988). The person who mourns another may have cared for them in their dying. What Hollan (1994, 84) calls the “ebb and flow of suffering” has many sources in life and responds to many existential and cultural factors. The way suffering is absorbed in life experience is itself an important question, and a person-centered, rather than a diseasecentered or trauma-centered approach, may be best able to do justice to this (Hollan 2001). For this reason and others, this volume is not a study of cancer or bereavement, but a study of selves and their subjectivities. What people bring to suffering is what they are as persons and the emotional, cultural, and evaluative resources they have as persons to engage the reality of their suffering. They have to define themselves in the face of suffering, mobilizing their subjective potential in the process. We might term this “the work of self.” The work of self is a process of self-reflection, but one that exercises the full range of human capacities, conscious and unconscious. The power of imagination and the intimate play of feeling are part of it. It often involves coming to terms with complicated, even highly disturbing, waves of emotion, and subjective imagery (Obeyesekere 1981).

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The work of self involves managing, developing, transforming, and risking the personal organization of self. We need to understand the cultural and existential settings of such efforts, but equally how basic psychological capacities are mobilized in the effort to be something in the face of existence, suffering, and uncertainty. I begin by examining suffering in three American lives. These are ordinary enough lives—each has a “culturally meaningful life,” as Garro (2001) aptly puts it—but suffering has broken in on them and they need not only to make life meaningful in new ways, but to define self in ways that will make it possible for them to go on with life. These three American selves, if we can call them that, define themselves in terms of their personal autonomy, but also experience themselves as morally interdependent and as emotionally shaped by others. They have to cope with discrepancies between their values and their life experiences (Hollan 1992). Up to a point, too, they value “having a normal life.” They do not want to be victims and want control over their lives, but their lives are not what they expected and not fully under their control. They have to make meaning out of this, meaning that can be felt, that can be integrated into a “sense of self” (Becker 1997). It is the sense of self—and its role in life and suffering—that I try to grasp. Cultural models and psychological capacities play a critical role in human struggles to know and be; yet I am not persuaded either one absolutely determines how lives turn out. It seems to me perilous to ignore either, or to neglect their interaction. I do not have the space to provide the cross-cultural material that might disentangle cultural and universal aspects of the self. Works of person-centered ethnography are relevant to this question (Briggs 1970; Hollan and Wellenkampf 1994; Levy 1973; McHugh 1989; Parish 1994). Here I try simply to show the work of self, the ways people attempt to mobilize their own (very cultural, very universal) possibilities to engage life. I believe, moreover, there is value in seeing these lives as lives. To grasp lives as Jackson’s “being-in-the-world” requires that we not arbitrarily split them up into cultural and universal parts—except for heuristic purposes, to bring some aspects of the process of living into clearer focus. People live as whole persons, and cultural and universal processes are always active in whatever they do or become. If we wish to understand them as active selves coping with quandaries of existence, we should not always leap over the existential unity of their lives. Bold analytic distinctions we make for certain research purposes may obscure the actual phenomena of selfhood and subjectivity.

xiv

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So while it is crucial to weigh cultural and universal influences on selfhood, it is equally vital to grasp how people live and adapt. In fact, to do justice to the subjectivity of suffering, it is essential to grasp what Hollan (2000) aptly calls the subjectivity potential of individual selves—potential employed to generate and test new ways of being in the world. What I try to show is how some individuals deploy such potential in efforts to deal with problems of living.

A Personal Note I have to say something about my relationship to the material of this book, since I play a role in it, not just as an author seeking to understand human beings, but as a self trying to understand and cope with my own experience. In fact, I wrote much of this book while I was a cancer patient. Having cancer is not the reason I began this book, but it is the reason I have struggled to finish it. I hasten to say this is not a book about cancer. Nor is it, except for one chapter, about me. It is, rather, a book about the vicissitudes of adaptation, about the way people manage their own existence. How do we sprout new selves for ourselves as our lives change and we have to grapple with the world in new ways? That is one question. Why do we have to struggle so much in our efforts to do this—and why do we so often fail? That is another. Cancer is just one of the experiences that throw people back on themselves. Much of human experience poses the question of self. Having cancer has inspired me to write a more personal book than I might otherwise have done. I have introduced personal reflections where they seemed to me useful. I have done so only after some hesitation. One should, after all, have what Fred Bailey once termed “a proper sense of one’s insignificance”—and guard against self-indulgence. The best place to advance an understanding of human experience is, most often, by looking beyond your own experience, and trying to understand other people. This is certainly true of my other books—personal reflections would not really have illuminated the human realities I was exploring. This book is different. I am both a human self, as I understand the term, and a cancer patient. I necessarily have the native’s point of view on selfhood and I unfortunately have it on coping with cancer. I find it ironic, and difficult, that I should become a case study in my own theory of self. But I find I cannot overlook the fact that my existential and psychodynamic account—like any perspective on

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selfhood—must do justice to this kind of experience, just as it must do justice to the experience recounted in the other cases I examine. Having lived with cancer and the possibility of death, as much as I would have liked to have avoided it, has provided me with data on the phenomena that I am trying to examine. For that matter, despite my qualms, asking how I relate to my subject matter is not an unfair question. It deserves an answer of some kind. It would be begging off to say that I was trained as an anthropologist, with some extra training in psychiatry—for the question is really about my existence as a human being and how this shapes my sense of what it means to explore human lives. What kind of “self” am I? How does this project of exploring human selfhood reverberate with my own experience of being alive? This volume may have taken shape in terms of my social background, my education, my profession, my life experience—perhaps it is all relevant, and none of it matters. I think it will be clear enough for any reader who reads the case studies. William James said once that all that really separates anyone of us from anyone else is only a “momentary discrepancy”—perhaps so, although all the distance between two cultures, and between eras, or between social classes, between sickness and health, living and dying may fit into it. Grasping the discrepancy with some sense that it forms a possibility for self is often, I suspect, precisely what makes it possible to grasp something of the life of another self. You, too, may be a cancer patient some day, and you will cope with it in ways that reflect what and who you are—a possible self.

Plan of the Book Chapter one introduces themes and reflects on the case of a young man perplexed by his mother’s mental illness and its meaning for him. He explores a very basic human question—where did I come from?—in terms of another one—who am I? At stake are the terms on which he might enter life. The chapter sheds light on how other people—our psychological objects (Bollans 1987)—can continue to define and orient us as we engage life. Chapter two focuses on the widow struggling with guilt and grief in the aftermath of her husband’s death. Her shattered sense of self and her effort to deal with conflicting visions of herself had to do with her ambivalence about him. Her grief is complicated by guilt, and by the fact that she has to mourn her own life as well as another’s death.

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The chapter sheds light on object loss as a human experience that defines the self. Chapter three explores my experience of cancer. I struggled to orient myself to my illness—to the possibility of dying—by reflecting on other selves. I found meaning for my predicament in their examples. I also personalized cultural conceptions, tried to piece together a vision of myself and my life that would help me face this crisis. The cases show the individuality, yet also the cultural and psychological depth, of the work of self. We had this in common: we were all haunted by feelings about other people and we struggled to find meaning for ourselves in terms of strong emotions. Each of us tried to discover that possible self that would, in some manner, allow us to master life’s predicaments. We all individualized cultural meaning in the process of orienting ourselves to our life problems. Chapter four proposes a model of the psyche that might support the phenomena of selfhood seen in the case material, drawing on some insights from contemporary psychological anthropology. Chapter five addresses the relationship of suffering and subjectivity. I attempt to rehabilitate the much maligned and misconstrued concept of inwardness by arguing that an “inner imaginary” is one key means for orienting self to suffering. I end with a brief essay on “intentional selves.”

Acknowledgments This book is dedicated to Bob Levy, mentor and friend. For kindness and inspiration, I thank Guillermo Algaze, Fred Bailey, Ted Ball, Ashwin Budden Steve Carlisle, Tom Csordas, Roy D’Andrade, Jason Danely, Krista Eliot, Eduardo Grunvald, David Jordan, Janis Jenkins, Tanya Luhrmann, Jonathan Marion, Ernestine McHugh, Keith McNeal, Heather Rae-Espinoza, Joel Robbins, Kedar Rajopadhyaya (and his family), Greg Simon, Heather Spector, Melford Spiro, Robert Tonkinson, Don Tuzin, and Kit Woolard. I have not been able to incorporate all their suggestions, but I am grateful to Bambi Chapin, Becky Joseph, Douglas Hollan, Charles Lindholm, Daniel Linger, and two anonymous reviewers for comments on the book as it developed. I had the opportunity to present parts of the book in my department’s Psychodynamic Seminar, which brings together faculty and students to discuss research in psychological anthropology. I thank the participants. I wish to express my gratitude to the nurses, doctors, and hospital staff of UCSD Healthcare, my family and Slim, for keeping me going so I could finish this book, and I hope for a while to come.


Part I Three American Selves


Chapter One Born into Our Lives: Other People in the Work of Self Overture People have moments of awakening to the world and self, in which experience strikes with the force of a revelation. This may not change the course of a life, may not shatter the person’s world, but still make a difference, altering the terms of existence in some small yet decisive way. Such moments may pose a dilemma or determine a choice, amplify some doubt or conviction, or just slightly shift the grounds of self-knowledge. Accordingly, a person comes to exist in the world in some new way. What such experience does is make palpable some new possibility. The possibility might exist in the self, or in the world, but most likely it is grasped in terms of experience that connects self and world, bringing their different possibilities together. Such moments may shape a new self-awareness, a new attitude toward existence, to be pursued in varied ways into the future. Susan Mitchell, a poet, commenting on one of her poems, reports on an experience she had as a child. She says she spent “an entire winter trying to catch a bird on a beach in Florida.” She finally caught one, and was “thrilled, but also terrified—by the reality of the pigeon, by the desire utterly separate from my own, the pigeon’s heart pulsing against my fingers, the wings pushing up against my hands.”1 She let the bird go, but the experience has not let go of her. It awakened her to the bird’s life, its sheer reality. Now she also finds herself in the memory. It orients her in some meaningful way to her own existence. Life is full of such experiences—any life, in any culture. These experiences arise out of the encounter of self and world and evoke emotional meanings in the self. This whole package—the self made self-aware by the experience, the image of the experience holding an image of self, the self reflecting on this, all of it enlivened by feelings—can unfold in future responses to the world. Such experiences pull us out of ourselves and into the world; but they also throw us back on ourselves, and can even move us to fold

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Subjectivity and Suffering

experience back into ourselves, as we respond to the existential encounter, to the fluttering bird in our hand, or whatever else we encounter that moves us into response, and into a new self-awareness. Encounters with other human beings can be much like this, too—we have all had them. Dealing with the reality of another person—another self—we experience a desire and a will “utterly separate” from our own, and yet somehow like our own. We find other people connected to our own existence by the sheer fact of their presence in our lives—and in our encounters with them they manifest their own desires, separate from own, spinning a web of possibilities in which we may ultimately find some of our own possibilities. If other people do not “push up against” our hands with their wings, they may certainly push against us with their emotions. If we do not feel their beating hearts pulsing against our fingers, we do, sometimes, feel their lives pulsing against our own. “Through most of my adult life,” Mitchell continues, “I was haunted by that experience and kept trying to write about it.” As I will try to show, people are, as selves, haunted by some experiences, and try to reclaim these for the purpose of entering their lives in the present. This is part of the work of self. The “self” enters the world in ways both deeply cultural and complexly psychological. If at the end of the day there is no way to grasp how people live the lives they do, it will not have mattered that we reconciled culture and psyche. Culture and psychology would just represent two ways of depersonalizing the self. We can do better by recognizing that human beings live in first-person, existential, terms; they push and pull themselves, their concrete possibilities, into the world as best they can. They organize and use the capabilities they have as living, cultural, psychological beings to cope with existence. The self is the agent of a life: the ambiguously self-aware progenitor of the most deeply grounded and all encompassing existential project a person can be involved in—being you, making the life you have. In fact, people are sometimes surprised by their capacity for responding to life, surprised at what they conjure up, at its moral and emotional dimensions—are caught unawares, as Mitchell was. They have to catch up to their own capacity for response. If they can, they may be able to make something of the experience, of the moment that threw self into relief against something else. Mitchell captures the sense of this, too, in her remarks on how her poem came into being: “It was not until I started to think of what at first seemed a very different subject—the number of times we are born into our lives, those experiences so crucial to us that we tumble

Other People in the Work of Self

5

out of them glistening and wet and new—that I began to think of my catching the pigeon as a birth.” She goes on to define birth “not only as freeing oneself from the mother, but more importantly as the struggle to enter the world.” The push to enter the world is not just about freeing oneself; it is equally about attaching oneself to life and testing the capacities one possesses for living. At least this is what I imagine Mitchell’s remarks suggest. She let the literal bird go; she held on to it in figurative ways, in feeling, in her imagination, and in her reflections on self, formed a kind of bond of possibility with it—perhaps it helped “bring her into the world.” No doubt it was a detail, a moment, in a larger process; but the details matter, moments matter. When Mitchell held the bird, she was involved as a self. Her hands held the bird; she felt the fluttering wings. She responded and reflected on her response. Are we justified in thinking she also identifies with the bird? That she identifies something in the bird’s reality, its “desire utterly separate from my own” as somehow like her self? That it resembles her existence in the world? That one has desires, separate from others? That one might be held, contained, released? That one might fear being hurt or crushed and might push against the world? The thrill, the terror, of otherness voiced in her account may coexist with the subtle connection of identification, a kind of solidarity with the bird, an intuitive communion. She releases the bird—because she is a young girl and afraid? Afraid of the bird or afraid of her own power? Or could it be an empathic act based on an elusive, spontaneous, intuitive identification? I do not know in this particular instance. What I do know is that people are capable of such acts of identification, and that one of the most obvious yet crucial facts about human beings is that they make the world part of an expanded sense of self, by finding images of themselves in pieces of the world. It seems possible that an empathic identification forms the context of the experience. The human ability to identify self “with” or “as” parts of the world—people, places, religious traditions, countries, events, ways of life, moral conceptions—should not be underestimated. People often grasp parts of the cultural world as if parts of self and then turn around to throw these pieces of themselves back into the world and enter their lives on the, often fragile, footing these provide. Visions of ourselves that take form in our emotions and define us in our self-awareness go through a process of development. We may

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want to change or fear doing so: but as changes in our existence accumulate, we may be forced to keep up somehow, whatever we want. As we struggle to enter the life that is possible now we may also have to struggle to exit the lives that we lived. We run against the limits of the self we are—it won’t take us any farther. However, perhaps it is not so easy to change, either: what and who would I be? Sometimes we have to go beyond self as it is and find a new way to be—or risk the tragedies that go along with failing in this peculiar human leap of faith—but what is there, beyond our own immediate grasp of world and self? We have to transcend what we felt and knew about the world and about ourselves. We have to let go of an adaptation that held us and made our existence possible, that made life what it was, made ourselves what and who we were (Kegan 1982). In the process, we develop and shed emotional skins: the sensitive membranes of feeling and attitude that join us to the world. That we do try to transcend ourselves and sometimes succeed suggests something basic about the human adaptation to existence: we can’t just be anything at all, by will or whim; but we do have some capacity to struggle into new self-configurations. The fact that it is a struggle is as important as the fact that it is possible: human beings are not endlessly adaptable. They often have to struggle to change and quite often fail in this struggle (Kegan 1982); and yet are able to form themselves into more possibilities for engaging life, than a lemur, a leopard, or a komodo dragon.

The Self of the Self Mitchell’s metaphor of birth juxtaposes two aspects of self: who has the crucial experiences and who tumbles out of them? It is the same person with a different vision of self and perhaps with different possibilities. When some experience shifts the terms on which we understand ourselves, it remains our larger existing self that sustains us in this. I go off to college, I spend a week in the wilderness, you get into a car wreck, get a good job, some one in your life dies or suffers, you have a spiritual or moral awakening— all this can happen and shift self-awareness, perhaps even recalibrate the terms on which you or I define existence. Yet we are also the larger self that supports this. It catches us as we fallinto the world.


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What I mean by self, then, is ourselves, whole persons, trying to live. This effort involves self-objectification: we generate visions of ourselves and our lives, hoist these into the world, and try to make them work. Sometimes they do. This is one relation of self to self: the conscious sense of self hatches out of the larger self as it engages life. The relation goes the other way as well. The conscious sense of self helps hoist pieces of the larger self into the world to build a life. It seems crucial to grasp not just this general process, but the specific possibilities of a life. What was there in Mitchell’s life and experience up to that moment that made her, that child on the beach holding a bird in her hand, tumble out glistening and new—as far as her awareness of self goes? The life history matters: it is the way that it matters to the human self, the self that is necessarily living its way across time, which we might want to grasp. Mitchell’s metaphor of birth suggests that something happened in a moment, that it was a movement, a crossing of a threshold of awareness; but undoubtedly the development leading up to the moment when one achieves a new awareness of life and self is a process, a series of baby steps, not quite in conscious focus, that lead by degrees to this new consciousness of self and to the orientation, or possibilities of orientation, toward existence that it bears. Yet Mitchell’s “haunting” experience could represent the larger process, because it was a moment in it. After all, if the bird was a reality, fluttering in her hand, then what was she? The experience poses the question of self. She had to be something in response to the bird’s reality and its struggle, and she had to be something in her response to her own response. In this volume I will explore strong forms of this experience of becoming a question to self, forms associated with strong emotions: Who am I, in this life, in this existence, in terms of the desires and realities of others? As large as the question of self seems, it also takes the most intimate, immediate form, both before and within any culturally elaborated personification of the self. When Mitchell helds the struggling bird in her hand, she held the problem of self in her hand. Here I explore how some people awaken to find that they have become questions to themselves. I show how some experiences are crucial enough to throw people into this state; and explore what they do about it. I get the phrase “becoming a question to themselves” from Hannah Arendt (1958). She gets it from Augustine—“a question have I become

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for myself”—who used it in a religious context. Yet self-reflection only sometimes takes a religious turn. The capacity is inherent in self-awareness. Conscious experience also absorbs and transforms self-reflections generated outside of awareness—and turns around to question these. I doubt that we would have this peculiar capacity if it did not potentially make some difference in how we live. People who become questions to themselves are likely to turn and address their lives—including the deepest, most cultural parts of their lives—in new ways. They have to negotiate whatever clash with existence has thrown them out of whatever synthesis of culture and self has guided them in the task of living. They may be thrown into a state of doubt about how to go on. Whatever their initial orientation— the state of “who they already are”—they may have to reorient themselves to new conditions and possibilities. Becoming a question to self takes several forms, many having to do with social and cultural identities heaped on persons in modern life— class identities and postcolonial identities, ethnic and racial identities, religious identities opposed to other religious identities, gender and generational identities. Yet these identities always preserve, I think, certain basic human elements. Somewhere at the bottom lurks a fugitive human self—someone who feels and strives, desires and remembers, and tries to grasp life. Human beings define self in many ways. I am simply interested in efforts that reflect the most basic pressures of existence: Who am I in this life that I live? Who am I in terms of the life I have not lived but wanted, or lived but not wanted? Who am I, given how other selves treat me? What am I in memory and in imagination? What am I in the face of death, and what am I in terms of whatever capacity I have to define and change myself? Echoing Kenneth Burke, we can envision the self as a “complex individual of many voices”—substitute subjectivity for individual, if you wish—a dynamic subjectivity of parts and possibilities engaged in a process of assembling itself into a response to life. It puts itself together as it puts together fears and hopes, attachments and antagonisms, puts together responses to the quandaries of its own existence, striving to enter life through “those tiny rebirths whereby, in being born to some new condition,” a self is “dying to a past condition . . . development being dialectical, a series of terms in perpetual transformation” (Burke 1969, 381). We might also transmute a line from Shakespeare: a self is not a self that alters not when it alteration finds. Even if, in a human irony, what it seeks in altering is to avoid alteration.


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Other Selves Most of all, though, the self finds alteration in other selves. Questions about self are asked and answered in terms of the experience of other selves. The Brazilian novelist Machado De Assis (1990) strips this fact down to an ironic simplicity: What Aristotle Overlooked: I think that this is metaphysics rather than psychology: Start a ball rolling; it rolls along, comes into contact with another ball, transmits its motion to the other, and the second ball rolls along. Let us call the first ball Marcella; the second, Braz Cubas, and a third, Virgilia. Let us assume that Marcella, having received a fillip from the past, rolled along until it came into contact with Braz Cubas, which, in turn, yielding to the force transmitted to it, began to roll, until it bumped into Virgilia, which had been wholly alien to the first ball; and thus, by the simple transmission of a force, opposite extremes of society come into relationship with each other, and there is something that we may call the Unity of Human Misery. How did Aristotle happen to overlook this principle? (81)

I can imagine many reasons for overlooking so obvious an aspect of human life as the emotional connections that propel our lives in ways not totally under our control. People are not always prepared to accept that they are emotionally dependent on others, or that an encounter with another self can send them spinning off on an altered life course. Yet Machado De Assis is right about the basic fact. In a variety of ways, some of them unexpected, we make a difference in each others’ lives. His analogy, deliberately, ironically, is far too mechanical. Human experience is not a game of pool. Human lives are not reducible to anything as simple as one billiard ball hitting another, and driving a third into the pocket. People have feelings, purposes, and self-awareness. These in fact constitute the medium in which the force of another life can be felt, can be transmitted to self. It is not that people do not exercise self-control; but the process of self-control has to stretch to embrace the shocks, and the possibilities, of life. It is not only Aristotle who overlooks the obvious. We all do, in one way or another. An impresario of self-deprecation, the novelist invites a wry examination of the self-inflation involved in imagining we are completely in control of our lives. He takes delicate aim at certain pretensions; he punctures the illusion that we can live unaffected by our experience of other selves. On the contrary, “a fillip received from the past” can matter very much. He knows the sheer experience of

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human connection make a difference, however insistent some are in believing they are “self-contained.” Human collisions take place, and throw our lives into motion. We encounter another—we are born into a family, we meet whom we meet, develop whatever relationships we can or must—and something happens: our life yields to the force of the encounter, the moral and emotional force of a human connection. What happens may be good, bad, ugly, or beautiful, but it is a collision: our lives are deflected off at some angle, pushed in some different direction. Human contacts carry something from one life to another. It is absorbed in the emotional medium of selfhood. This is inescapable. We are altered in the encounter. Our capacity to feel, to experience, is altered. This is what it means to have “objects” in the sense proposed by psychoanalytic thought: other people impact the work of self. The force of human collisions—the way our experience of other selves set us in motion, the way we yield to the emotional presence of others in our lives, or resist this presence, the way we absorb emotional shocks—bends our lives into felt shapes. Based on the interviews I have conducted or supervised, I do not know what surprises people more: the feelings that happen as another life crosses their life, altering some of the terms of their existence, or the profundity and ambivalence of the attachments they may develop as a consequence. This series of human facts—the links between attachment, emotion, and self-formation—is so fundamental that it is worth restating in less mechanical terms than the novelist uses for his ironies. Charles Lindholm (2001) has put the psychological, existential, substance of it wisely: In truth, human beings everywhere are inevitably and inextricably linked by the shared awareness of the unavoidable onslaught of death, the irresolvable problem of finding meaning in life, and, especially, by the demands and constraints set by equally self-aware persons whose desires and fears are as compelling for them as they are for us. (217)

I am less pessimistic that Machado De Assis; the unities forged in human connection are necessary to human existence. While they can, and often do, produce much misery, they also support the development of the human self. They can enhance whatever capacity for joy in living that people possess. Yet these processes are not to be taken lightly; they can go very wrong. Examining the way that the “demands and constraints” and “desires and fears” may be emotionally constraining,


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and even oppressive or crippling, has to be balanced with a consideration of the way others can support, encourage, and sustain the presence of self in the process of living. If we seek, in one way or another—whether by a process of conscious reflection or by some series of actions whose motivation we don’t fully understand ourselves—to deal with what other people mean to us, because this helps us assemble ourselves into a response to life, it is not with the absolute passivity of billiard balls. If the novelist’s image brings into focus the inescapable human collisions we all experience, the power of human contacts to move us and send us spinning in some direction, what it fails to capture is the emotional significance some of these collisions come to have, and the creativity with which people often respond. As a novelist with an ironic eye for human foibles, perhaps De Assis was well aware of this. After all, he was having his protagonist compare us to billiard balls, life to mechanical collisions. Perhaps his protagonist has his human reasons for depersonalizing human life. He has pain of his own. He is writing, in the novel’s central conceit, after his own death, looking back on a life that held little joy or meaning, and involved more than a little misery. He is, to be precise, the middle ball in his own analogy, the one who unites others in misery. His human collisions have led to disillusionment, bitterness, irony. In fact, the author manages to endow his character with what one review called a “delicate suavity of despair.” Susan Sontag (1990) identifies this depth of pain in the novel, remarking on how the book blends whimsy with misanthropy: “If Bras Cubas is not just another of those repressed, desiccated, pointlessly self-aware . . . narrators who exist only to be seen through by the full blooded reader, it is because of his anger—which is by the end of the book full-out, painful, bitter, upsetting” (xvii). In fact the Lindholm passage quoted earlier could stand as epitaph for the protagonist’s life. In the face of death, he struggles with problems of meaning, as in living he struggled with the meaning of others for him. People do struggle in just these ways. This is existential psychology, not metaphysics. In the balance of this chapter we will see how a young man hangs a question mark over himself in terms of his mother’s mental illness. Benjamin is a solid young man of medium height and build, with short sandy blond hair, brown eyes, and an attentive air about him, twenty-four years old at the time of the interviews. In the interviews, he is by turns anxious and passionate, didactic and doubtful.

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Benjamin, His Mother, and Her Madness As we talk, Benjamin looks anguished, but he is not in pain. He is young and healthy. Nothing is wrong with his body. He has no cuts or wounds. It is not any kind of physical pain that he feels. Yet I have no doubt it is pain he feels, a kind of anguish, shaded by doubt, by perplexity, by sadness. What I see in his face and posture conveys his relationship to his words. He was trying to tell me about his mother. Now he is caught up in the experience that speaking of her involves for him, the feelings it produces. Evidently, judging by his facial expression, some deep and important emotions are involved. He has held on to something and he is trying to release it in our encounter. What is welling up into his conscious awareness are memories, and the feelings attached to these. His mother is a memory. She is not part of his life and has not been since he was a small child. Yet he is capable of having feelings about her, feelings that pull his face into the expression I read as pain and perplexity. The emotions signal something about his experience of her. It is evidently not easy to have these feelings—if there is no physical pain there is some kind of pain. If human emotional capacities evolved to serve the body, to protect and guide it, now they also serve the self, the existential self, the self in its transactions with others, the cultural self, the imagined self. The pain crossing Benjamin’s face has to do with the integrity of his life, not the integrity of his body. His mother is the question mark he hangs over his life. His feelings mark the question “Who am I?” that is provoked by the question, “Who was my mother?” A strong emotion is a strong evaluation (Taylor 1989). It says something strong, something important, about a life. I focus on Benjamin’s feelings because it shows how he is related as a person, as a self, to what he is going to try to tell me: the story of his mother’s mental illness, which he grapples with as an adult, but experienced as a child. So I have to ask what Benjamin was feeling. Can I define it more precisely than “pain”? It was, I have no doubt, a strong emotion; but what, precisely, was it? What manner of pain was it? No doubt psychological pain, like physical pain, comes in varieties; certainly it can be modified by other emotions. How such states coalesce depend on what the emotions are “about”—that is, how feeling


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is fused with particular problems of meaning, questions of identity, or urgencies of existence—as we will see. In Benjamin’s case my best guess is that his face conveyed “anguished doubt,” a doubt that goes to his mother and her behavior and yet bounces back to his experience and sense of self. Benjamin’s face conveyed pain to me, but there was, I think, something else. Was there something ambiguous, blended, in the way he tensed his face, contorted his forehead, worked his eyebrows? What capacity for feeling had he—his organizing sense of his own existence—borrowed from his body and how was he using this to evaluate his life? I did not read anger in his face. I think I would have been able to read anger. Was there a little sadness in Benjamin’s face? It is hard to know. It seems possible. He may have looked sad before he reached this point. Fear? I might have missed fear. I think I missed much. I now suspect that Benjamin’s face may have been contorted with conflicting emotions that richly portrayed his struggle to come to terms with part of his experience. His face may have expressed his feeling more accurately than I could have imagined at the time.

Unlocking the Doors of Perception Benjamin feels that parts of him are missing or if not exactly missing, lack a full integration into his existence, or sense of self. They float there—his interests in writing, his desire to be creative—and he wants to know where they came from and what else they might bring with them into his existence. He wants to explore what he has and what he might have, and use this to know himself and propel himself forward into life. That is the short summary of a project he has set for himself, with his own life as the subject matter. It is the kind of project we might describe as “hyper-reflective.” Taking part in a series of open-ended interviews with a researcher (myself) who has expressed an interest in understanding creative processes is, in a way, simply another angle on the project. Everyday life goes on while the project is pursued. Benjamin lives and goes to school part time in a college near Boston, but grew up near Los Angeles. He works as a janitor, but sees himself as a writer. Recently divorced he has a young child, whom he clearly loves deeply and who forms a foundation for his life—but it is not, overtly, toward his son’s life that he directs his “diagnostic self-awareness,” his sense

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of where his difficulties in understanding his existence lie. He locates them in the past and positions these, tacitly, as sources of self. Yet I wonder, long afterward, if he was not reflecting, tacitly, on the question: what kind of father will I be? I wondered about this later, when I became a father, and something he said leapt out at me: “I pick up this kid and there’s this existential dilemma—what do I do about it?” Wanting to know what he might be as a father, he reflects on his parents—what they were for him. In the immediate past, there is the failure that he experienced in a previous relationship. I think this does organize his reflections on his past—on his mother in particular. He describes this first marriage as a “disaster.” As time went on, we could not get along, I mean, she could not handle like day to day life, and a lot of people can’t and I can’t sometimes, but . . . hers . . . was too much. Little things freaked her out consistently . . . the kid was just too much for her—she was not ready to have a kid, I don’t know how to say it, I mean, she wanted more freedom, she was not ready . . . and then I tried to deal with that and it became, ah, you know, very clear to me . . . that this was just not going to work. Things got progressively worse . . . she’d fly off the handle at the littlest thing . . . she had a very difficult time raising the kid. Ah, I’d be working full time and going to school, trying to make money an’ everything, I’m in the middle of working and really busy, and I’d get these phone calls consistently you know—having tr-troubles with this infant and I and um what can I do, what do you want me to do, leave work?

His distress is palpable. This seems like a classic American dilemma: a young couple forms a family without much social support; when the pressures of raising a child get overwhelming, they blame each other, rather than the social system. In the aftermath of this, Benjamin is trying to repair himself. He does so by trying to return, in his self-reflections, to the sources of self. Self, for him, has various sources—but parents are a “deep” source that goes to the foundation of one’s being. Nurture makes a difference, but “blood” is primordial. In part, then, his sense that something is missing derives from his American model of kinship. What is missing for him is not a father, as it might be for some of those who grew up in the same suburban neighborhoods, whose fathers were away at work and emotionally distant as well, but rather a mother, who was


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in her madness both “away” emotionally and yet an intimate, chaotic presence. I will call his mother’s condition “madness” because we are considering its impact on Benjamin—as a child, he did not think of her as suffering from schizophrenia complicated by depression, drug and alcohol abuse. He may not even have used a word at all to describe her behavior. He simply experienced her. She must have been a mother before she was a mad woman—simply the presence she was in his life. He would have been thrown into a response, and I suspect this involved fear, uncertainty, protest, and incomprehension—all that a child can experience. As an adult, his understanding is that she had delusions and episodes of paranoia. She thought that people were doing bad things to her, remotely, that fluorescent lamps were being used to shrink her spine. Yet she was his mother. This identification involves deep personal and cultural meaning. She brought him into the world. He shared, for a time, her body and wonders, a little, if he might share her madness. She was supposed to nurture him, be there for him. She was there—he thinks she loved him, tried to guide him, and that she somehow inspired him to write. She was too much there in episodes of rage and violence. Later, she was simply gone because his father divorced her and got custody of him and his brothers. For Benjamin, his mother is a mystery. The mystery needs to be explored, because it is a mystery. Benjamin has a keen and curious mind. He would not overlook a mystery that presented itself. Yet there is more to it than this—this is not a mystery he has stumbled on, by chance; given his cultural sense of the origins of personhood, it a mystery in which he is involved, in a deep sense. It speaks, at least potentially, to who he is. He believes that whatever he is or can be has some relationship to his mother: the mystery of his mother’s madness is linked to the mystery of self. These mysteries have, I suspect, a sort of mythological resonance. Where do I come from? A personal mythology of origins can be used to compose a vision of the self. Even if a personal mythos is necessarily ad hoc, and not exactly a sacred narrative, it can be intensely felt. Benjamin explicitly says he feels that finding out about his mother, and writing about her, will help him understand who he is, because he feels that she must have given him something, that some part of himself must reflect her life or being or nature. I want to suggest some of the cultural and psychological dimensions of the way Benjamin strives to know and define self. He has crafted a practice of self knowing out of cultural material available to him.

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Words that Go with the Feelings that Happen All literary, or creative, writing has value to Benjamin, but he sees poetry as the most powerful kind of writing. He says, repeatedly, that poetry possesses the power to “alter perceptions” and to allow a person to “see” reality in different ways. He writes poems for different reasons and occasions, but it has a special role vis-à-vis his mother. That he makes use of poetry to explore or confront his memories of his mother is not surprising. What is interesting is that he uses poetry to try to participate, vicariously, symbolically, in the world of his mentally ill mother. Poetry becomes a kind of surrogate for the altered way of perceiving and knowing the world he associates with his mother. Art and feeling, the whole package of expressive values, form part of a cultural package he is personalizing, making his own—for “creative” is what he wants to be in the world, and creativity is what he wants to make the basis of his life. He wants to be a writer. When Benjamin pursues the origins of self in his family, he is also in pursuit of the origins of creativity, his creativity. He hopes, I suspect, that creativity will be the moral and psychological support for his self and his life, second only to his body. It has, at this moment in his life anyway, when it is more possibility than actuality, great value as he imagines what he might be and wants to be. He wants to understand it, and he wants to have it confirmed that it is really his. What better tool for understanding it—and making it his own—than his creative capacities themselves? This animating of what he is, or at this point in his life hopes he is, capable of doing as a self takes up the question of the origins of these capacities in his family narrative. It is a neat turning of life experience into a life history, a fashioning of a kind of hermeneutic circle in which he finds himself in the text of family life that he composes.

Glimpses of the Family Benjamin has a brother nearly his own age who until recently was involved in music, but has stopped and decided to concentrate on making money. Benjamin and his brother used to play together in a rock band that barely made it out of the garage. Benjamin also has a younger sister involved in dance, and an older brother who was violent toward him when he was a child. He always mentions the artistic interests of his siblings—reflecting both my stated interest in creativity


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and his own. He finds creative talents in all his siblings except for an older brother, who seems to have none, and who is described as having a kind of separate reality. Benjamin has given quite a bit of thought to how he is like and unlike his parents. He feels he is like his father in many ways, but does not necessarily value these perceived similarities. His father he describes as solid, pragmatic, logical, goal-oriented. His father owns a small business and carries on his life with the discipline, caution, and economic orientation that success in a small business requires. Benjamin contrasts the creative bent he sees in himself and his siblings with the utilitarian, rational, economic orientation of their father, who he describes as “highly committed to the work ethic.” As I listen to Benjamin speak, I think that he envisions his father almost as a kind of petite bourgeois, the bearer of instrumental values, focused on money, and envisions himself in contrast, as a bohemian, rebel, and poet, the bearer of expressive values. This is not wrong but too neat; Benjamin makes this contrast, but then confesses that he finds many of his father’s qualities in himself. He does not seem pleased to discover this—he is simply being honest about it to me and to himself. He knows he is in many ways not like his mother, but is drawn to what he sees as her ways of seeing, her ways of knowing the world. Benjamin sees his artistic values as, in part, a rejection of his father’s values; nonetheless, he says, he works at his writing with the same kind of intensity that he sees his father apply to his business. As a conscious source of values and a role model, his father is a dominant figure. He mentions no other significant male influence on him as a child or adolescent. The brothers engaged in fairly extensive acting out and delinquent behavior during heir later school years, especially during junior and senior high school Benjamin says he built up his self-esteem by being a “tough guy.” He beat up people, started fires in trash cans, blew up lockers, and used drugs. Once, in a boys’ home economics class, he fed the principle a meal in which he put dirt and feces. He related this incident with a certain zest. Benjamin sums up his disruptive behavior as his “first taste of, [the] power and [the] popularity you can get by opposing the system. It occurred to me that the way to get popularity was to be a tough guy.” His rejection of authority, of “the system” as he calls it, may be a reaction to the authority or dominance of his father. In any event, he rejects not just the life and values of his father, or the authority of particular authority figures, but modern society as a whole. He rejects

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the dominant politics and the economic system, but he says he wants to take this further. He wants to break loose of the vision of the world imposed by modern culture, he says. Poetry is his tool for “breaking through” into the “something else” that he thinks must exist. Here we have not postmodern indifference, but an expressive sensibility suggestive of the European romantic movement and its aftermath. What gives this a personal twist is that his mother offers a model of that something else, of that altered vision of the world that he seeks. His relationship with his brothers and sister was close, but punctuated by periodic fights. With the exception of a “fantasy world” built up around comic books in collaboration with his brother, and a later period of identification with rock stars that involved writing music, Benjamin reports no creative activity before he began to write poetry. Benjamin’s father and mother were divorced when he was about five. His father later remarried. Benjamin does not have much to say about his stepmother. He says that she did not understand them and tried to impose household chores on them, which they resented. Benjamin’s older brother beat him and his brother. He also forced them to beat each other. “He’d have me and my brother, he’d have one of us hang up by the garage door . . . and have the other one kick him in the balls and if the other one did not do it, you know, he’d just get the shit beat out of him.” I have little doubt, based on the interviews my students and I have done, that such family violence is quite common in the United States, which I think is a fairly violent culture in general. Violence is a problem for the sense of self; it is not surprising that people recall it. Benjamin, however, also relates it to a vision he has developed of other people having “their own realities” or “alternate perceptions” of reality. Benjamin describes his brother: “He’s just so completely bizarre. He drives around in this big white truck, and like drinks beer, and he’d put it down, and let it dribble down the side of his face, and turn around and just look at you and stare at you.” His older brother is one example he gives of someone who acts out of a “different reality” or altered perceptions. Notice how this makes motivation a matter of perception; the brother behaves in conformity with a vision of the world, not because he is trying to manage internal emotions or pressures. There is a cultural element here—part of a model of mind and reality, perhaps—that says people do things because of the way they perceive the world. I suspect this model reflects the legacy of empiricism as it traveled from eighteenth-century philosophy to nineteenth-century psychology to the twentieth-century novel, but that is another book. Here it is perhaps enough to say the


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model leaps over the question of people’s “internal organization” and the pressures to act that such organization may produce. My own view is that people originate purposes in terms of internal dynamics set in motion by emotional experience of other selves. Yet Benjamin’s “perception is reality” theory has, of course, some currency in modern life. He simply makes more out of it. Let’s look at passages of interview transcript that suggest he is grappling with psychological identifications while in the process of incorporating cultural understandings into his project of self-understanding. Naomi Quinn (1992) suggests people may define themselves in terms of their social roles by recruiting from a “cultural repository of complexly interrelated but separable schema available to them” (120). Benjamin is doing so, working with the cultural models and practices available to him, taking from the “pool of possibilities” just those elements that make his project possible, elaborating on these and weaving them together with others. He sets out to explore his mother’s world and the way of seeing the world. I infer that part of his motivation derives from his sense that his self may reflect his mother’s self. Drawing on a cultural image of “the artist,” he equates poetry and her mental illness, taking each as a way of knowing that involve altered perceptions, altered ways of seeing the world. Benjamin says he remembers positive things about her but the memories he reports concern her bizarre ideas and her violence toward his father. “I have memories of my father getting a high chair across his face in the glasses . . . that’s one I remember, I remember a lot of violence, but at the same time I remember her having a very gentle side, of course . . .” To me, the “of course” seemed perfunctory: a softening of a harsh picture, an appeal to conventions of maternal goodness, cultural expectations that must be acknowledged even though the reality rapidly passes into the violent and bizarre. I probably block out more than I remember, in terms of the violent parts—but I can remember some things that were pretty strange. Mostly what I remember is—certain images—that are kind of plain— but still say things, like I have a strong image of a kitchen full of beer cans, and the smell of beer constantly, like, that sits in cans for a couple of days—that smell.

Benjamin describes his mother as existing in an alternative perceptual reality, where she saw and experienced things in ways others do not.

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Subjectivity and Suffering She actually believed that rays were coming out of things, that rays, for instance, were coming out of electrical outlets—rays were coming out and threatening her . . . She wasn’t just thinking that, I mean, she must of seen that, is what I think, I mean, she entered some—where else are rays coming out?

Benjamin believes that the world can be structured and perceived in different ways, and that he can use writing to develop an understanding of these alternate worlds. This is what poetry allows one to do, to construct an “alternate way of thinking.” [My poetry] comes from direct experience—in [the] process of getting to the page a lot of times it gets quite distorted—to the point where it—well it’s an accurate description and it’s a straight story—well, . . . It’s honest, let me say it that way, I’m not making anything up, I might exaggerate—it’s a different way of looking at things—I think that’s what I’m getting at . . . [it is] an alternate way of thinking . . .

He applies this to his mother, trying to get at her alternate way of thinking, or rather her way of perceiving and experiencing. It wasn’t just that she thought this, but she’d get violent about it. She’d accuse my father of being responsible, for having the rays that would shrink her spine, for instance—lights would come down from the ceiling at night and shrink her spine, at one point, one night, she had an iron, you iron clothes with, he was asleep and she just attacked him with it—and he wakes up, and what the hell is going on, and she says, you know, he’s shrinking her spine with rays from the ceiling—so I use the rays as a thing—the first is a weird schizo poem. Another one was a flash, a lot are flashes—a flash of her driving in her . . . four door sedan—and the resemblance of her and Lucille Ball, who was always on the television . . .

Benjamin did not show me these poems. He felt he was not ready to do so. Although the poems themselves would offer insight into his experience, what I want to focus on here is the nature of the project that he has assembled out of the materials of his culture. He is seeking, in the most general sense, to understand aspects of his own existence, which he believes for cultural reasons to go to the sources of his own being or identity. He is also attempting to know another person—his mentally ill mother—who stands to him, culturally and psychologically, as a source of self. He is mobilizing parts of himself that he hopes will help him know her, and in knowing her, will help him


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know himself. His tool for this is language, understood in terms of various cultural theories of language as these apply to the practice of creative writing. In this project, he sometimes seems to be saying that he can approximate the experience he thinks others are having, while at other times he seems to be saying that he can develop an understanding of these states. In either case, however, he has to generate a text—a poem or a narrative—that organizes his understanding, and provides, ideally, a kind of imaginative virtual experience. Writing is thus a means of experiencing/understanding. It serves empathy as well as reason. The ambiguity about whether he can come close to an “experience” of the alternate perceptions of others, like a person absorbed in a story who has managed to identify with its characters, or only “understands” something of these perceptions, like a person reading a difficult text that resists empathy and identification, relates to an ambiguity in the cultural status of texts. In one strain of expressive individualism, growing out of romantic traditions, poetic texts express experience; they are even “epiphanies of being” (Taylor 1989, chapter 23). A poetic text originates in a person and expresses some aspect of his or her being. It has an authenticity of a movement from the “inside, out.” Yet a text is also something that one “reads” and “understands” from the “outside, in.” Related to this, there are those modern theories of language that say language constitutes reality, or at least the perception of reality. Benjamin plays with all these cultural possibilities. He says people have their own realities and alternate perceptions. These originate in, and express, their personal being. Yet these can be “read,” and “understood.” If one develops the right language for exploring the lives and perceptions of others, the reality forming powers of language will give a deeper understanding and bring you closer to other selves. Language—in the privileged form of poetry and inspired narrative—bridges the gap between self and other. It allows the person looking from the “outside, in” to pass part of themselves— their poetic imagination, their empathic feelings—“inside” the world and experience of others. Here, we are dealing with large cultural postulates about “language” and “reality”: ● ●

Language expresses being and constitutes reality. It is possible to reconstitute the language that constitutes the reality of another, the conceptual “vocabulary” that expresses who they are.

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Subjectivity and Suffering ●

By grasping the language that constitutes them, you can know them.

Benjamin does not think this recovery of the language, reality, and perceptions of others, which leads to or provides clues to their originating being, is an exact science. It is more in the nature of poetic approximations done by a kind of trial and error—by pursuing leads and evidences, on the one hand, and by putting one in a state of creative receptivity, on the other. He describes his method, which he applied in researching his mother by examining court documents, as follows: It was novel, in terms of how a writer would look at it—it was a strange experience for me . . . After reading the thing, a poem came out, just shot—you know, occasionally poems just shoot through you really strongly—and this one just shot through—and it became obvious to me that I had to follow what was happening. But I couldn’t sit down and try to construct poems, all I had was my memory, and then there was this data sitting here . . . That one came through, and then like two weeks later another one came through, and then—and they kept doing this whenever they wanted to and they came out almost perfect the first time . . . They came out of nowhere.

His method involves both the collection of data—he examines court documents and other material—and an effort not to impose an order too quickly on the material. In fact, the strategy here seems to be to proceed with a high degree of conscious purpose, but not to follow a conscious plan for constructing the meaning of the material. Rather, he allows his unconscious mind to respond. He experiences the poems as originating somewhere outside his consciousness. Since he here frames his experience of himself in Cartesian terms—as the conscious, thinking subject—the poems seem to come from beyond himself. This quality enhances their overall significance. Benjamin himself remarks on the experience of the poems as arriving from outside himself, and links this up to a metaphor: “Jack Spicer said that a poet’s a radio and, you know, he receives transmissions and then broadcasts them. Of course, Jack Spicer had this thing about angels—so he’d say that angels come and do this.” The radio analogy works as well as any, but the notion that inspiration (as well as madness, rage, and battle fury) derives from something


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beyond the self goes back at least to the Greeks of antiquity and their concepts of divine and demonic possession. Benjamin is working with layers of cultural meaning to fashion a response to his own felt existential predicament. Benjamin constructs an analogy: poetry is treated as a surrogate for mental illness, for his mother’s mode of experiencing. He is trying to create virtual states of self that correspond to his mother’s states. He takes his understanding of poetry—his belief it involves altered perceptions of reality, that it involves priming the creative unconscious (or getting angels to broadcast to you), that it involves receiving messages from beyond the conscious self—applies it to his mother. Her illness involved altered perceptions of reality (she must have really seen that, he says). He feels she actually experienced rays shrinking her spine and messages being broadcast to her. He proposes to grasp this using the analogy of the poet receiving poetic inspiration. In madness as in poetry, he imagines, the self receives visions from sources beyond the self. This analogy was a work-in-progress. It was not meant to be a theory of either mental illness or poetry. Rather, his goal was to understand his mother, to grasp something of her experience. The analogy he constructs to this end minimizes what some of us would see as important difference between poetry and mental illness. His mother seems to have experienced subjective imagery as objective, as “really” happening to her. He knows his imagery is subjective. He does not experience hallucinations or hear “voices.” He cultivates his capacity to receive imagery; it is not violently forced on him. He understands that his project depends on self-control, that it involves a poetic mastery of subjective imagery. I am going beyond what he said, but looking back I feel he viewed his mother’s mental illness as a kind of terrifying muse. It introduced chaos into her life and into his. Poetry represented a kinder, gentler—a healing—muse; one he can, he thinks, use to understand her madness. His seeks not only understanding but also solidarity: he wants to get closer to his mother, by generating empathy through poetic experience. It is to this end that he assembled and personalized cultural conceptions. *

*

*

I heard once from Benjamin after the interviews. He told me he was going to get married and filled me in on some of his plans. He seemed poised, eager, self-confident—a person who had resolved doubts and made up his mind about what he was going to do.

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Notes on the Existential Self I began this chapter with the poet Susan Mitchell speaking about a childhood experience, how she caught a bird one summer on a beach, an experience she kept trying to write about as an adult. The point I was trying to make was that there are experiences that galvanize an emotional response around which a sense of self can coalesce. I wanted to establish that even seemingly small, intimate experiences can leave a mark. Every mark can be repositioned and interrogated to probe the possibilities of existence. They add something to the capacity for knowing self and world. Sometimes they are painful pinpricks or shattering blows, and not the expansion of the sense of the world’s possibility that Mitchell describes. Benjamin is, in effect, in the same situation as Mitchell holding the bird. His experience of his mother was disturbing. It did not damage but did stimulate his capacity to know and to be. Of course the provocation in the two cases has radically different dimensions and proportions. For one thing, it is not as easy to see a mother or father as totally separate from the self. Not, at least, in American culture, where the models of kinship tend to stress these connections. Also, where Mitchell was the master of the moment—her hands held and then released the bird—Benjamin was “held” and “released” by the human world in the form of his family. They sustained him physically and psychologically in the world. Yet they also shocked him, by acting out violently and emotionally toward him and each other. Benjamin in his own way is dealing with one of the central challenges of selfhood—its dependence on and exquisite sensitivity to the often volatile process of human attachment. To put it in very general terms: we let others into our sense of self because we enter the world through them. They form part of us. We reference them in our acts and capabilities, in the way we understand and evaluate ourselves and our lives. Yet we also resist them and push against them, define them as not self, in ways that depend on their presence in self. Benjamin’s experience of his mother’s illness and violence was difficult—it possessed the potential to overwhelm his capacity to cope, whereas Mitchell’s encounter with a bird on the beach was simply inspiring. Yet the experiences have something in common. By comparing them, I don’t mean to diminish the human elements in Benjamin’s experience. Quite the opposite: my thought is that if even an encounter with a bird on a beach can set off the kind of response it did in Mitchell, then we should imagine how much more powerful, and more complicated, human encounters can be, particularly those


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where emotional bonds are involved, and a person’s capacity to enter and sustain his or her life is at stake, as in Benjamin’s case. I think I detect a background of human contact shaping the terms of Mitchell’s response to the bird. What may echo quietly in Mitchell’s experience are matters of Benjamin’s conscious reflections, and he has formed them into a writing project. He is haunted by his experience of another human being. He is trying to come to terms with it. The moral qualities and emotional dimensions of the experience are radically different. Yet the process set in motion may not be wholly different in form. The self appears in its responses to another life. The self appears to others, certainly, through its acts and attitudes, but self is also made palpable to self. Mitchell knows what she did. Benjamin is making himself appear as he gathers memories and finds that he has feelings about them. Yet others appear in these scenes, too. We can speak of emotional response as triggering a process of reflection, as when I feel some emotion and then tell myself a story about it; but I think we might view both response and reflection as different ways of marking up the self, of priming it to register the world in particular ways, to carry past experience into future experience. I appear in my own life and the way I appear in my responses and my reflections, my emotions and my life narrative, is structured back into the capacity to live. Self-appraisal involves the whole person, and so adjustments in a person’s model of self—the model that generates the feelings that inspire the reflections that help build the model as it continues to develop—are not just carried out consciously and deliberately, but intuitively, unconsciously, immediately, with adjustments not just in self-image, but in many other related capacities for knowing, acting, perceiving, and evaluating that might be influenced by notches and marks made on the model of self, twists and folds made in its sense of reality.

Applying Culture Mitchell’s capture and release of the bird has this quality of a private ritual act, one that oriented her to her existence in some way, becoming in her case a source of reflections on human life. Perhaps revisiting it in memory and reflection celebrates her own will and desire, somehow supplemented and enhanced or simply made known by spending a summer catching a bird and then letting it go. I am persuaded by Michael Jackson (2005) that there are ways of registering the self-in-the

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world, of supplementing the human will, that work by symbolic gestures, by ritualization: acts that signify possibilities, purposes, desires, and visions that tacitly place a possible self in a possible world. Revisiting evocative memories can have this almost ritual quality. They remind you of who you are in the world. What I did not examine in reflecting on Mitchell was the activity that she used as an adult to pursue the potential meaning of her experience: writing. With Benjamin we see someone pursuing the potential of writing to address experiences that haunt him. What Charles Taylor (1989) says of the nineteenth century applies in a way to Benjamin: “the life forms of expressive fulfillment and instrumental-rational discipline were partly defined in contrast to each other” and “many people couldn’t confine themselves to one side.” Benjamin cannot confine himself, either. He resists the impersonal by pursuing the personal. He does so for his own reasons and in his own way, but he is not alone in doing so. His personal project coalesces in terms of a history of cultural responses to the depersonalization of modern life. In fact, he makes us the tools of the “revolt against the Enlightenment” and applies them to his concerns. We should see his “project” in terms of values that derive from Romantic movements that had some of their impetus in reactions to the cognitive values of the Enlightenment—science, reason, utility, and so on (the kind of values Benjamin associates with his father). Romantic values that stress personal experience and self-affirmation, authenticity, and, of course, “poetry,” could be set against the economic disciplines of capitalism and the more impersonal, rational– instrumental values associated with the Enlightenment. This sounds very distant from Benjamin, but his experience in fact registers something like this split. He identifies his father with rational–instrumental discipline, his mother with expressive fulfillment: his objects are aligned with vast cultural movements. Benjamin responds to and creates internal imperatives. Yet some of these derive from cultural models deployed in a cultural milieu, although he does not respond in lockstep, a marionette. He seeks the personal through the cultural. He assembles materials into a project of knowing, in which self is in a sense the medium of knowing, but also part of what is at stake. It is a deliberate project of self-knowing. Yet it is also a poignant effort to know someone else, in relation to himself, by assembling a method for understanding her, this woman, his mother, who was not there for him, and in not being there, has become a strong and mysterious presence in his life, in his imagination.


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It is important to grasp the quality of memory involved. In a discussion of Proust, Samuel Beckett (2006 [1931]) distinguishes—no doubt too sharply—between two kinds of memory. One kind of memory lines up with expressive fulfillment while the other has a more instrumental role: “voluntary memory” keeps track of the ordinary details of life; but Beckett indicates memory of this kind neither contributes to the creative process nor offers expressive fulfillment. In fact, it is an obstacle to this. All it does is give access to more or less neutral information about self or world that can be accessed volitionally—so if I ask you for your phone number you can give it to me. The other kind of memory is not volitional—at least not directly—but the self can be primed to have such memories, which are vivid and evocative. Based on Benjamin’s case, it seems plausible to speculate that such memory experiences give access to the self, signal its predicaments in ways that have evocative force. This kind of memory involves subjective imagery and episodes of feeling, which may provoke self-reflection. Ordinary memory is a matter of habit, the application of a concordance to the text of an individual’s past, as Beckett puts it. Neither vivid nor evocative, it supplies uniformity and predictability to existence. It endlessly copies a kind of schematic of the self; Beckett calls it “the most necessary, wholesome and monotonous plagiarism—the plagiarism of oneself.” Necessary indeed: what if the brain could not recall the simple facts of personal identity, knowledge of what you do or where you live, the objects you use, your likes and dislikes, the emotional marks that key you into your existence—all the “locating” data of a person’s life and existence? What if it did not maintain memories of recent events, plans, wants, and “imaginary events that we intend to make happen, or expect to happen,” did not provide what Damasio (1994) calls a “memory of the possible future” (239)? If this knowledge was not refreshed, copied from one moment to the next, life could not be what it is. This is useful; but the more evocative kind of memory confronts us with our existence in a different, more vivid and forceful way. If the human brain endlessly refreshes a schematic identity for each of us, perhaps it also makes it possible for human beings to evoke some of the basic values of the self in the form of this second kind of memory or subjective imagery. But why have a dual system—two qualitatively distinct kinds of memory?2 Perhaps evocative memory disrupts habit— suggests new possibilities or prompts a search for new possibilities of dealing with the world. Certain emotional memories may hang questions over the self, its history and efforts to be, and provoke conscious reflection on these.

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Evocative memory can supply subjective images that fascinate the self, but from our point of view require interpretation. It does not mean much to us that Benjamin has “a flash” of how his mother resembled Lucille Ball, who was on television all the time; but for Benjamin such images may express the whole problem she poses for him. His mother looked like the canonical comic of the reruns, Lucille Ball: the mystery of a violent love, the unfathomable, conveyed in the commonplace. What is the implication? For Benjamin she could not mean what she seemed to mean. How could she be violent or crazy? She looked like Lucille Ball. Yet how could she be like Lucille Ball: she was not as safe as the comic figure she resembled in his “flash of memory.” For our part, how do we understand the force of such memories? What seems to us banal or inscrutable can seem almost infinitely meaningful to someone else—if it is, for them, the product of this involuntary memory, a memory that in some way symbolizes and evokes not schematic identity, but a sense of self that brings into focus the key values of a life, that evaluates self in these terms, and relates self to the most emotionally significant figures in its life. Perhaps human processes of attachment involve a kind of memory distinct from other cognitive memory processes. We might consider the possibility that object or attachment memories involve a quality of communion, the tangible elements of which are produced “by some immediate and fortuitous act of perception,” as Beckett suggests. Such memories might provide some basis for knowing and evaluating self. This in turn would imply certain possibilities of development; in Benjamin’s case, I think he seeks to define himself by evaluating the terms and possibilities of his identification with, yet separateness from, his mother. Perhaps emotional memories provide flexibility by breaking into habit and routine—making it possible for someone to take a new perspective on their own existence. Memory that fills consciousness with feeling and images can provoke a process of self-reflection. 3 Habit is after all not always adaptive. Living requires some flexibility, some capacity to restructure self. How is the self as a living system to jar itself out of habit, even out of what anthropologists call “habitus,” the weight of the past carried by cultural and personal history, and into reflection that probes possibility, and so brings with it some possibility of transformation? Memory flashes charged with feeling, subjective imagery of the kind Benjamin experienced, may provoke just such passages of self-reflection, and lead to efforts to wrestle with culture, society, and personal history.


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The Creative Turn: Psychodynamic Speculations If evocative memory teases with images hoisted from the deeper sources of self, this leads to the question of psychodynamics: how is Benjamin’s conscious project related to his own deeper sources? What motivates him to fashion cultural possibilities into an identity project? I find some insights in the clinical art of the psychoanalytic therapist D.W. Winnicott (1989). He reported a case that bears a family resemblance to Benjamin’s. We should be careful, in making this comparison, not to attribute any pathology to Benjamin. He fears that he might be susceptible to his mother’s condition but I could discern no sign of any psychiatric condition. He was not manifesting clinical symptoms; he was crafting a creative project to engage his memories. We might begin by understanding his project as the mastery of a trauma. These terms have no real meaning, I suspect, whenever they are disconnected from the work of self. It is only be recovering something of the work of self that one can see what “trauma” and “mastery” might be for some particular person, in terms of their life history and cultural setting. Benjamin’s project has something to do with mastering, in terms of his own psychological organization and existential orientation, what for him were wrenching emotional experiences. What we might want to know is how the experiential chaos of his mother’s madness and violence register in his work of self, what place the feelings he felt, absorbed in emotional schema, have in his efforts to cope with his life? In brief, how is Benjamin crafting a possible self out of a traumatized self? We do not, however, have enough data to do more than plausibly speculate; but we can gain some insight, perhaps, by probing the parallels with Winnicott’s analysis of a boy dealing with his mother’ madness. Benjamin is using writing to “take possession” of his mother’s madness. He attempts this, not in a psychological vacuum, but in terms of self-experience; he is “possessed” by his mother’s madness only in the sense that he has to cope with it and the feelings it produces. It preoccupies him consciously; he experiences memories and subjective imagery related to it, and it may be a factor in the basic formations of his selfhood insofar as it was a factor in his overall psychological development. However, he is not dealing with some definite manifestation—a set of clinical symptoms—of his mother’s madness here but rather with existential concerns and questions of identity that are consciously, and culturally, perceived in terms of self.

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His experience of his mother forms something of the matrix of his selfhood, but as a relatively “ego alien” factor. She is not self. Yet, in some sense, she is also self. Existentially, one might see a certain affinity for chaotic, disruptive activity and relationships as symptomatic of this “possession.” The choice of a wife who he then experiences as chaotic, as disruptive, is one expression of this. Benjamin himself wryly notes the parallel. One might speculate—he does speculate—that he arranges some things to be “out of control.” Not everything; there are countervailing identifications. Of course, life provides plenty of material for these resonances; chaos and disruption are a very ordinary part of existence. It is the way life events are registered that suggests underlying motive. We can in shorthand say that his project involves mastery of trauma, but it is more precise to say that it involves taking possession of his mother’s madness as this possesses him. It is, we might think, both the madness and the mother that “possess” him. He seeks to possess them, to make them his own. This distinction is important: both madness and mother qualify as ego alien and as source of self. This gives structure to psychological processes, ultimately to his engagement with cultural materials in the sort of creative “play” that appropriates cultural possibility in an existential setting. If he is taking possession of something that possesses him, this is not a mechanical trauma, but a living element of his experience that involves the fear, hurt, and damage to “structure” that we associate with the notion of trauma. It is, however, not the fear and hurt alone that move him to feel what he feels, or to grasp cultural possibilities in an effort to master his experience. Rather, he is struggling with a felt potential of the self associated with the way he is identified with his mother’s madness and his mother herself. He wonders if he could go mad and if his mother is the source of his creativity. What he struggles with are the problems of meaning his mother and her madness represent, and the feelings that brings such problems to life—he is baffled by her behavior and wants to understand it; he needs to engage it not just because he has been “traumatized” by violent and bizarre behavior, but because the arbitrariness and injustice of her acts of violence are a problem of meaning. Her transformation from a nurturing to a violent figure, equally, poses a problem of identity. Benjamin attempts to take possession of the inner and outer expression of this: the chaos of his own life, the vicissitudes of his own feelings of identity.


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He feels he might be like his mother; in fact, he wants, up to a point, to be like his mother. He wants to make her altered perceptions his own; this is because they give a more extreme and yet “purer” expression of what already lies in him (e.g., the rage he felt at his spouse and brother). If so, then what he attempts to master is not merely the trauma, but the identification that goes along with it, and the emergence in his own life and experience of the madness of his mother, but transformed into creative potential. One can play a game of self where one escalates hostilities against identifications until they become “other”—split off from the self, isolated and rejected. The original identification is converted into the ego alien. Benjamin does not do this. He takes an identification that has ego alien features and attempts to integrate it. The goal is to have it take form in his poetry; it is a matter, in Winnicott’s (1989) phrase, of taking possession of it, and not allowing it to take possession of him. Benjamin has internalized his mother in two ways—as a positive identification and as an ego alien factor in his own existence. My intuition is that there are parallels with a case that Winnicott describes, of a young boy who acts out his mother’s madness for the therapist, after doing a series of drawings that suggest he is giving symbolic expression to the disturbing qualities of her behavior and trying to “be nothing” or “not there” in relationship to what he has represented. Winnicott writes that the boy then “suddenly . . . goes mad, but it is more true to say he is possessed by madness.” It is no longer him, but . . . a mad person that I watch—one who is completely unpredictable . . . Then the mother’s madness passes and the boy begins to want to use his mother as a mother who cares for him and whom he needs in order to get home. The boy leaves my house in a happy state. He is confident in this mother whose going mad has now been shown to me, whose going mad has become objectified and limited by its own boundaries. [He] can now become something instead of nothing and he can play again, even play at absurdities which, being part of his own madness, are not traumatic so much as comical and laughable. (381–382)

The boy exhibits the mother’s chaotic behavior for the therapist, yet he also seeks to be nowhere and nothing in relationship to it. The boy is a kind of artful dodger, seeking because he is afraid to represent the mother’s madness in symbols and symptoms, but trying also to evade or escape it. Benjamin, in contrast, as an adult does not so much “go mad” as seek to do so, in the surrogate form of creative experience, in a quest to find himself and his creative powers in the

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aesthetic potential he associates with his mother’s states of mind. He does not try to escape the experience by being “nothing” (although one wonders what he did as a child) but to appropriate his mother’s madness, to make it a method, and to define what this makes him. If he was ever an “artful dodger” of family trauma, Benjamin is now “artfully engaged”: not possessed by, but taking possession of, his mother’s madness. These cases suggest one formation of other in self. The boy manifests the mother’s madness because it is threatening. Benjamin, for his part, stands consciously receptive, awaiting “messages” from somewhere else, from the “otherness” in the self. Subsitute “poetic and creative” for comical and laughable; Benjamin is making use of his mother’s impact on him, his sense of her presence, made emotionally significant by her absence, to be creative. His mother has become his muse—the source of inspiration, because the source of self. Deeply personal, this may also resonate with a cultural mythos. Long after I drafted this chapter, I saw the movie The Hours. One of three narrative lines involves a mother who is, if not “mad,” certainly alienated from her suburban life. Unable to find herself in the life scripted for her, she flees suburbia, leaving her child behind. In the story, he grows up to be a poet who is dying. The movie shows an image of him as a child, protesting his mother’s departure, juxtaposed with an image of him grown up. Perhaps there is a cultural mythos here that complements the personal mythos. If Benjamin is personalizing cultural themes, it is because he can feel the connection. For him the space of personal loss, the mystery of the other-as-self, does become the space of creativity. Benjamin’s work of self makes connections that have cultural resonance, that are perhaps made possible in cultural terms.

Coda: Among Foreign Walls Other selves, by making self feel, become part of self. Each of us carries a community of these with us, our objects in psychoanalytic parlance (Bollans 1987), as part of our capacity for self-appraisal and engagement with life. Benjamin has his mother as one. What is the meaning of an object? What is the feeling of an object? Freud once spoke of what happens when “the shadow of the object fell upon the ego”—yet I think we can see that the shadow of the self falls on the object as well. Benjamin has goals, and he has a life. He brings these to his effort to define himself in terms of his mother. The


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self’s experience, it goals and orientations, influence the attitude taken toward other selves and toward psychological objects. People define themselves in terms of their objects—this is a life-long process. In defining self they use objects in creative ways to propel themselves into their own lives. We might echo an ancient poet: Take to heart what may be learned from Oedipus: If someone with a sharp axe hacks off the bough of a great oak tree, and spoils its handsome shape; although its fruit has failed yet it can give an account of itself if it comes later to a winter fire or if its rests on the pillars of some palace and does a sad task among foreign walls, when there is nothing left in the place it came from. Pindar

We recycle other selves to orient and define ourselves. If Benjamin’s mother was once an object of fear, she becomes an object of desire. Where she once offered chaos, she comes to signify creativity. He transmutes her from a figure of danger into a source of his own creativity. Benjamin’s effort to “take to heart” the lessons of his mother’s life and illness is also a process of self-reflection—he consciously examines memories and tries to imagine what these mean for him. He does this at a moment in his life in which he is facing some of the challenges of adulthood in his culture. His reflections—and more than these, his feelings, the emotions he experiences—mark an effort to envision his life in the world, his existence, to define who he is and how he might enter the world. *

*

*

Only the loss of an object, I fear, may persuade some people of their significance as a feature of human selfhood. Cultural values of independence may make it harder to see how our orientation to existence, our capacity to enter life, rests on sharing lives with other people. What is it like to lose an object? In the next chapter, we will see how such a loss can threaten to overwhelm and fragment a person. In this case, emotional ambivalence about a loved and hated object is so intense and morally fraught that a self is thrown into disarray, into a profound state of disorientation.


Chapter Two What a Tangled Web She Weaves: An American Widow Helen, a widow, has to struggle with her possible selves. Planting herself solidly in a chair, she looks at me with a stony face, and then begins to tell her story. Appearing sad and tearful—but somehow also managing to look angry—she tells me how her husband died six months ago, from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, Lou Gehrig’s disease, a degenerative nerve disease. It was not a good death. She was not prepared for it, she says. He went more suddenly than expected. Now she finds herself struggling with feelings and experiences that she is not prepared to cope with. She wonders why she is still feeling sad; it has been all of six months. Her mask seems to slip. She looks afraid. “I sometimes think he is still there in the bedroom,” she says. “Am I crazy?” She tells me she is depressed; doctors and psychologists have diagnosed her as depressed. The label—without necessarily being wrong, either as a self-report or as a clinical judgment—might suggest a narrower range of emotions than she actually experienced. She often looks angry when she talks about being sad and tearful for many hours each day. She looks angry when she talks about psychologists; she feels they planted ideas of suicide in her head. Since I see her as looking angry, I wonder what she might be angry about, and who it goes to: herself, for being weak or needing help; to her husband, for leaving her by dying; or does it apply to some abstraction, the universe, life, god, for what has happened to her, for the wrong turn her life has taken? Primed to focus on “depression,” I fail to see for a while that depression and the life stories and emotion that I thought went along with depression and bereavement formed only part of her story. Fear counts as much or more: here is a woman who shuts herself up in a haunted house. Her husband is not just “still there.” He wants to get her, she says. Hesitantly, she tells me that she sometimes thinks she smells like blood.

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How might we understand Helen’s experiencing and suffering? Her “self” is not something added on to her existence—an essence lurking in the hidden grottos of her mind, or a disembodied concept in some purely cultural system. Such notions detach selfhood from its grounding in human existence and present it as something somehow wholly separate from the life a person has lived. Helen’s case is relatively clear; most people with a little psychological insight can work out the basic psychodynamics of her distress. They can see how its shape emerges from the contours of recent American social and cultural history, and how she personalizes culture as she tries to cope. Her pain highlights some key phenomena of selfhood: she struggles to define self, questioning what she feels; she evaluates and acts on self. One sees the activation of psychological systems in terms of a process of self-appraisal. Since the psychodynamic phenomena proper—her guilt and self-reproach, her shifting conceptions of herself, her attachments and identifications—form a relatively clear pattern crystallized around Helen’s threatened sense of self, we can use them to guide us in understanding what a theory of selfhood must do. In the case of Helen, it must offer insight into the processes that make it possible for a person to feel haunted by the dead, to feel guilt and self-loathing, to smell metaphorical blood, to want to die. It must be able to deal with human attachment and the kind of moral and emotional ambivalences that grow up around these. Helen’s husband is the focus of her ambivalence—he died, leaving her alone, but when alive he helped define her existence and sense of self. Her being-in-the-world was interwoven with his—and this interweaving was often difficult. What she feels herself to be now grows out of her experience of the life she shared with him, with the conflict and tension that this sharing involved. Her process of living, her past, her fumbling toward a future cannot be separated from this. In this spirit, the present chapter explores aspects of Helen’s life. This is very much an American life. It is the story of a woman of a certain generation, belonging to the modest middle class. Aspects of cultural life (including social class) are drawn deeply and often painfully into her experience; but her story is also about how she confronts the human condition. It is about the way she reaches the limits of her power to endure, and what she does when she arrives at this point. The death of her husband sets in motion a life crisis: it is an emotional crisis and a crisis of identity. Although complicated emotionally, this crisis takes the form of a developmental transformation. The death of her husband collapses

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her world and throws into doubt the way she has participated in this world. This means she is in doubt, because it is as herself—as an organization of capacities, motives, goals, attitudes, all mobilized as part of, and active in, her experience of being alive—that she enters into her life. What is in jeopardy is her organization as a person and her sense of self. She experiences this in the first person, as a self—it is not happening to someone else, but descends on her and fills her world. It is the deepest kind of existential crisis. Her whole process of living, her basic ability to integrate herself into life, is affected. What she is to herself is thrown into a state of upheaval, doubt, and confusion. She has become a question to herself, a deeply existential question. She wonders if she is a good person; she experiences guilt, doubt, shame. She must regroup and reform herself. On one level, then, parts of her “die” when her husband dies. The loss of her husband entails a loss of self, and she must mourn both. In the face of this double loss, she must regenerate her sense of self. For her, however, there are deeper issues of self-evaluation, nested within each other. She must struggle with the feeling that she abandoned and betrayed her husband, while also coping with feelings that she abandoned her own capacity to live. She feels that she betrayed herself by giving up what she wanted for herself. She gave it up to make a life with a person whom she fails in the end after he has long failed her. In her self-appraisal, this renders meaningless her sacrifice of self. It makes her loyalty false and meaningless. Her bereavement is a profound loss, but also a profound crisis of identity. She mourns lost agency, and the possible selves this agency could have made for her. She evaluates herself and her actions based on her Polish–Catholic background, upbringing, and on her life experiences with others. She engages in a project of self-punishment that leaves her desperate. She then seeks to escape what she is doing to herself. By examining her predicament, we gain some sense of what the death and rebirth of self is like for an ordinary person.

What a Tangled Web She Spins Clifford Geertz (1973) offered us the image of culture as a web of meanings—living in terms of cultural meaning constitutes an inescapable fact of human existence. In the case of Helen, we might imagine that her “web of meanings” has turned against her, that her life has become a web of problems, each strand of meaning leaving

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her either confused and baffled, or guilty and depressed, or angry and afraid, and so on. Increasingly, as she struggles with powerful emotions, there is no “meaning” in the meanings that once sustained her. She is cut off from the source of self in a cultural conception of the good person; she struggles rather helplessly in a web of self-reproach, self-subversion, and selfloathing. She confronts self as a kind of anti-self. She is many things she never wanted to be, and was never prepared for psychologically. If this begins with certain inevitabilities that her cultural background deals with only thinly, such as aging and ill health, the indifference of others, the death of significant others, and the whole process of mourning, it embraces as well central episodes of her personal narrative. These episodes form the cognitive-emotional base not for the kind of self-understanding that sustains a person in everyday life, but rather for the sort of self-judgments that breaks through and dissolves such understandings, leaving a person struggling with new and unacceptable convictions about self. In her personification of self, Helen sees herself as bad, as weak, as inadequate, and worse—and in a state of shock she takes this new conception of herself to be her “true” self. After all, she can profile it against episodes of her own life experience, and can find echoes of it in the attitudes others take toward her. She experienced intense psychological pain as a result of this moral epiphany, and this bleeds into her experience of the world. She stands alone, condemned by herself. Helen went to an outpatient psychiatric clinic because she wanted “someone to talk to” about her husband’s death. He had been sixtyfive, preparing to retire from his job as a custodian when he was diagnosed. Symptoms appeared in February, he was diagnosed in June, and he died in December. Helen had hoped and expected that he would live longer, based on her understanding that some people with the disease lived for several years. Perhaps this was partly denial, but in any event she reports herself unprepared for the death. They had been married thirty-nine years. She reports being moved by the funeral service, but did not go to the burial. In our first interview she speaks of two main psychological states. She says she feels guilt concerning her husband’s death. She is troubled by the fact they had an argument just before he died. She also feels she did not get to “say good bye” since he died suddenly while she was asleep. Besides guilt she reports feeling overwhelming anxiety. She worries about her health, and she does have medical conditions that threaten

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it. She has a thyroid condition and arthritis. She is going to have a colonoscopy. She says she is afraid she is going to die. However, she also reports feeling anxious over “small things.” For example, she said that getting on the bus and making the trip to the clinic made her very nervous. She takes the bus, however, because she is afraid to drive. The fact that she is nervous and fearful about such things makes her more worried and distressed. She experiences both specific anxieties (about her health and appearance, finances and work) and more diffuse feelings of anxiety that seem to drift through her existence, attaching to a variety of things (such as getting on or off the bus). Helen’s anxiety reflects specific concerns, and yet also registers a background of general anxiety and distress. Indeed, there may be an extra edge or intensity or obsessive quality to her anxieties about her body and health based on displacement from other sources. I suspect the ultimate source of much of her anxiety is the sense she has that her life as a whole is failing, and that the locus of this failure—its primary cause and its struggling, helpless victim—is her self. The anxiety, the fear, reflects the loss of her husband, but indirectly; it is the loss of her sense of reality and the collapse of her sense of self that inspire anxiety. One of the first things that someone trying to understand her experience of herself observes is that she now lives in a state of fear. The odd thing is that in the early interviews she did not look obviously sad. She looked angry, and she looked fearful. Later she found some peace, and I saw her face relax into what I read as an acceptance of her experience as she came to terms with it. Only then did she seem to me to look sad. This came with time. Remember that when I first saw her, she looked angry—in a solid, determined way. As we continued our conversations, it became clear to me that she had some reason to feel angry at life. In time, I began to think that she was also angry at being afraid and at feeling helpless, and afraid of being afraid. What then was the source of the emotional and existential states that produced these second-order emotions?

His Death and Thoughts of Her Death Her husband has asked her to quit her job to help take care of him. She did this, but feels she did not do a good job of it. “I do not,” she reports, “have the personality for it.” Tension had developed between them; she felt overwhelmed, and he was dying and feeling he was not

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getting enough care. He had become bedridden and Helen says she found this very hard to handle. Just before he died he was being very demanding, and finally she snapped back at him. His lungs collapsed and he died the next morning. She had gone to sleep, and her daughter had taken over watching him. He daughter came and woke her up to tell her that he had “gone.” She called the hospice program, and they told her to call a mortuary. Her son, who had worked as a paramedic, came over and verified that he was dead. “Why,” she asks, “is life worth living?” She says that when her regular doctor prescribed an antidepressant, he warned her that she could overdose on it. She says that planted a thought in her mind. Later she told me that seeing a mortuary sign set off suicidal thoughts. She had experienced such thoughts earlier in her life, during a period when she was drinking heavily and experiencing discord in her marriage. She says she started drinking heavily to spite her husband, who was also drinking heavily, and it went out of control for a while. She says she has never actually attempted suicide. When not having suicidal thoughts, she sometimes simply feels like dying. Yet she reports a fear of death. She thinks she will die from her health problems. She fears she might die in a car wreck. She has given up driving. Eyes widening, she confides her fear that her deceased husband will kill her. “Ted is going to get me,” she says.

The Feeling of What Happens is Where She is Trapped The phrase “the feeling of what happens” has been adapted from Damasio’s book The Feeling of What Happens (1999). I want the phrase to evoke the role of feeling in defining self. The feelings that happen as life happens (think of Benjamin) have the power to shape our orientation to existence. People as embodied, emotional beings literally feel their way into, and through, life, and organize themselves in terms of the ebb and flow of feeling. Feelings awaken the self to the urgencies and possibilities of existence. This has its human ironies. Helen does not want to feel what she feels. It is not just that she cannot make sense of her feelings. It is not simply that she feels bad. Rather, these feelings are filling her world, remaking her existence. She is not sure she can survive this reshaping of her world. Either the feelings do not belong there, or she does not. Her conscious self has not caught up with the response her whole

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being—the feeling, adapting organism she is—is making to her lifeexperience (Kegan 1982). What is plain from Helen’s account is how punishing and threatening her distress is. She no longer leaves her house very much. She stays home, sleepless, but unwilling to get up and do anything. She says that if she did not have to get up to urinate, she might not get up at all. She does not sleep, however. She stays in bed because she does “not want to face things.” The list of complaints goes on: she gets stomach cramps and does not want to eat during the day because she thinks stomach problems will hamper her activities; she gorges herself at night. Guilt feelings erupt over minor matters. Fear strikes her from many points. The most intense of her fears is the fear that Ted might be in the house. In the midst of this, she is shocked to find herself feeling sexual desires. She confides: “I’m looking at people in a way that I haven’t in years.” She had not been that interested in sex with her husband, and he had always been the one who initiated it. She finds her present feelings disturbing. They don’t fit her body image: “I can see what I look like,” she says, referring to her weight and age. She says her emotions are too strong since it has been six months since her husband died. When I suggest that is not long enough to recover, she tells me others urge her to “move on.” Buffeted and troubled by all these emotions, she says she does not cry. She seems vaguely troubled by this, but also presents it as a sign of strength or character. In fact the problem seems to be that she does “tear up,” but never cries in a way she imagines might offer cathartic relief. She gets weepy-eyed, she says, but never really lets go. She wants to cry, but does not do it. She attributes this to values she was taught in her family, summed up in the phrase “big girls don’t cry.” Crying is a sign of weakness: something to be embarrassed about, something to hide. She attends church services wearing sunglasses to hide her weepy eyes. What is this all about? Why does she feel so much anxiety and distress? Why is she so unable to control these “feelings”?

Helen as Herself, I: The Pliable Medium of Pain Sitting across from Helen, trying to listen attentively, I do not have much time to reflect on how unreal many of the grand theories of contemporary thought seem when one is trying to understand a single

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human being. What I have to deal with is the case she is making about the kind of person she is. She is presenting an account of self that she wants heard. She needs to hear it herself. She bears a history, both social and personal. In this history, she has been shaped culturally. To not see her as expressing cultural values would be doing an injustice to her. Moreover, her history and her experience of cultural life followed a trajectory through class, family, and culture. She began her marriage in the 1950s—the era shaped her orientation to self. Yet I want to stress that she speaks as herself, speaking out of her experience, and so out of her position in society, but always in terms of her existential presence in this position. She speaks as well out of a body of experience (literally, a body of experience) reflecting her bonds with other selves. Vincent Colapietro (1989) puts it this way: “The human subject is not a disembodied cogito but an embodied speaker, not an insurmountably private consciousness contingently attached to a body but an inescapably expressive consciousness necessarily embodied in some medium, first and foremost in the exquisitely pliable medium of the human organism” (41). In short, Helen feels; her self-consciousness is incarnate in a feeling body. Her feelings capture her sense of her existential predicament, and the flow of her feelings helps shape her efforts to live. What Helen feels is pain. What she speaks out of is this pain. The first step in understanding her is to appreciate her suffering. Helen, embodied, a human organism, finds herself an exquisitely pliable medium for suffering. Her body is failing her—bringing the pain of arthritis and the indignity and anxiety of medical procedures. The cultural evaluation of her body as old and fat brings her shame. Relationships fail her, too—she has lost her husband, whatever he meant to her, after thirty-nine years of struggle. Her family, she finds, withdraws from her. No one wants her, she feels, and she is left alone. To understand Helen we need to pile up the details of her pain and imagine what it is like. She lives in a world of pain. Worse, the ultimate source of her pain is herself. The pain that troubles her most does not even emanate from her failing body: it is her feeling that she is a bad person. Here perhaps we find a strain of American moral individualism. How does it play out?

Her Place in the Social World She attended a support group for a while, but says she did not benefit from it. What others said about how they loved and cared for their

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spouses increased her feeling that she was an inadequate caregiver and exacerbated the guilt she feels about her husband’s death. She lives with her youngest daughter in a house she owns in a suburb of Boston. She has two other married daughters and a married son who lives in another city. She says she cannot talk to her children about her feelings. She thinks they do not want her to talk about their father’s death. She feels the family was held together by her husband and has started to drift apart with his death. The children don’t come over at times she expects them to, when, she insists, they would have come when her husband was alive. She had been a junior high school teacher and administrator, but took a year’s leave of absence when he got sick. Helen experiences this as a loss—she went, she says, from being “boss” to being a “caregiver” and felt she was inadequate at this. Caregiver is what she calls it—perhaps it just a convention she picked up somewhere, in the support group or elsewhere, but it suggests some lack of emotional connection to her husband. It as if she distances herself, slightly, from the immediate pain and passion of being a caring self; she imagines a role that she had to play, and evaluates herself in the role. The theme is not pain, but inadequacy. Inadequacy, and the whole slight shift of perception, is perhaps less—painful—than pain. In fact, she has many reasons to feel emotionally disconnected from her husband, based on his behavior and the contradictions of the “culture of intimacy” that strained their relationship. This compounded her uncertainty about her role in his dying. I think her role in it seemed too indefinite; she would have liked a clearer job description. As a life transition, there is something to her characterization of her new role as a “demotion.” Becoming a caregiver in the first place was difficult. She went from a position of relative authority and autonomy in the workplace to take up a domestic role, placed herself in the position of a menial, laboring at low-level tasks. Such, I think, was the feeling she had about giving up her job. She felt this before she came to see herself as a failure as a caregiver. Yet for her the task of caring for her husband is a duty, a response to a crisis, and a test of character. How she handles it matters. For what would she be if she did it badly? In her mind, caring for her sick spouse constitutes a moral obligation the marital bond brings with it, not something to be avoided as an onerous task for which one is unsuited by temperament. Moreover, it is, or is supposed to be, an act of love. And yet, she feels she does it badly. Worse, she feels she does not want to do it. She cannot cope with it. Here she is a failure. Then the failure has fatal results. It kills Ted.

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The cultural equivocations that lurk beneath the larger moral problem posed by her failure are worth noting. The notion that “caregiving” amounts to little more than menial labor is not Helen’s alone, one imagines, but rather more or less accurately registers the second-class status that “caring” is assigned in the wider culture. For her, it is as if a forced retirement or an abrupt economic downturn has forced her out of a good job into a bad one. She experiences the emotions typical of such events. For an American whose sense of self is wedded to work, it would be a blow quite apart from everything else. This is especially true since her life history, as we’ll see later, suggests her life has long centered on work—work that defines the self in terms of productivity and autonomy, public recognition and financial reward. In fact, the long shadow of the work ethic of capitalism falls over her life. To be a good person one must be productive and autonomous; taking care of others is a domestic virtue. Helen’s feelings accurately register this, I suspect. Caring is a virtue, but it is a leavening, not the whole substance of a good life. It is hard for her to sacrifice the primary virtues of her life, which she fought for in the course of her life history. She tries, but she does it badly, in her judgment. Her husband dies, she feels, not of his fatal disease, but because of her failure. In the aftermath, she can look neither to success at work nor success at caring to establish her adequacy, worth, or goodness.

More Down than Up: Life History in the Psychological Present No “life history” offers a literal recounting of events. When people recount their own life history they present the self as a protagonist and as an object of contemplation. Life narratives are self narratives: they interpret the past in terms of the present, what happened then in terms of what one feels now. Memory, we know, interprets, often wildly. One can expect that such narratives will select from, or add to, the past what in some fashion fits the “feeling of now,” the moods and motivations of the present moment. Life stories are revealing rather than objective: responsive to what concerns people. Virtually the last thing you would expect is for people to spontaneously convert their own first-person experience into a third-person account (although the slight depersonalization involved in Helen evaluating herself “in” a caring role rather than “as” a caring self should

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alert us to the defensive possibility of her doing so). What people typically seek are relevancies to life and self, where “relevant” reflects experience, in the present. These “relevancies” often present cultural conceptions in terms of personal experience. For Helen, social class has this kind of relevancy. It is intimately involved with the intimate politics of family life. In her perception, you can be “up” or “down” in the class system; this exerts evaluative pressure on her sense of self. She has had to struggle with being down in the sense of “downwardly mobile,” and less “successful” than her siblings. She feels deprived, down—it is a relative deprivation, but one she feels keenly. For her, class has to do with anxiety about not having: not having consumer goods, not having the freedom to pursue her interests, not having prestige, not having her family’s approval. Ted’s death revives concerns about not having enough, and about the stigma of not having enough, about not being good enough. When young, coming out of the Depression, through World War II and the postwar years, her family had been poor. Her mother had worked for three dollars a day. Her father was unemployed for a while, then on what Helen described as “welfare,” and finally identified as the depression era Works Project Administration. Her family was Polish–Catholic. She attributes some of her tendency to feel guilt to the Catholic Church. She confesses she was a bigot when young, an anti-Semite. “I was raised to hate Jews. I was taught that they killed Jesus.” She was taught, she says, that she should “spit on Jews.” She says she got over this in high school, when she had Jewish friends. She spends quite a lot of time talking about this. In fact she spends enough time on it that one gets a sense that it somehow really matters to her, in a way that is not remote from her present psychological predicament. Her family wanted, she says, for her to become a dressmaker or designer. Notice the up and down in the alternative posed: she could be a seamstress, tailoring for others, down in the work hierarchy, a mere laborer, or she could be the person in charge, the designer. The term dressmaker neatly elides the difference, and offers a petite bourgeois alternative, the hope of having your own shop. She tried it for a year, she says, but did not like it. She wanted to be a nurse but her mother felt that was “below” her. World War II broke out and Helen decided to join. She was nineteen and she thought the uniforms were exciting. Her parents, however, disapproved and resisted her desire in various ways. Her mother reconciled herself to it, eventually, but her father did not. He

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refused to talk to her for a long time. She never got to say good bye when she entered the service. She liked being in the military. She was a driver; she found driving large trucks exciting. When she talks of this, her mood lifts. She speaks with mild pleasure and excitement, as if reliving the moment in a small way. Her enthusiasm about this period of her life contrasts rather sharply with her attitude toward her present, and much of the past. She says her marriage after the war was a series of shocks. She left the service, met and married Ted, soon had two children, and felt trapped. There was no one to help her, she says. She missed the satisfaction of having a job. Her husband used a small inheritance from his father to finance and then eventually pay off the mortgage on a modest house in a modest suburb, of the kind that blurred the distinction between “middle class” and “working class.” She felt far from her family in Baltimore. Her husband showed a controlling side after marriage that she had not seen before. Maybe, she thought, it was brought out by the house. He refused to let her hang any paintings on the walls of the house. He was afraid of the nail holes. He also refused to buy a washing machine for the house. He made her go to a Laundromat. This was the middle of the 1950s, when consumer culture was getting a new hold on the nation. Not having appliances seemed wrong to her. It also showed that he did not care about her. Her husband had been a machinist. Job insecurity in his industry led him to become a custodian. She felt badly about this. It was “a step down.” She sees her husband’s family as “family oriented,” and not as concerned with money or success as her own family. Her sisters are more financially successful than she is. One has offered to pay for Helen’s daughter’s education, doling out money a few hundred dollars at a time. She has set conditions on the gift: the daughter may not work while going to school, and may not marry. Helen says this makes her feel like a “poor relative.” She resents as an intrusion the constant questions about her daughter’s academic progress. Helen’s mother and her sisters always showered her with gifts. She felt ambivalent about this generosity, since it was proof that she was less successful than they were. Her mother didn’t have a lot of money but “knew how to save.” “I wish she had taught me that,” she says, wryly.

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Her husband resented the way her sisters and mother gave her gifts. It implied he was an inadequate provider. This led to arguments. Her family “looked down” on him as “lower class.” She had “married down.” Marriage was not what she expected it to be. She thought she could shape her husband, “make him something.” Now she says, “I didn’t know he had ideas of his own.” She laughs. They were not able to talk effectively about their issues. Helen has an evaluation of the kind of conversational partner her husband was: both too silent, and too critical. Ted, she says, did not talk much except when he got drunk. Yet he “preached” at her a lot. He criticized her when he “felt down,” had problems at work, or after a “few drinks.” There was a period when both of them were drinking. He hit her, she says, sometimes, but she hit back. She says that she dished it out as well as received it. She presents herself as tough. She picked up a chair once, she says, and hit him with it. As she describes this, she gestures, and I have an impression that she is making herself expansive, filling space, gesturing in a way that is meant to convey toughness, aggression, assertion. She makes sure I know that she defended herself, that she was not supine. I listened—I imagine I nodded. I did not explore this in the way it deserved. It seems to me now that I made an elementary mistake. Focused on the reality of grief, did I let the possibility of domestic abuse slip by in our conversations? I should have explored this more deeply. I wonder now if she was finding a way to tell me this happened without making herself appear to be a victim. I noted the report and thought it contributed to the anger she felt at her husband, and that this complicated her grieving. I got the ambivalence about Ted—the anger and resentment were palpable—but I missed, I suspect, the problem of agency involved in all this. She was, after all, telling me that she was a violent person. Letting me know this, however, was linked with her letting me know she was the victim of violence, at least during some part of their marriage. What is it like to go from being repressed and constrained, subject to violence and harsh words, to being an agent? Her guilt expresses ambivalence about Ted, but also about her own powers and capacities as an agent—which include a capacity for violence and aggression. Based on what is known about domestic violence, we are entitled to wonder if the violence was in fact symmetrical in the way she suggested. She may, in fact, have received more than she dished out. Now I wonder—was she beaten until she bled? Did she smell her own blood on herself?

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It would make a difference, one would think, complicating her guilt and her grief. She says the conflict settled down after many years. Listening to her, I got the impression that they wore each other down, rather than really resolving their problems or making peace with each other. She says she misses the arguments with her husband. She says wryly, smiling just a little: “I don’t even have someone to fight with.” I take the smile and the wryness to be a good sign: a little bit of hardearned distance, suggesting a capacity to come to terms with painful experience.

The Emotional Self: What It Means to Drive a Car She gave up driving during her husband’s illness. She explains that her husband was not used to being driven by someone else. He would criticize her driving. This made her angry. But she did not feel she could “get mad” at him since he was sick and dying. After his death, she tried to drive again. She got very nervous, and then panicked. She could not see behind her and her hands quivered. She says her daughter encouraged her not to drive. Her daughter said she might have an accident and “hurt someone.” Maybe, the daughter told her she would kill someone. At this point in the interview, Helen breaks into tears, and then begins sobbing. She says she feels she killed him. She says she did not take good care of him. She was not a good caregiver. The connection between driving and killing seems too simple, yet Helen’s emotional responses suggest this identification does have significance. Her husband’s criticisms and rebukes are now perhaps psychologically true for her in a way they were not in the past. With his death she has to struggle internally—as she has throughout the marriage, but not more intensely—with his concept of her. It is not just the criticism of her driving; it is all the years of criticism. What if he was right? She falls into what she imagines is, experiences as, his perspective on her. She has a vision of herself as bad, dangerous, and inadequate. She has to deal with what he was for her by dealing with what she was for him. She has to do so in terms of what she is for herself. Here we should recall that not all women drove cars when she was young,

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and that driving had meaning for her as a symbol of her independence. So giving it up has meaning, too—it is a loss of autonomy. It is, in the context of her life, one more episode of having autonomy taken from her by Ted.

Other Feelings Helen feels unwanted. No one calls her about a job. No one calls her about anything. I ask: “How do you feel about being alone?” She responds: “I don’t like it. It scares me—I can hear every creak in the house.” Weekends and holidays are lonely, frightening. Yet when relatives come, they are “too much.” When she goes to visit someone, they are boring or irrelevant. Contradicting her earlier statement that she does not cry much, she says that on some Sundays she has crying jags. The family does not talk much, she says. Helen is afraid she will get “preaching” and “recriminations” if she talks about her feelings. She says that she was always the listener in her family. When she tried to talk herself, she says, people always thought she was “bitching” or “complaining.” She says cannot remember her husband’s face anymore. This distresses her. So her daughter had her put a photo out. Yet she was disturbed by the photo, too, but without being able to say why. Yet she feels her husband is a presence in the house. When a lamp fell over, she thought Ted did it. She feels he’s in the bedroom, at night, sometimes. She looks fearful as she says, “I don’t believe in ghosts.” She is quite disturbed by her feelings that “he’s there.” It frightens her. Her daughter (the one who lives with her) also feels her father is in the house. Note the various kinds of feelings she reports. She feels unwanted and does not like it—a feeling that evaluates the world’s relationship to her followed up by a feeling that evaluates the feeling, still in the context of appraising, of struggling with her relationship to her world. “Feeling” has this wavelike quality, and cannot be simply parsed into discrete stand-alone emotions, although the feelings involve emotions of various kinds. We see this in her fear that Ted is in the house. What some would term a “primary appraisal” of her relationship with her world breaks into awareness, in the experience that Ted is in the house and the fear this arouses. This experience is then interpreted and evaluated in her

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fear that she is “crazy.” The feeling is not fear, pure and simple. It is the feeling that Ted is in the house, and the feeling of fear this provokes, and the feeling she is going crazy, and the fear that this provokes. She would not fear if she did not feel. It is not “existentially valid” to maintain that she “cognizes” or “imagines” Ted in the house and then feels an emotion. She feels what she imagines. To present feeling as secondary to the experience—as if a “primitive” reaction to cognitive constructions—seems wrong, for many of her cognitive constructions are reactions to what she feels. There is no point at which she is a Cartesian self—I think therefore I am—and not a feeling self. To try to establish the priority of the cognitive (envisioned as separate from the feeling process) is just wiggling words into place in ways that will obscure the phenomena of feeling, and the theoretical problems it poses—but alas, Descartes and his cognitive revolution still haunts psychology and other fields (Damasio 1994). Here, a necessary connection exists between “thinking about Ted” or “remembering Ted” and “feeling Ted is in the house.” You and I, or even people who knew him well, could do the former without ever experiencing the latter. Something mediates the connection—let us, for now, simply say it is some aspect of Helen’s “self process.” It is the felt quality of his “presence” that gives the experience its power to provoke fear. All feelings may involve “thoughts,” conceptual propositions looped through quite varied framings and constructions, cognitive and cultural. Many feelings may involve images, memories, and meanings—Ted in the house, Ted hates me, Ted is dead—but all this becomes integrated into the flow of feeling.

Self-Evaluation Helen feels like a failure. She describes herself as mediocre. She says she’d come to a realization that she “couldn’t live in a rainbow”—that she was mediocre and would have to accept this. She wonders why life is worth living. She goes to art classes as part of her effort to force herself to bet out; but thinks her own works not worthwhile. She thought her drawings were bad. She could not bring herself to hang them up with those of other students: “No talent,” she says. Later, however, after looking at other students works she told me she thought hers were no better or worse. I suspect she is mourning for her own life chances. This is complicated, however, by the ironies of her process of mourning. Her husband

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would not let her hang paintings; now she can’t bring herself to put her own up. I suspect her conviction of mediocrity reflects years of belittling by her husband, which she had internalized but also discounted; but the belittling words she has internalized form an internal discourse now strengthened by the way she identifies with, and tries to hold on to, Ted.

Feelings, Attachment, and Self Helen loves her grandchildren but feels her husband was closer to them, warmer, and that they responded to that warmth. It is a restatement of something she has said before: her husband rejected her, but bonded with others. She was left out, in the cold. One day her granddaughter says to her—“Why don’t you go away so grandpa can come back?” Helen says to me, “Well, I’m sorry, but I’m here.” She is tearful, but I think I detect something—something I take as a possible sign of strength or acceptance—in her as she tells me this. It may be that I read a flash of irritation, which I took to be an appropriate defense of the self, or the way her remark plants her in the world, and announces by implication, “And I am going to stay here.” Audiences I have told Helen’s story to recognize something poignant in the way her granddaughter asks her to go away. For many middleclass Americans, the incident transgresses an expectation about the “normal” relationship a granddaughter and grandmother should have, and implies a special quality of depersonalization: one’s existence is less than another’s, in the evaluation of a third. Moreover, the granddaughter’s question carries with it, for Helen, the danger of sincerity. Helen fears that the whole family feels the way her granddaughter does. She thinks they won’t say it—or even admit it to themselves— but nonetheless share the sentiment. She feels—in what I take to be one of those wavelike appraisals of her existential situation, in which one feeling follows close on another—that she is losing them, “losing everything.” She grieves for a world and a self, not just a husband.

The Strangeness of Feeling We can, and do, empathize with Helen’s feelings, and even with those of her family. But why does she feel anything at all about what is happening to her? How does she feel what she feels? How is it that we have any capacity to feel anything about what she feels?

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We are so familiar with emotions that we don’t fully appreciate how strange they are. Why should there be any suffering associated with loss at all? It is a good question because we have little reason to ask it in everyday life. We observe and experience grief, for example, participate in rituals of mourning and remembrance, and so on. We know the death of someone can cause distress in the living. Our bodies do not respond to the death of another in the way they respond to a wound or an infection. Our lives may not even be significantly disordered by the death of someone else; yet we register the death with feelings. We are misled by analogies with pain—the death of another inflicts no direct physical pain on us. Grief is a bodily experience, yet there is no physical stimulus to the body that produces it: no wound, cut, burn, laceration. Amputees can experience pain in limbs they no longer have; the pain exists in phantom limbs, which exist only in a model that the brain maintains. Perhaps grief is like that—a subjective experience generated from a model. But what is the model a model of—and for? Notice how peculiar the analogy is. In grief, the “arm” or “leg” that feels “pain” is a phantom from the beginning. It exists only by virtue of human attachments. Grief is felt for others who in some fashion had a role in the life of self, who provided for, even if only symbolically and even if only negatively, the existence of the self in the world. We could argue that human beings develop a model of and for self to represent and to help constitute and maintain their efforts to live; this forms a space of personal existence, but one saturated with the experience and meaning of others. Grief exists in terms of this model of self and world. The model is not “cognitive” in a classic sense—a set of discursive ideas or mental representations of some sort. Cognitive judgments are part of the emotional process (Nussbaum 2001; Parish 1994); Helen knows Ted is dead, she knows her world has changed, she judges herself to be a bad person; but these cognitive judgments take the form of feelings. However and wherever these feelings are organized by and in the brain, the brain projects these into the model of self and world it maintains. One can argue too that it is the existential, the experienced, history of attachment to others that shapes this projection of feeling into the model of self that each of us, in part, “is.” Notice that I do not say nurtured, or provided for the flourishing of the self, even though this might be the most adaptive or ideal form of the relationship. We know human beings often form attachments with those who do not nurture, but rather “put down” a person with words or acts, or engage in acts of abuse and violence.

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Like pain, grief exists in the brain and can be felt by the body, but it is generated by the model of self and other, as relational pair, which the mind (or brain) maintains. Ted is not there, interacting with Helen; she struggles subjectively with her experience of him, as formulated in her mind. Perhaps this gives us a context for understanding Helen. Her problems multiply and radiate, subjectively. She loses Ted and she fears she will lose others, that she will “lose everything,” that no one wants her, that she is a failure, and so on—her pain sometimes seems almost total. It registers not only her loss of Ted, but the loss of the possibilities of her own life. Her grief is only part of her pain. There is also guilt.

Guilt Helen feels guilt over minor matters; she herself says they are minor. One day on the way to an interview with me she could not get off the bus because the bus driver had pulled up near a mail box. She had to ask the driver to move the bus, and she felt guilty about this. She may also have felt ashamed of her body, that it was too “fat” to squeeze by the mailbox. Family relations also involve guilt feelings. She reports she feels guilty for not babysitting for her married daughter. She felt guilty when she did not buy her other daughter something she wanted. More diffusely, she feels guilty for the way she raised them, for not “caring” or “nurturing” them enough, for feeling “trapped” by them. Helen herself thinks this guilt is spilling over from the guilt she feels about her husband. The real basis of her guilt, in her own mind, is for not having been a good caregiver to her husband. She repeats this point every time she comes in. Finally, she gets to the crux of this guilt, the moment that holds it in its purest form, the moment of the greatest wrong. Just before his death, her husband accuses her of being selfish, of thinking of no one except herself. He needed and wanted, she says, a lot of help. Sometimes it got to be “too much.” Sometimes she would sit in the kitchen and ignore his cries. “Too much”—she repeats. That is when he accused her of only thinking of herself. She says she felt he was a very honest person. So now she wonders if this is true. What kind of person is she? She wonders, too, if he had always thought this. If he did, why did he stay with her? She sobs.

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Earlier in the session, with what seemed to me a peculiar, strained expression on her face, she had said “I smell bad.” Leaning a little forward toward me, her face now contorted, she whispers, “Sometimes I think I smell like blood.”

Getting to the Crux I try to imagine what this is like and how it fits into her experience. What she feels when she tells me this is, I think, fear. Her face is contorted in fear. I wonder if this fear registers both the uncanny quality of the experience—she thinks she smells like blood but there is no blood on her, no blood on her body—and a deeper fear, a kind of moral horror. For like many people who hear me present the story of Helen’s distress, I think her experience of smelling like blood registers a profound sense of guilt. People readily interpret Helen’s experience of smelling like blood as symbolizing guilt. Sometimes they associate the blood with Shakespeare’s Lady Macbeth: “Out damned spot” and “Here’s the smell of the blood still.” I had a more anthropological association; the Cheyenne believe killers have a smell to them. If we then ask, who does she think she killed or irreparably harmed, the obvious answer seems the most plausible. She feels she killed Ted. We can interpret her powerful emotional experiences as reflecting this feeling. How and why does she feel this, and what follows from it? She thinks she smells like blood. “Blood” here stands halfway between symptom and symbol. It is a sign of distress and expresses the psychic conflict generated by her struggle with Ted and with herself. In this sense, it is motivated. At the same time, it has a kind of transparency, an intelligibility to others, that one associates with the concept of a symbol as a vehicle for shared meaning. Obeyesekere (1990) writes that “A symbol and a symptom contain both motive and meaning, but whereas a symptom is under the domination of a motive, a symbol is under the rule of meaning” (12). Helen’s experience of smelling like blood contains both motive and meaning—insofar as “motive” is dominant, we might believe this is a symptom that draws symbolism to it, giving us access to her experience and self-evaluation in a way more obscure symptoms would not. As a sign of her distress, it registers her existential situation: she feels she smells like blood not simply because the cultural order supplies it as a “rule of meaning,” but because it fits her self-evaluation. It is integrated into a model of self. Symptom or symbol, the meaning

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for her relates to her own actions and her evaluation of self. The meaning does not just float in the air. I believe it is anchored in a kind of inwardness, a remembering and reliving of scenes in which she took part, against which she figuratively, emotionally, profiles herself, in terms of which she evaluates herself. Smelling like blood seems, then, like a token of guilt. It is her way of getting herself to grasp the nature and significance of her predicament. As such it is a venture in reflexivity: she is inviting herself to understand, reflect, judge, and come to terms with her own acts. She is making herself go through this process. This gets felt; it takes emotional and sensory form. Moreover, her self-evaluation threatens her identity in two of its central aspects: her sense of herself as a good person, and her adequacy as a person. Losing these Helen feels depersonalized. Her embodied, moral, selfjudgment takes charge of her “being-in-the-world,” if we want to use that phrase, and her emotional and imaginative capacities in particular. She uses these to condemn herself. Recall that just before his death, she had a scene with her husband. It was at a point when he needed and wanted a lot of help. Sometimes, she says, it got to be too much. Too much is a phrase she uses quite frequently. She tells me that sometimes she would sit in the kitchen and ignore his cries. This was one such occasion; she sat in the kitchen and listened to him beg and demand, and finally accuse her of being selfish, of thinking only of herself. In her conversations with me, she says she feels guilty because she neglected her husband, and this caused her death. We are entitled, however, to speculate about what she thought and experienced sitting in the kitchen, listening. It seems plausible that she might have felt angry at him. It seems plausible that she might have wished he was dead. If so, this experience would explain why she thinks of herself as smelling like blood. She may, in some way, not just believe what she says, that her neglect killed her husband. Rather, she experiences herself as having killed him with a murderous wish. From her perspective—the perspective of some part of her—she killed him with her rage, a rage that grew out of years of conflict. Yet she loved him and had stayed with him for thirty-nine years. There was an enduring attachment. So perhaps her most basic question about herself, as one psychologist put it, is: what kind of monster am I? One can hardly help but put this together with the fear that “Ted is going to get her.” If she killed him, he is going to seek revenge. Here we have one of the cases where human senses are taken over by some “inner” imperative to generate a virtual experience; of all the

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senses that her “conscience,” the power of self-judgment, could activate to condemn the self, the sense of smell might be seen as among the most powerful. Words of self-condemnation, like words in general, are potentially evanescent and superficial; smell is connected to the world as it is, a patent sign of real things. To smell like blood declares that a state of moral corruption—the identity of a murderer, or monster—exists in her body and self.1 We can find some secondary support for this interpretation in Helen’s concept of her insurance money as “blood money.” She spends some of it on her daughters, but hesitates to spend it on herself. She says “Ted died for it.” Interpretation: Gender and class are fault lines for Helen’s crisis— they are in fact central to the upheaval she experiences—but they enter it through her sense of self. What she experiences is her sense of her failure as a human being. She is not the kind of person she thinks she must be. This judgment is, of course, deeply cultural in some ways (it depends on cultural conception of the good person) but it takes psychodynamic form—it involves psychological and emotional agency. We can usefully ask some simple questions: why does she feel so bad? Why is she punishing herself? We see here a crisis of some basic kind; her symptoms are causing her great distress. Shaken by her experiences, she has to readdress the question of what kind of person she is. What values does she embody, what has her husband’s death and dying shown her about herself? Did she do what a person in her role ought to do? In light of this, what is she like, fundamentally and really? In terms of the values she embodies, and the way she participates in moral relations with others, she feels she didn’t treat her husband right. She didn’t do the right thing. She could not given him the care he needed and deserved: it was too much for her. She feels she’s a moral failure. Related to this, she feels she is a failure in a role that is part of her identity, but one that she is ambivalent about. She feels she was not a “good caregiver”—her phrase—and that she didn’t do, couldn’t do, what a person in that role ought to do. She felt she was not a competent agent. She could not do what she was supposed to do. She says she always felt more competent and more valued in the world of work that she had to give up to take care of her dying spouse. (There is a background of gender issues here: she started working during World War II, and always resisted pressure not to work outside the home.) Her sacrifice of her job didn’t even mean anything because, she feels, she didn’t do a good job. Her sense of failure is virtually total.

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Finally, this sense of failure lead to the question of what she is like, what inherent characteristics she possesses. She said that she did not have “the personality” for the job of taking care of the sick. But before we consider this, let’s back up and look at what she said about the circumstances of her husband’s death. This couple had a history of marital discord. She says he always “preached” and criticized her. She always felt he restricted her, and wouldn’t let do what she wanted. He would not let her buy things for the house; she says she always resented this. That she has grounds, at least, for ambivalence seems clear. As his illness progressed, he became incapable of taking care of himself. He was confined to bed or a chair and needed constant attention. Just before he died, he was being very demanding, and she snapped back angrily at him. Before this was resolved, his lungs collapsed and he died that night while she was asleep. It would not be surprising if she felt angry at him, even if she tried to suppress it because she felt she could not attack a sick and dying man; and it would not be surprising if the anger she felt then activated somatic memories of other times when she was angry at being frustrated, belittled, and abused by his words. “Losing it,” a whole history of rage could flow into her experience of herself at this moment: a great rage, a murderous wish. I’m sure you see where this is headed. There is a surface, conscious conflict—she believes she was a bad caregiver, that she didn’t do the right thing, that she was inadequate and a failure, and that her husband died prematurely as a result of her failures. Beneath this lies a deeper level of conflict, perhaps unconscious in part, that we can plausibly speculate about. She wanted him to die. He died. She blames herself. Her struggle with the question, what kind of person am I, what am I like, goes deep, and has a desperation to it. What is at stake is whether she deserves to live (suicide is a thought) and whether she can live as the kind of person she now postulates she is: overtly, a neglectful, selfish person, incapable of caring for others; tacitly or unconsciously, a killer with blood on her hands, a monster. I think her struggle with this question, and the way the question’s very existence shatters her concept of herself as a good, moral person, was reflected in some of the life-history material she divulged. Before she disclosed her feeling that she had killed her husband, she spent a long time talking about how she had been an anti-Semite when she was young, how she had spit on Jews, how she had learned this from others, and how she had overcome it, later, when she had Jewish

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friends. She was vague about most other aspects of her childhood, but seemed highly motivated to speak of this. My speculation is that discussing it allowed her to assemble a kind of “story line” that would carry her through her current distress: yes, I was a monster, I have been a monster, but there is hope that I can be something else. The burden of guilt was transferred to self-understandings that suggest she can survive and transcend the moral state she is in, that she may be a monster now but she need not always be a monster. What she attempts to do is to define the way she treated her husband, the way she failed in the role she had assumed, and the emotions she felt, not as naturally defining of self, not as inherent in her, but as responses to a difficult and overwhelming situation. We could find more of this if we had time to sift through the case data, but I would like to move on.

Deconstructing Helen (Oversimplified) What was Helen doing to herself? To shift the question into terms of the psyche: how were psychological systems mobilized in a way that produced an effect on her sense of self and her capacity to live? Case material gives you a sense of how the psyche and culture has a life attached to it. Cases suggest how the “systems” grab hold of that life and define or explore its significance for self. These responses to the circumstances and experiences of life can generate waves of self-experiences (generated within the psyche) that can overwhelm or alter a person. Helen had experienced a loss that threatened self and challenged her capacities to know and be in several significant ways; these can be located in the systems of the psyche. Table 2.1 presents the points in terms of her experiences following the death of her husband. Part of her (the struggling ego, the part that wants help, that wishes to survive) resists her self-condemnation and seeks an escape. This part of her pursues reasons to live and to get better. This involves identity revival, a struggle to deal with her current crisis in terms of the past. She sifts through the possibilities the past represents, holding onto whatever reasons she can find for going on with life, now. In fact, we can see parallels between her present crisis and the part of her past that places her in the worst light in her own mind. For she was once caught up in the anti-Semitism that was part, she says, of her own community. She seems to suggest that “I was an anti-Semite—a moral monster—until high school when I got over it because I had

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Helen’s Experiences Following the Death of her Husband

Modes of suffering

Helen’s reactions and conclusions

Her identity loss and contradictions

Not a good caregiver Had her husband always thought of her as selfish: was she that?

Her bafflement and truth

She did not understand what was happening to her She knew she had wanted him dead

Her identity

In agony and fear, she says, “I smell like blood” I am a killer

Attachment to her husband (Ted cycled into the superego. Assimilated to parents? She has a history of parting on bad terms.)

Experience of loss Object haunted Ted is going to get me

Bad conscience

What does a murderer deserve? Not freedom, maybe not life Killer should be disarmed, imprisoned, punished— maybe even put to death Disarm the killer—don’t drive Imprison her—agoraphobia Punish her—guilt, self-reproach, thoughts of suicide

Jewish friends.” Why does she revive this episode from her past? Perhaps because it supplies a recovery theme: I was evil before but I got better with help from some of my friends. Lying beneath this theme, however, may be a deeper, darker connection to her past. Perhaps she reviews her past, her anti-Semitism, to find answers to the question she has become for herself: what kind of a monster am I? Imagine that the answer she finds to her question is—“A Jew.” It is a disquieting possibility for her and for us because it confronts us with the horrifying history of anti-Semitism—and here we have a human being struggling with her small part of this history. The possibility is that she is reviving her anti-Semitism, not to apply it to other human beings, as she once did, but to apply it to herself. It was terrible the first time around—she threw stones at human beings—and it is terrible this time. If this is what is going on in her mind, it may, however, offer insight. We have to ask: what would arriving at just this answer to her existential question mean to her and how would she, in her mind, get to such an answer? If she makes this connection—and we have only the

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material I have presented to suggest that she might—we would have to ask what is involved for her in having such an identification, and what it might be for her to examine it in the context of her present crisis. Much would depend on whether she thought of Jews as innocent or as guilty of the “crime” of “killing Jesus”—the traditional “blood libel” directed at Jews—and if this review of the past somehow involves reviving the emotional meaning of anti-Semitism in parallel, or in concert with, her struggle to define herself as guilty or innocent of the crime of killing her husband. My best guess here is that she sees Jews as guilty and as innocent, as unforgiven and as forgiven, as deserving hatred and not deserving it, in ways that reflect her guilt, her self-punishment, and her desire to escape the torment she feels. If her overcoming of anti-Semitism suggests salvation or redemption, some way out of her present crisis, perhaps it does so because she can mobilize the conceptual structure of her former anti-Semitism to define herself in these multiple, ambivalent ways. What I would suggest is that she finds in her former hatred of Jews a parallel to her judgment of herself as a kind of monster: an analogy that she can feel. She identifies herself as like the Jews in several conflicting ways. It is not just that she was an anti-Semite and then stopped being one—as if it were somehow only this part of her past that has emotional salience in her current crisis. Yet before this, she was an anti-Semite, pure and simple, who listened to an anti-Semitic priest and went out to attack and revile Jews. It seems to me this could be revived and relived, too, although on altered terms. It fits the current case in the rough and ready way human analogies do. What I would suggest is that in her present crisis she revives feeling of justified hatred as well as the thought that she stopped being such a hateful person. When she was young, she felt justified in reviling and abusing others who were condemned for shedding the blood of Jesus. She thought Jews killed Jesus; that they deserved to be hated and punished. Now she revives this part of her experience in a complicated way, to express something about herself. Here we have a cultural schema—the idea that the Jews killed Jesus. Helen identifies with the terms of the schema in more than one way. In her mind, the Jews killed Jesus; she killed her husband. They shed blood; she shed blood. They do not deserve to be forgiven; she does not deserve to be forgiven. Teetering on this thought—the identification that expresses her self-loathing—is the thought that they did not deserve to be hated and punished. Perched precariously on top of this thought, as it were, is the thought that she stopped being a monster once before.

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We might see this as an expression of her ambivalence about herself. Here she has a schema, one she knows and has experienced, with which to express some of her ambivalence to herself. She does so by making a double identification with the Jews she once despised and attacked, but who forgave her or at least accepted her after her change of heart. In this double identification, she makes use of the most hateful and the most hopeful elements of this passage in her life. In her mind, she is an anti-Semite and a Jew (not just a reformed ex-antiSemite): she hates and is hated. They are guilty (she validates her selfhatred); they are innocent (is it possible that she could be redeemed?). In this, they are like her, and she is like them. Part of the identification is directed at the thought that they did not deserve the hatred directed at them; they were not guilty, but innocent. The other part of her identification is directed at the thought that they did kill Jesus (as she killed her husband) and they deserve the hatred directed at them (as she deserves to be hated, as she hates herself). In other words, part of this structure of identifications intensifies her self-loathing; the other part offers a slight hope of a way out. What goes deepest, I suspect, what bears the most pain, is the thought that they are guilty and deserve punishment, and that she is guilty and deserves punishment. Through this she works out, or tries to work out, her sense of self in two related, but opposite ways. One part of this has to do with the fact that she is no longer an anti-Semite. She no longer feels justified in her hatred of Jews. She is being victimized in the way they were—but by herself. This is wrong; it should stop. She is victim and transgressor, and also judge of the wrongness of the transgression. Yet this “overcoming” does not really overcome— not, at least, in a final sense. She is able to mobilize the feeling the Jews did not deserve to be hated; but she also in a way revives the feeling that they deserved to be hated: this permits her to hate herself. In this sense her compulsion to speak of her anti-Semitism is an intensification of her self-loathing. My intuition is that this intensification may help her “break though” to a different perspective on self; but it is difficult to see what the mechanism of this is, unless we postulate the body/brain can sometimes reach a kind of climax of intensity that allows them to clear “somatic markers” and “emotional loads” at some point. This would correspond to Kegan’s (1982) insight into the creation of cognitive objects: that what was experienced as part of self becomes other than self, and in doing so comes to have a different role in self-experience than it did up to that point. Here it is as if obsession can sometimes move a person into a developmental transition—but it is a risky strategy.

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In any event, it makes a certain psychological sense to think that Helen gives her past anti-Semitism an interpretation that speaks to her burden of guilt: “I am a husband killer. Jews are Jesus-killers. I am a husband killer. I killed Jesus too. Jews have survived. I survive. They are forgiven/unforgiven; I am forgiven/unforgiven; they survive. I survive.” That is, at some level she may have been reviving her anti-Semitism in an altered way, not seeking to spit on or throw stones at Jews but rather to join them in what some part of her still defines as their guilt. Through this identification (I am like them) she can view herself as belonging to a community of others who have killed God and gone on to live. Although I cannot offer this as more than a speculation, it seems psychologically plausible.

Helen as Herself, II: The Evolving Self Let me, after so much concreteness, offer some abstractions that might help us see more clearly the basic dimensions of Helen’s struggle, and help us understand it as a process of human development. Let’s consider the obvious aspects of what we have learned about Helen. First we can note that Helen’s existence involved the convergence of biological embodiment with social embeddedness; as a body of flesh and nerves she exists in a social and cultural world, where her husband, children, and grandchildren are important attachment figures, and a variety of cultural discourses and institutions play a role in her life. Her self-awareness—and, ultimately, her suffering—emerges in the interplay of all these factors. Embedded in the way she was, and biologically what she is, she is capable of feeling and in particular capable of taking feeling as self, while also identifying with cultural values, social roles, and specific interpersonal relationships. She is conscious of a world and conscious of self. She narrates her story, and in this self-narrative personifies herself. She is capable of reflexivity in different forms: she has feelings about her feelings, and feelings about her interpretations of her feelings. She judges herself morally; places herself in the past and future, and so on. These are some of the core phenomena of selfhood. All these cry out for theoretical interpretation; we could go in many directions with the phenomena that confront us. We could take up Antonio Damasio’s (1994, 1999) or Joseph LeDoux’s (2002) discussion of the biological aspects of self and consciousness, of feeling and emotion. We might examine the social, cultural, and psychological aspects of

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Helen’s struggle for orientation more closely—something I will return to in later chapters. We might want to examine cultural discourses on selfhood more closely—an invaluable task. We could do all this and more, including developing long-term, culturally sensitive, perspectives on grief and mourning (Brison and Leavitt 1995). Clearly, understanding one human being can turn into a project of many dimensions, precisely because human selfhood rests on the convergence of those features of human existence that are adaptively critical. What I want to do here, however, is briefly treat Helen’s struggle to know, master, judge, and “be” herself as a process in human development. I take psychological development to be adaptively critical, in ways that meld social, cultural, and psychological processes. Temporarily depersonalizing Helen has its dangers, but may help us see more clearly the basic structural features of the process that alarms and distresses her so much. So imagine that Helen is a system with certain capacities. Keep in mind that Helen is the whole system, not just the conscious voice that portrays and personifies herself in her narrative testimony. The system Helen as a whole is primed to adapt to changes in the world in which she exists. She is organized to structure herself in terms of attachments to other selves and to engage in emotional and reflective self-appraisal. She is, as a whole person, organized to respond robustly to the loss of attachment figures, and to take this loss as requiring an internal transformation, since her internal “homeostasis”—as much as her interpersonal life—depends on symbiosis with not just a person, but the relational matrix, the immediate culture of self, that went along with this person. With this loss Helen needs to seek a new inner equilibrium and a new relationship with her environment; these two processes must converge. Neither the world nor the organization of the self-system permits long-term stasis: but many features of the system are heavily invested in the synthesis of system and world that had been achieved, and is now lost. The system is organized to recognize the dangers of this uncertain situation. Emergency emotions come into play to force the system to seek new parameters and new relations. These emotions also signal the urgency of the situation, and the dangers to the integrity of the organism. In the end, you have Helen sitting in her house, crying, afraid, tormented by guilt, because she cannot accept these messages from her larger self as it attempts to restructure itself and move “her” into a new synthesis of self-structure with the conditions of existence. Robert Kegan (1982) has identified “anxiety and depression” as “the affective experience of the wrenching activity of differentiation”

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by which restructuring takes places, and allows the self you are to give way to the self you are becoming (82). When he speaks in the following passage of “the system,” he means the larger self that encompasses the conscious sense of self: It is only in the face those experiences which cannot be assimilated or accommodated by adjustments within the system (the recognition of further implications of my meaning) that the system finds itself threatened with the possibility of a limitation or inadequacy of its basic presuppositions. It is in the self’s marshalling of a defense against this possibility–its attempt to reduce or confine the impinging environment—that assimilative integrity can become clinical defensiveness, so dramatically characterized by increasing social isolation, or even, in the more extreme exercises of control, by delusions. (170, italics in original)

This fits Helen well enough. Helen, however, assumes a defensive stance, in part because her experience of anxiety and distress at the changes in her life are linked to guilt and self-reproach. All this is less a question of psycho-mechanics—of a system accommodating and equilibrating—than it is a question of giving up the self, of allowing yourself to be possible, and a question of trusting, or not trusting yourself enough to let yourself become what you are becoming. This, as I see it, is the psycho-existential version of Helen’s problem. Someone once held us in the world, and then we held ourselves to some moral standard, and to some hope. Yet most of us are not capable of standing absolutely alone—we “hold,” we sustain, a life that “holds” us in ways that bring others to us, that allows them to hold us, in the peculiar psychological and existential sense I am giving hold (Kegan 1982; Winnicott, 1965). Together self and other sustain a joint process of living, performed, experienced, made a medium for mutuality and selfhood. Ted, for good or for ill, held Helen in her world. She still holds him in her mind and experience. In Helen’s case, the emotional experience of “wrenching differentiation” is accompanied by her withering attack on what is presupposed in her selfhood. What is especially vulnerable is her sense of herself as a good person. Helen is having a difficult time testing out a new self (a reorganized self system) because she has defined herself as “bad,” and parts of her carry out the punishment she somehow sees as fitting her “crime.” The impulse of the “self system” to find a new integration is thwarted. Not surprisingly, this lead to more feelings; she is caught in a vicious cycle. Wisely, she seeks help and attempts in a life review to formulate a set of understandings that will help her

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by contextualizing or reframing her troubling sense of herself as husband-killer. In other words, the loss of part of the matrix of living, the loss of any relationship central to living, is always a loss of self; but the way to find a new matrix involves developing a new self. This reorganization does not always proceed smoothly—in fact, it almost always involves degrees of distress, as parents who have taken a child to a new school, or anyone who has lost a job, may appreciate. This line of interpretation may ultimately be defensible or not. One might want to take the parts of the model and relate them in other ways, add other factors, and so on; but the real question remains: how is any of this possible? To return for a moment to thinking through what a good theory of self must do, an obvious point is worth underscoring. A useful theory of self will necessarily conceive of selfhood as a system that has parts (themselves systems) that interact internally and that connect the person to the world in very basic ways. This is a simple premise, but without it, we can hardly do more than treat human beings as opaque lumps who can be understood only by some magic of metaphysical speculation, compounding our refusal to understand. When the lumps are lost in the fog, eventually we stop caring about them. Living, acting human beings, in contrast, always express aspects of their own personal organization, if we are willing to look. Of course, cultural factors influence not only the organization of emotion, reflexivity, attachment—basic processes of selfhood—but also the perception of these. Since the seventeenth century—but this may have earlier, religious beginnings—Western thought has tended often to privilege the conscious, cognitive, discursive part of selfexperience, while tending to neglect the existential, the structural, and the biological part, committing what Damasio (1994) has called Descartes’ Error. Helen herself takes for granted a view of the self that may be linked to the metaphysics of Western thought and religion. We should not identify Helen’s conscious sense of self with her whole self, as she, tacitly, does. There is a danger that we are—whether for cultural or biological reasons—all a little too good at being Cartesian. We identify self too completely with conscious, discursive thought. This does not give us a full view of the way people are “embedded” in the matrix of their lives. In the end, Helen got better. I did not have anything to do with this, although I am sure that it was useful to have someone to listen quietly. I believe, however, that she healed herself. She made the adjustments she needed to make, came to terms with her pain and

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with those visions of herself that so troubled her. She found her way out of the pain and guilt. If she was not who she had thought she was—if she had confronted the very human fact that she was more, less, or other, than what she thought—she had in the process also discovered that she could live with herself. She could accept her life as it was. She went to the cemetery where her husband had been buried to say good-bye. I think this ritual act helped. That she could go, at last, expressed her healing, her new life. She brought me a fruit cake and said good-bye to me as well.

Coda: Every Tale Condemns Me Helen’s possible selves are a problem for her. She tries to generate possibilities of redemption in the face of what seems agonizingly possible psychologically: that she is a monster who killed her husband. Can she then be someone who might be forgiven? The best literary representation I have come across of a self divided into antithetical moral possibilities is a dialogue Shakespeare’s King Richard has with himself: Cold, fearful drops stand on my trembling flesh. What, do I fear myself?; there’s none else by; . . . Is there a murderer here? No-yes, I am: Then fly. What, from myself? great reason, why? Lest I revenge. What, myself upon myself? Alack, I love myself. Wherefore? For any good That I myself have done unto myself. O, no alas, I rather hate myself For hateful deeds committed by myself ... My conscience hath a thousand several tongues, And every tongue brings in a several tale And every tale condemns me . . .

Here art has tweaked a fictional self into a more perfect self-dialogue than one might expect people in everyday life to achieve. Yet Helen comes close to having this kind of dialogue with herself. She judged herself, this judgment took hold of the powers of her psyche, and made them torment her; she resisted this, struggled toward some hope that she might be forgiven; and this hope also fought for control. This struggle was not contained in her conscious experience, although it

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entered it in the most forceful way—as the feeling that happens when someone believes what she believed about herself. The soliloquy captures a sense of Helen’s self-division, but does not do justice to the problem of existence that propels her into this state. She has been split into her possibilities by her collision with another self. *

*

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Someone once suggested that Shakespeare’s characters only hear themselves: soliloquy takes over. This is not true of Helen. She hears Ted. Even after his death—especially after his death—she is very attentive to his opinion of her. With his death she puts aside the tin ears she had developed to filter him out. It is when she takes up his perspective that she shatters. This is a product of her life with Ted, that “other self” who has his own desires, ideas, and plans. His life tumbles into her life, and vice versa: his existence clashes with her existence. By the alchemy of attachment and ambivalence, he becomes virtually a voice within her, a way she has of understanding herself. Whatever good there was in their life together, it also involved painful experiences. These experiences have to be dealt with: they define Helen’s sense of self in ways that threaten not only her capacity to think well of herself, something people struggle to do (Wikan 1995), but her capacity to live as well. W.B. Yeats offers a useful literary image. 2 Reflecting on the accumulation of personal experience an artist might use, he came up with a metaphor for the personal source of poetic images: “the rag and bone shop of the heart.” Yeats was drawing a connection between art and the debris of life experience that is a possible ingredient of art. In art, what resides in the rag and bone shop of the heart is transmuted into “masterful images, because complete,” which Grew in pure mind, but of what began A mound of refuse or the sweepings of a street Old kettles, old bottles and a broken can Old iron, old bones, old rags . . .

We visited, peered into, Helen’s “rag and bone shop of the heart.” It is the repository of her experience and so the repository of her possible selves. The self is the only art most of us have. Life experience is the material it has to work on. Helen seeks mastering images for her experience,

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the art to craft the ability to go on, to bear suffering, to go through it. Life experience is what it is. Each of us gathers the debris of a life history into our own approximation of selfhood, find a place for it in our own rag and bone shop of the heart. There may be old dreams faded and forlorn, or old grievances twisted into strange shapes. The hurts, hopes, and losses of someone else’s existence may have found their way there, too, delivered to us by the need and feeling we have for others, jumbled together with our life experiences, our own hurts, hopes, losses, desires. Of course, this is not a place at all, nothing but ourselves, but only what and who we are and can be, a mustering of our possibilities, the ways we make ourselves be available to life, based on what life has been for us. Other selves: our objects. They make us feel; the emotions leave their marks and we conjure a sense of self from them. We define ourselves in terms of the feelings that happen to us because other selves were part of our lives. Whatever guidance these others provided by being there for us, whatever orientation their sheer presence in our life offered, they also lend us the stuff of Yeats’ rag and bone shop of the heart, from which we gather our incompleteness and our becoming. *

*

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In a passage from Mourning and Melancholia (1989 [1917]) relevant to Helen, Freud puts the matter a shade less poetically but with a keen eye for the way people go on living in terms of their experience of other selves, even when these others have gone: Thus the shadow of the object fell upon the ego and the latter could henceforth be judged by a special agency, as though it were an object, the forsaken object. In this way an object-loss was transformed into an ego-loss and the conflict between the ego and the loved person into a cleavage between the critical activity of the ego and the ego as altered by identification. (586)

Helen hated Ted; now she hates herself. This is not wrong I think, but too neat, and not quite enough. She raged at herself in an echo of how Ted raged at her. She judged herself guilty in a way that Ted, at his worst moment, may have judged her guilty. She lost an object to death and she takes up his judgment of her as her judgment of herself; but she had many times lost this object in the conflict that characterized their relationship, in the ambivalence she felt. She loved him; she resented him. First the light of the object fell upon her, then the

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shadow. Moreover, Ted was not just a shadow when he died: he “shadowed” Helen’s existence throughout their marriage. Freud’s comment suggests the origins of the “voice” within that condemns her; but it perhaps does not quite catch a sense of her resistance to it. How does the shadow of self—of her own purposes—fall upon the object? If we adopt the literary metaphor of voice, the object is a “voice within her,” Ted’s voice. How does she find a voice that can respond? A voice from within that might tell her to stop punishing herself? This was Helen’s struggle—a struggle with possible selves toward a possible self. *

*

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When I face a life crisis of my own, I find myself thinking about Helen and Benjamin. Like them, I become a question to myself. I don’t know what will happen to me. I wonder, how will I get through this? I hoist memories into awareness. I search for models to help me cope. I search through the personal and cultural baggage of my own life history, and try to distill the meaning of human life I find. I experience strong emotions. Something terrible (there is really no other word) was happening to me. In memory and reflection I reached out to emotionally significant figures in my life. In these ways I tried to define myself. Thinking about Helen and Benjamin helped me—I felt a kind of solidarity.


Chapter Three California Dreaming: My Days on the Cancer Ward All the leaves are brown And the sky is grey I went for a walk On a winter’ day I’d be safe and warm If I was in LA California dreamin’ On such a winter’s day . . . —The Mommas and Pappas

A Beginning, an End My Life Starts Over One day in November, three years ago, I learned I had cancer. I should say, rather, that this was the moment the knowledge became official, took on an aura of authority. I walked along a line of trees into a hospital, on a bright sunny southern California day, found my way to the cancer center, and was escorted into a small office. The doctor gave me the final, official diagnosis, told me of the probable course of the cancer, and described possible treatments. As I listened, the knowledge that I had a deadly disease became coercive and compelling. Having cancer became my reality from that moment on. It became the absolute foundation of my life for the next three years. I had known this was coming. It seemed likely that I had cancer, close to a certainty, a few weeks earlier, when I woke up after the biopsy that removed a lump from my neck. The surgeon came in and told me that he thought it probably was cancer—it had that color, he said, and the texture he associated with it. I groggily took this in and began to assemble myself into a new self.

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I had to adapt. My capacities as a human being, my desires, my hopes, my identity, my talents and skills, were organized into a new configuration, devoted to coping with my new circumstances. I became, in effect, a new self. I had to enter my life on new terms. I had to cope as well with the new self I was in the process of becoming. This new self I was becoming had, of course, a complicated relationship to the person I was. I was not any different, was I?—no, not really—yet everything had changed, and I had changed with it, or would. I was falling, zooming along, waiting to emerge into my new existence. My world had shifted on its foundations. It kept shifting. I would have to change. I thought I was dying. No one, as far as I could find out, survived this kind of cancer. You could prolong your life, but in the end you would die. This belief gripped me, gripped my whole experience of being alive. What I felt, what I wanted from life, where memory and reverie took me, the whole organization of my existence, all of this coalesced into new forms. I responded. As part of this I found myself reflecting on my whole existence, thinking about the life I had lived up to now. I wanted to judge it, and to squeeze whatever possibility it still had out of it. What was this life I stood on the edge of losing? I needed it to be something in relationship to what was happening to me. I would not have been able to put it in exactly these terms at the time. It is as I look back that I see that I was fashioning a self for selfawareness. What filled my awareness was, first of all, the urgency of the situation, the need to do something; but there was much more. My consciousness took it all in—the dilemmas of medical treatment, the disjunctions with “normal” life, the suffering, the loss of control, which I was experiencing—parsed and reframed my experience, connected it to other parts of my life and experience. I had to “be” something in terms of all of this: my organization as a person had to be utilized, adapted, and restructured. Coping with this experience and these changes, I wanted the brute fact of having cancer to mean something. Yet this was only part of it. If I was going to die, I needed my life to mean something. If I was going to suffer, I wanted my life to mean something. I wanted it to have some significance. Of course, I did not want to die. The raw fact: I desperately did not want to die. I have two young children. I wanted to live. I had to grapple with the palpable urgency of my desire to be there for them, grapple with all my reasons for living, experienced—I don’t have any better words—as a total moral compulsion, something that mobilizes

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all your capacities for motivating yourself and dealing with the world. Yet I had to confront the realistic fact that my chances of survival were not good. I had to prepare for my death. I was living with cancer. I was living with dying. That this is living is what I had to grasp as an insight and then hold on to as a moral fact, and then make something of it—a modus vivendi, the best compromise with uncompromising realities that I could make. I had to adapt. And I had to be something in the process, at every step. In fact, I wanted to master the experience and all that it brought: suffering, change, the collapse of life plans. I wanted to find a way to cope that left me intact psychologically, still a person, still somewhat in control of my life and of myself. I felt this desire in many different ways. It required that I fashion some of my own possibilities into something new. I had to make something out of what was at hand. I had to forge an adaptation to my life circumstances, to the fact that I had a terrible, and terrifying, disease. I grasped some of this, but not very clearly, on that very first day, when the doctor came in and looked me over. Glancing at the file he held in his hand, he gave me the formal, official, final diagnosis: an aggressive form of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. It was advanced—stage four. He declared it neutrally, blandly. I tried to say something appropriate, but it was probably off-key in its stoicism—something like “Sounds like I’m in pretty bad shape.” I ended the interaction before, I think, the doctor was quite ready, explaining that I had to prepare for a trip the next day. I was not in shock, not quite anyway, or I covered it up pretty well. I had prepared myself, and I had a few things to do before I succumbed to my new selfhood. The next day I flew to Chicago, to a conference. I discussed some interesting work on women in Sri Lanka, and got to chat with candidates for a position at my university. I learned a lot from the papers and discussion, and was glad to meet some distinguished figures in my field, and some friends. It was a good trip. I enjoyed the cool wind whipping along Michigan Avenue. An ex-Midwesterner, I felt at home in Chicago. I did not think much about having cancer. In retrospect, of course, I can see there was at least a little denial involved. I was not quite willing to take it all in yet. Still, I knew my life had changed in the most fundamental way. When the thought intruded into awareness, I made a conscious effort to suppress it. I did not want to think about it. I was trying to enjoy the last few days of a normal life. In the end, of course, I had to deal with it. Thinking back on this long moment—a moment that stretches from waking up after surgery

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to the knock on the door, the doctor’s entry, his deft delivery of the diagnosis, to the day I walked into the hospital to start chemotherapy— for me evokes memories of a passage from Sartre’s (1963) classic biography of the playwright Jean Genet. The child was playing . . . Suddenly he became aware of his solitude and was seized with anxiety, as usual. So he “absented” himself . . . There is now no one in the room. An abandoned consciousness is reflecting utensils. A drawer is opening; a little hand moves forward. Caught in the act. Someone has entered and is watching him. Beneath this gaze the child comes to himself. He who was not yet anyone suddenly becomes Jean Genet . . . Who is Jean Genet? In a moment the whole village will know . . . The child alone is in ignorance. Suddenly . . . a dizzying word From the depths of the world abolishes the beautiful order . . . A voice declares publicly: “You’re a thief.” The child is ten years old. (17; italics in original)

I can echo parts of this. I can echo the beautiful line of poetry—for me, too, there came “a dizzying word from the depths of the world” to explode my beautiful life. The word came lightly from my doctor’s lips: “Cancer.” I am fifty years old. Divorced. I have two children. Cancer. I am a cancer patient. You have cancer. With that word cancer echoing in my head, I became aware of my solitude. I was seized by strong emotions: fear and grief. It was a moment of awakening, from one existence, to another. It was a moment of loss. My life was gone. Such an awakening makes one’s past life seems like a bout of sleepwalking, a dreamy fantasy, comforting, what one might want, does want, cannot have. The sleepwalker wakes up. He realizes he is dying. He wants to add: maybe. That one may be dying, keeps the door open on still living. “I may die”—it not a certainty; you are not absolutely sure that you are dying. It is an uneasy qualification, yet one does not wish simply to erase it for the sake of simplicity or certainty: erase the “maybe” and one is dying. “I may be dying” is not quite dying, but is it living? In my experience, which may not apply to anyone else, the idea of living is necessarily modified by the idea that one may be dying. It is a peculiar and


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disorienting modification, if one is not prepared for it. I had been healthy all my life; my father had died of a heart attack and insofar as I thought about death I thought I would likely go the same way. I never thought about getting cancer. It took some time to get used to it all. I think the impulse to insist on hope, to thread hope through the opening that “maybe” makes in the wall of almost certainty, was understandable. I am dying—maybe I am dying—I might survive. Even if, in the end, one does not die and is not going to die, because hopes have been realized, because a cure has been found—biomedicine as deus ex machina—still one is dying, dying out of the life one had, dying as a self and seeking rebirth as a self. In the cancer ward, one’s former life is ended, whatever crucial threads of continuity one manages to weave into the whole experience. That is how I experienced it, anyway. When your whole world changes and you must change with it, you must become, in certain ways, a new self. When one stops to think of it, this is an obvious aspect of human existence, yet it is not easy to do justice to it as a human process. It is hard to trace all the exchanges with the world, culture, and others that go into this, to grasp how basic these are, how they reintegrate the parts of a person. I knew this before some of my body’s cells mutated into cancer, but my experience coping with my cancer has reinforced it. For me, it was a wrenching transition. I could not be “me” anymore. I suppose a child may only awaken to self-consciousness. Just that—nothing more. There is nothing that has to be displaced. At fifty, having lived half a century, I also have to put away part of myself, to make room for the new. At fifty, I cannot so easily “absent” myself, cannot easily make it seem to myself that there is no one there, in the room, where the IV tubes feed into that body in the hospital bed: me, myself. At fifty, I have to change, adapt, move my internal furniture around. I can echo parts of Sartre’s presentation of the crystallization of self-consciousness, although only in part and not as dramatically. There were many moments of awakening. My new self did not happen all at once, like an epiphany on a stage, presented dramatically in some climatic scene. I emerged only by degrees onto the scene; it was a process of becoming. This involves many, overlapping and varied transactions with the world. The “sense of self”—your ways of knowing and evaluating yourself, of entering into life—may have a hard time keeping up. I had a biopsy. I had been diagnosed. I was ready to be dizzy, to go into

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denial, to come out of it, to “fight” as the television ads for drug companies urge, to grasp this “not self” as “self” in the way I must. Who is Steven Parish? A cancer patient. A cancer patient? What did this mean? I would find out. In any human life, there are moments that objectify the self, in ways small and large, moments that make it present, often enough painfully, to itself. A small one—I recall being in the Emergency Room (ER) and having a young doctor break into a big smile and tell me: you have a really rare form of cancer. For her I was an interesting “case.” I found her glee a little shocking. On reflection I think she was just young, with the openness of a novice. I don’t blame her for her insensitivity. How would she become a good doctor if she did not find pleasure in interesting cases? She needed to bring her excitement and enthusiasm to her role as a physician, just as I was reluctantly compelled to bring myself into my new role as a cancer patient. Mostly, the hospital made an effort not to dehumanize. Interactions with staff were characterized by a determined solicitousness, a deliberate effort to keep things light, personal, and upbeat. This was, at moments, not much better than medicine with a smiley face. Yet I can think of much worse ways of dealing with the personhood of patients, with their need to be acknowledged as persons. Yet as worthwhile as humanizing hospitalization and treatment is, it does not change the basic facts. People died while I was in the cancer ward. I did not ask, and the staff did not tell. Even in my own mind, I went from “I have cancer” to “I am a cancer patient.” My awareness that I was involved in a major life challenge developed into ambivalent acceptance of a social role. Some part of me never accepted. There was a struggle to be something else: to refuse to let these terms of existence absorb all I had been, was, or could be, to keep open some sense of possibility, even—it is a difficult word—freedom. For me, only “cure” is a more difficult word. A human self has a first-person perspective on life. As such, you adapt to life by using such innate and acquired talents as your moral imagination, your capacity for feeling and understanding, your sense of value and purpose, and whatever parts of your culture you have made your own. I am not saying the first-person perspective is not saturated with cultural meaning: quite the contrary. I am saying there is a first-person perspective, and that it makes a difference. I went from feeling safe and warm in my California dream to feeling sick, out of control, with the chill of fear and even despair settling on my life. I believe such experience cannot be completely understood in third-person terms.


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The world is very much part of this. In my case, the world of cancer came crashing down on my life. The cancer ward for me was very much there: it forced me to be me, something, some kind of person, trying to live some kind of life. I had to be something in relationship to it. I had to mobilize the resources of self. These resources included cultural conceptions and capacities that could orient me; it involved who I already was, my whole life history. It also involved people who mattered to me and were part of me—my “objects.” From the possibilities of all these I had to fashion a response that would allow me to go on. I would have to change but I would struggle to remain the same. When I returned from Chicago, I did not spend much time unpacking my experience into its various elements, nor spend much conscious time trying to figure out what it “meant” to me. That would come later. Rather than reflect, I threw myself into research, using the Internet and personal contacts. I focused on pragmatics. What is the nature of the disease? What is the prognosis? What are my treatment options? My prognosis, my treatment options, my disease. My life was now attached to these categories. The personal, the reflexive, were there, of course—it was not just that I was motivated, which I certainly was, but that so much of what I am, for better or worse, was mobilized, recruited into the response. The Internet, people I knew, gave me information, but my mind organized it, my feelings signaled concerns and brought them to awareness, cajoled, nagged, and tweaked the process. My learned skills made a difference. I was able to organize information, negotiate with others, motivate, and “make myself heard.” If Sartre suggests the impact of objectification, the self as agent responds. One does what one can. When one of my doctors protested at my research and soliciting of other opinions (he feared that I did not trust him and would not come to the right conclusion), I responded by saying, in part: “I do it because I can. You would do it in my situation, too.” He then suggested ways I could approach this research, and doctors I might consult. I did. I emailed and phoned doctors considered leaders in the field, starting with a contact a friend (a survivor of cancer) gave me at the University of Texas. These doctors responded—I thought it was quite impressive how they responded—and I learned rapidly about my prognosis, my treatment, and my disease. Cancer has this peculiar characteristic: it is me, in a peculiar and disturbing sense. It is as much of my body as my good white blood cells; as much part of my body as the cell systems and organs that give me life. Yet it harbors and signifies my death. It is not self. My cells

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are mutating, turning against me. I reject this process. I reject the cancer. It is something terrible happening to me, not something that I am doing. It is what psychoanalysis used to call “ego alien.” It has that quality, that frisson in the feeling that happens, which is sometimes described as “otherness.” Here is the question—who am “I” in this self-shattering rejection? How do I formulate myself into a self that opposes the doings of my body? If cancer, as brute fact, is the primordial “other”—as I make it, want it to be: not me, not my fate—other parts of the whole experience also loom as not self. The hospital is not home. Its routines are not the routines of one’s life, under one’s control. The hospital experience can be alienating because it confronts you with “not self” in so many ways—you do not want to be there at all, do not want to be sick, to lack control, to have people feel bad for you. Of course the shock of having yourself, as it were, turned inside out also generates self-awareness—something in you may reject all this and set out an opposing vision: “I will get through this.” “I will get better.” “This will end.” This must be asserted against the experience of feeling sick, afraid, helpless, out of control, having your own existence made so unfamiliar you are not sure how to define yourself. As I write this, a memory floats into my awareness. I had reported to the radiology department in my hospital for some scan or X-ray. I don’t remember what it was. What I remember was that I waited in the hall, dressed in a hospital robe, with two other people, a man and a woman. The woman was also in a robe, also waiting for a procedure; she was sobbing. The man looked grim and uncertain. He was not comforting her. He seemed abstracted. Not fully there. He did not look at her. She did not look at him. My thought was that the reality of her diagnosis was hitting them. Their lives were changed, and in the worst possible way. What had crept into their lives was the end of their lives as they knew it, even if the disease did not end in death. Where was the otherness of it all, for them—in the lives they would live, or in the lives they had lived? Which was more alien to them? Normal is what you do not have, what you are not. You look in at it from the outside. You try to remember what it was like. Hovering beyond this loss of one’s normal existence, one can make out of the possibility of death—it becomes a shadowy presence. Death is, after all, in part what all this signifies: the X-rays, the weeping, that blinding word—Cancer. Sartre (1963) writes of Genet: “Is he fleeing his original malediction or is he pursuing his being? Both at the same time” (149). I think there is something right about positing this existential polarity. In my


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case, I was fleeing death as determinedly as I could. I was avoiding the identity of “cancer victim” and the indignities of my new status. Eventually, I learned to live with it. All through this time, I was also mobilizing and pursuing my own being, and adding layers of selfawareness in the process.

Living with Dying: Days and Nights on the Cancer Ward My body had turned against me. To save my life, I had to be poisoned. This was the upshot of my diagnosis of cancer. I had a form of lymphoma. Roughly a month after the official diagnosis and the first meeting with my oncologist, in November, I checked into the hospital to begin treatment. I would spend much of the winter of 2003 in the hospital. The poisoning I would receive I called chemotherapy, but poisoning better captures the feeling of being sick that you experience as a result. The idea is to kill cells that are multiplying fast, which is something cancer cells do. I had decided, with my doctors, that my best hope was a very intensive kind of chemotherapy known by an acronym that suggests its aggressiveness as a treatment: Hyper-CVAD. The hope was that I was young and healthy enough to tolerate it well. There were urgent and compelling medical issues at play. I won’t examine these here, however, or try to explain what was happening on the cellular level of my existence. My focus will be my experience of cancer, and my efforts to cope. I want to examine how I faced up to the prospect of dying, for the thought that I would or might die decisively shaped my experience. It made me reflect on my life, on the meaning of my existence, on the value it had for me. I don’t think there is anything special about my experience or about my psychological responses except for the inescapable fact that they were mine—reflecting my life history, my cultural background—but I think they say something about selfhood. There are other ways than mine of coping with the confrontation of life and death set in motion by a diagnosis of cancer. Some turn to religion, and their faith may make a difference. Conversations with patients suggest that while there are commonalities, people with cancer do not follow a single script in responding. Their lives will not be the same: but how they respond depends on a variety of factors. They have to assemble a response. I agree with Bluebond-Langner (1978), who studied children with leukemia, when she stresses the role of

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self-awareness in coping with cancer. People respond to cancer as selves. They have goals; they interpret their experience. I had the goal of not dying and of getting better, and I developed a secondary goal of dying well, if that became necessary. Some people might be more concerned than I with restoring a sense of “normality”— although in the end and during the process I was very concerned with getting back some control over my life (Becker 1997). I thought I was prepared by background to let go of my normal life. I had done fieldwork in Nepal. I had lived in a Hindu city, a place as different from my Midwestern, Lutheran, working-class background as I could then imagine. I lived there before it had telephones or television or Internet connections to the rest of the world. I had stepped into different worlds before; but now I had to leap into a world stranger than any I had known. My life had involved a number of transitions that I hoped prepared me for this experience of a “new life.” I had been the first member of my family to go to college. I had passed, although not without a sense of loss, from working-class life and the sense of vulnerability of living on the edge of poverty to middle-class professional life and the modest prosperity of being a tenured professor. I had been through a divorce. I had, in some ways, done all this “well,” although it had required effort and some painful adjustments of my expectations and attitudes toward life. However, I found the life transition I now faced difficult. I had lost control of my life, more completely than ever before, and lost, I feared, all hope of a future, at precisely a moment at which I had hopes, plans, and deep obligations to others. I had already recently received several blows to my hopes and life plans. The diagnosis had come hard on the heels of my divorce and the death of my friend and mentor, Robert Levy. Cancer is a brute fact. It does not give you a choice. You will cope, because that is what you have to do. There is nothing brave about it. It is just the way it is. While I am certain there are different ways of coping with everything that cancer brings with it—culture, gender, age, life experience, temperament all make a difference—I do not think one can cease to be a feeling, thinking self. Some people are good at denial, but even denial is a state of self and the product of a series of psychological acts directed at self by self. It had been a hectic period, the time between getting the official diagnosis in late November and the day I entered the hospital. I had thrown myself into research and consultation, had tried to put my affairs in order. I had waited until the fall term ended, too, and my


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teaching was done, the papers graded. It was with a sense of resignation, but also with considerable curiosity and excitement, that I walked into the hospital pulling my suitcase behind me. There was the satisfaction of getting on with it, too. The decisions had been made. Now it was time to place myself in the hands of others. It is with these feelings that I submitted to being a patient on “3 West,” the Bone Marrow Transplant (BMT) unit of my university’s teaching and research hospital. It was like checking into a nice hotel, but with a little more paperwork. The hospital even looks a little like a hotel, with an automated piano playing in the lobby and wood-paneled elevators. I am sure this is deliberate, architecturally, that an effort had been made, in this case, to make this hospital seem not (quite) like what it was. Of course, the patients spoil the illusion when we enter the corridors in hospital robes. This might work as a kind of metaphor for my status as a patient: it is a circumstance where some attention is paid—even by myself, I admit—to making the hard core of the matter seem not quite what it really is. A great struggle is taking place. Life hangs in the balance. The softening of this harsh reality has its place. I know I don’t like too many things around that remind me I have cancer, that I am suffering, that I am not in control of my life. So I accept the shift into neutral pleasantry, whether in architecture or staff demeanor. I would not replace the automatic piano in the lobby with a statue that expresses profound suffering. It was my choice not to see a therapist or one of the religious figures who make rounds in the hospital. I am not sure now whether this was a wise choice, but I saw a downside. I did not want more medications and I thought a secular therapist would misread suffering and struggle as depression. I feared a religious person would not place me in my life but in his (all the ones I met were male) religious context. I did not think these people would really get to know me. I thought they would, with the best of intentions, rely on generic scripts. I did not want to be oversimplified; the whole experience was one of too much simplification. Yet I might have benefited from the opportunity to have my struggles recognized without having it interpreted as clinical depression or a spiritual crisis—my experience translated into someone else’s terms. I checked off the box on the form saying I did not want to see anyone for spiritual advice. I made it clear to the clinical social worker who came around that if I was suffering it was not from depression. (“I have bad hours. I don’t have bad days.”) I made a choice to rely on

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family and friends; but found that I was unwilling to burden them. Looking back, I think it would have been better if I had acknowledged the terror of it, the wrenching of life into a new shape, the transformation. I did not want to burden others. I fell into the role of being cheerful and strong. Should I have fallen into the role of being depressed and weak? Of course not. I might have benefited from a middle way. I would not deny anyone the chance to be cheerful and resolute if that is what they need to do and can do. I have been there. I understand the impulse to soften the facts, to suggest continuity with something like everyday life, for I wished for this, too. I might wish for subtle ways to acknowledge the human condition at hand. I don’t trust the hospital to have such subtlety—nor do I think American culture runs in this direction. Institutional resources go elsewhere and the culture only thinly describes the experience: so it is good to bring a support system with you as you step out of your life into the world of the hospital. Having seen worse hospitals in other countries and in the United States, I did not really mind that my room looked like a nice, if very small, hotel room, with prints on the wall. The illusion could not be kept up, however, for very long; there in the center of the room stood a hospital bed. There were panels of medical devices on the wall. Blood pressure cuffs. Access ports for oxygen. A call button to bring help. The patients in their hospital gowns did not look like hotel guests, either, of course, but I don’t recall that I met any as I checked in and was shown to my room. Lots of things signaled the special character of the BMT unit. A sign asked people not to bring in flowers. Sinks along the corridor had signs above them directing people to wash their hands before entering rooms. Eventually I would see patients, in hospital gowns, and soon I would look like them—after all I was one of them. I did not feel like one at this point. My cancer was asymptomatic—I felt nothing except slightly tired, and the lump that had been removed from my neck in the biopsy was the only other visible sign. I had learned my cancer could, and would, rather quickly kill me if left untreated, but it had not made itself known subjectively yet, in the way a heart attack or stroke does, with a bodily violence that breaks into, and breaks down, one’s awareness of self and world. I had an inner enemy—so I sometimes thought of it—but it was silent. Even then, I had started to personify both disease and death—you can see that in the image of it as my enemy, an example of metaphor


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creeping into the framing of experience—but I did not yet have any palpable experience to struggle with, to give it visceral presence. I unpacked my laptop, a few books, and a few personal items. I put photos of my son and daughter up on the wall. I stared out the window. I was glad to see trees. I could see the VA hospital where I had lectured as a professor on culture and mental illness, and, years before, attended courses in the psychiatric residency program, as part of my training as an anthropologist. I could see the university housing where I had lived as a graduate student writing my dissertation. It was strange to see so much of my life laid out in front of me, at just this moment. It invited me to reflect on my life, and this task would grow more important as weeks passed. It was not long before we began treatment. For this first round of chemotherapy, I had a tube inserted in my arm and up into my chest. Later I would have one in my chest as well. These were used to allow the “chemo” (and later blood transfusions) to be pumped into my body. The tube in the chest, the one put in later, was used to reinfuse my own stem cells after chemotherapy to “rescue” me from the destruction of my bone marrow, and with it, my capacity to produce life-sustaining red blood cells, platelets, and white blood cells. Platelets help stop bleeding. My platelets would get so low I was in danger of spontaneous hemorrhaging. I bruised easily. I healed slowly. I was told I should not jog, and, in a serious joke, told not to get in a car accident. As my hemoglobin and red blood cell counts diminished, I experienced anemia. I felt fatigued much of the time. When tests indicated I needed them, I would receive transfusions of platelets and red blood cells, benefiting from the kindness of donors whose anonymous generosity kept me and many others alive. I also lost the ability to produce white blood cells that protect against infection. I was periodically neutropenic—the adjective describes someone suffering from neutropenia, the condition of having abnormally few neutrophils, white blood cells that protect against infection. I had to learn this new vocabulary, but I also had to learn the rules of a new state of being. I was not just neutropenic, I was a neutropenic. A neutropenic is a person who must observe taboos. Although these are realistic medical taboos, and keep you from real dangers, they set me off from normal people, normal life. I was put on a special diet and learned to avoid foods that might harbor bacteria. People washed their hands before entering my hospital room. When I was out of the hospital, I had to wear a mask, until my counts went up and my capacity to fight infection improved.

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There are medicines that help support red and white blood cells. One day a nurse taught me how to prepare a needle and inject myself. I practiced on an orange. Then I tried to “pinch an inch” and stick the needle in my stomach. I used a little too much force and ended up bleeding. Did I imagine the skin was actually a barrier to the needle? I suppose I was overcompensating for my nervousness. Soon I would get very good at giving myself injections, and would do them myself everyday when I was out of the hospital, for almost two years after my stem cell transplant. Medicines I took to prevent infection make the body photosensitive, so I was told not to expose myself to sunlight. Even when released from the hospital, I could not take walks on a sunny day. Every beautiful California day was a reminder of my situation. I joked that I was like a vampire. When not in the hospital I took to wearing a hat and putting on sunscreen to go from my car to the hospital. When I was out of the hospital, I could not go with my children to a buffet, or drink a glass of wine with friends. The faculty club was no longer part of my world. I could not go to a movie theater without risking a return to the hospital through the ER. In fact, despite my discipline at observing all these taboos, I was admitted to the ER, and then the ward, several times. I learned all these limits and likelihoods during the period of my first admission. In total, I would spend fifty-eight days in the hospital, if my count is correct. This was not continuous, since I was out in the intervals between rounds of chemotherapy, to let my body recover. Not even two months. Two months normally fly by in my life. Not these—they stretched out, and on, seeming to form a whole world. If I recall it as a long time, a kind of era in my life, when I look back on it, I experienced it as longer, too. It is not just my memory now that stretches it out; it was stretched out as it happened. Maybe this has to do with the way I was involved in it—that it involved me so totally, that it involved so many aspects of my existence, in so many new ways, yet with a routine and sameness that make it all meld together, as if one day endlessly repeated, when in fact I was in and out of the hospital. I experienced all this, too, in a state of heightened body and self awareness. Maybe hospital time looms vast and slow in memory because feeling sick was juxtaposed with mental novelty, and both these were embedded in the monotony of hospital routine. After all, I was radically separated from my ordinary life. I was cut off from my past, and from my future—at least from hopes for a future. I had been waved off onto a detour, and I did not know if I


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could get back to my life. Only this time really existed: the moment now, filling the tiny hospital room. I lost control of my life. My daily existence was now reduced to medical routine, pretty much the same everyday, governed by medical imperatives, marked by the nurses taking my vital signs and hanging bags of IV chemicals. I had to be there actively, too, because it involved new learning. I had to learn new skills and learn how to place myself under the social and medical discipline of the cancer unit. When I think back on this world I think of the sick feeling. The nausea, the vomiting. I can recall asking for medicine for the nausea produced by the chemotherapy. But the feeling of sickness, of nausea, has been stripped from these memories. Yet I know this sick feeing filled this world and defined me. Think of a world filled with the feeling of being sick. Think about living that feeling, hour after hour, day after day. All this—the arrested, monotonous time; the lack of control; the sick feeling—ended up connecting me to my own life and existence. It pushed me back on myself, and propelled me powerfully down the corridors of memory. In this sense, the hospital experience was paradoxically richer, more significant, involved more intensities of feeling, and more shifts in self-awareness, than two months of routine life. I experienced this short time, out of my life, this small world, as strangely encompassing everything in my existence. I make it, psychologically, into what it was for me: a world in a bottle. I can peer in and see myself. This is somehow compelling and a little disturbing. In fact I sometimes have trouble even now of extricating myself from it, of leaving it behind—as these paragraphs themselves suggest. It is almost as if everything in my past existence had to enter that hospital room and then reemerge, not quite the same, had to pass through my self-awareness and help me reshape my awareness of self. In this I feel like the victim of a cliché, or like a character in a bad novel—“my life flashed before my eyes”—but this is how I register the experience: as shifts in the sense of self. These shifts registered my search for meaning, orientation, identity, and, most of all, mastery. I tolerated the chemo pretty well. I handled feeling sick pretty well. I had been used to getting sick while living in Nepal, so I knew I could handle being sick, at least up to a point. I could reassure myself that it would not last forever, or that it could be worse. If I had to throw up, I treated it as a chore, a task, something to get done. The nurses were practiced as keeping the tone light, but very pragmatic about dealing with nausea.

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Each day doctors would come on their rounds and check on me. I made a point of being up and sitting when they came in, especially when a decision was to be made about whether to release me after the end of a cycle of chemotherapy. I always wanted to be let out. My blood counts—my white blood cells, my platelets—were the main criteria for deciding whether to release me or not. I thought, though, that sitting up and looking alert might tip the balance toward releasing me if the blood counts were marginal. Getting out a day early mattered to me. It mattered quite a lot. It was freedom. I remember, vividly, taking a walk, with a mask on, after my first release. I was feeling quite sick, but I was happy to be out. It was a gray dull day. I took in the leaves of trees, the colors of the leaves, with delight. I gave them a kind of focused attention. I had always taken pleasure in natural objects, enjoying their sheer sensuousness; but this had a new quality. Looking back, I see myself as like a child, discovering new objects, but driven to this by the thought that I might not have the chance to see such beautiful and wonderful things again. However, these intervals between hospitalizations were not really a return to normal life. They had their own peculiar character. As we were destroying cancer cells, we were also destroying my capacity to fight off infection. So when I was outside the hospital, I wore a mask to protect myself. At first I found this awkward. It is the rational thing to do, but it marks the distance you have come from what you take for a normal life. This distance between you and the life you had, or wish for, expands and contracts. I remember once when I was out of the hospital trying to get up out of bed and walk to the kitchen. It was, quite literally, one of the longest walks I have taken, longer, subjectively, than days of trekking in the Himalayas. The irony was not lost on me. I took a grim pleasure in it. I counted getting around in my apartment an achievement and took pride in it. I made myself walk, padding around in a pair of sheep skin slippers. Even when I did normal things in the intervals between hospitalizations they often did not turn out normal. One evening I went shopping for groceries—you have to have groceries—wearing my mask, a hat on my head, not to hide its baldness, but to protect my photosensitive skin from the sun. I ended up throwing up in the store’s parking lot. I went to a shopping mall—I was trying to get my normal life back and what is more normal for an American than going shopping?—I vomited in a trash can. When I finally went back to teaching, I was often sick before and after class—but proud that I was able to get through that first seminar I offered.


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I did a total of eight cycles of chemotherapy. When my blood tests permitted, I was released after chemo, until my blood tests indicated it was time to resume the chemotherapy. It was relentless and brutal, but necessary. I was building up to the stem cell transplant that had been decided on as the best course of action. My doctors and I had decided that I would have an autologous (“auto”) transplant in which my own blood stem cells would be reinfused in my body after one final bout of intensive chemotherapy. In chemotherapy, toxic chemicals were introduced into my body through tubes attached to the ports inserted into my arm and chest. The tubes were connected to bottles of these chemicals—my “chemo”—that hung on a metal stand on wheels. A blue pump on the stand gently but insistently forced these poisons into my body. The stand, the pump, the tubes, the chemicals entering my body: all these were features of the new person I became. I felt I was a kind of medical symbiont, dependent on drugs and blood bank to live; pumped full first of drugs that killed part of me, and then others that “rescued” me from the first. I was a kind of cyborg—part biological, part machine—and I had a pulse not just of blood, but of poison. My IV pump communicated with me and others; if the flow stopped it would start beeping until someone came to check and turn it off. I lived by the rhythm of chemotherapy and the need to monitor my status. Nurses would pop in all night to monitor my vital signs, and to start or stop the chemotherapy. I had no control over when things happened; time was fragmented and not under my control. If space and time as I experienced them were altered, so also was my body and appearance. My hair started to fall out. I let it fall out on its own for a while—I was hanging on to my old life—but finally there was too much hair on my hospital bed, so a nursing aide and a friend shaved my head for me. It was a good moment, actually—a kind of ritual, acknowledging my separation from my past life. We admired my hair and laughed at my transformation. I had no hair. I did not have eyebrows. I lost weight. I barely recognized myself. In those intervals when I was out of the hospital—as I draft this I stop, noticing how even now, in retrospect, months later, the interval is the time outside the hospital, the reality is the hospital—people would sometimes not recognize me. Students who a couple months before had taken one of my courses and consulted me in my office would pass by, their gaze passing over me without recognition. Some friends and colleagues did not recognize me. I understood why. Yet I confess I felt a sense of depersonalization. It was as if I did not exist.

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Recognition could be worse. I shocked my brother when he came to see me, and I saw myself reflected in the shock on his face. His horror, his distress: myself. I could see what I looked like: no hair, no eyebrows, very pale, thin. I was gaunt, but the IV fluids pumped into me made my face round. In my hospital gown and blue bath robe, I looked like a starving, moon-faced clown. I picture myself that way, capering androgynously down the hallway of the cancer ward, in a hospital robe, lost in my thoughts.1 Yet I belonged. I would pass by people like me, smile, nod, say hello, converse a little, retire to my room when I tired, let the cycle of the hospital day roll on, do my small part to make it go smoothly, to get through it, to survive, to manage, to make do. There was even a rudimentary sort of culture to go along with my experience: significantly, the day of my stem cell transplant was termed my “birth day.” I was to be born again, without cancer. My son and daughter came on this day. I had already begun the transplant. A nurse—her name was Sarah—would take my stem cells out of liquid nitrogen, warm it up enough to transfuse it. I introduced my kids to Sarah. I explained what was being done. They came awkwardly to my bed and hugged me. Five and seven years old, they did not know what to say. They saw I had their pictures on the wall. It was awkward for me, too. What kind of father was I? Stretched out on a bed, limp, uncertain. I had always made a point of getting up when they visited. Now I could not. This was not the way it was supposed to be. If this was my new birthday, I imagine the hope was that I would be born back into my life. But I thought I might die and leave my children without a father. I experienced shifts in self-awareness: my imagination superimposed images on my body—shifting image of my own dying and death, my life and survival, all colored by cultural attitudes toward disease and dying. I don’t want to overstress the discontinuity, although I experienced a radical separation from my old life and sense of self. There were parts of me that did not change. I remained a creature of my attachments (photos of my children adorned the wall of the hospital room, a small personalization), capable of trying to grasp my situation in realistic and rational term (I continued to read medical journal abstracts on the Internet). I navigated my brave new world with as much zest—and pragmatism—as I could muster. Doing so, I grappled with the identity of patient and “cancer victim” and I tried, and probably succeeded, in being a “good” patient. My process of


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self-evaluation did not stop—in fact it expanded, called up memories and desires and positioned them in my conscious awareness: what could I do, but interpret, judge, imagine. My whole life became the object of evaluation. Thinking that I was dying, I found myself reviewing my life. I wanted to grasp it as a whole, but I could only do so by remembering and evoking a flow of precise, intimate details. I revved up the hermeneutic circle of my life. I found both beauty and pain in this process. After the transplant, we waited to see if the graft would take. I had more time to reflect on my life. If I inhabited a small hospital room, in a cancer ward, in a hospital with fake palm trees in the lobby—yes, it has fake palm trees in the lobby—I also inhabited my own inwardness. It is where I could be. It was an inwardness inhabited by memory, by meaning I take from my cultural background, by imaginings, by feelings. It was inhabited by thoughts of people, people living and dead, and by my feeling about them. There were places, too. As I took my walks monotonously around the ward I was also in memory and reverie walking again in the shadow of Himalayan snow peaks, through the rhododendron forests on the flanks of these familiar mountains, through green bamboo groves, to tea houses along a mountain river. One image that visited me many times—that I visited many times—was of sitting on a mountainside and looking back down the trail I had climbed, taking in the vista down into the valley now far below. I could see clouds forming there. They would rise up and pass over me as mist and fog, then continue up the mountainside. Down below, another cloud was born. It too would rise up and pass over me. I recalled the people, places, and events of my life. But why did I call them to me, out of memory and into reverie? I was trying to place myself in my own life. Memory played its part in this. There were memories of adult life mingled with memories of childhood—my parents; the woods near my childhood home in Wisconsin. Rivers: a river in Oregon; the Mississippi when I was a child; and the monsoon swollen Irrawaddy when I visited Burma. Rivers as a theme in my life, a metaphor, a feeling: rivers running into darkness. All this remembering—this reconnecting—this synthesizing—was no doubt a fashioning, a shaping, a making, a kind of primal response to my predicament. I was not recovering objective memories. That suggests a literal calling to mind of the past. It was rather a “subtle interchange” between memory, imagination, and culture, of the kind every human beings uses in some fashion to frame existence. This

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kind of memory and reverie is more like an art, one meant to capture a sense of self. In this case, I was also escaping. I was there, but also “away.” Memory and reverie, my inner imaginary, took me somewhere else. Yet it was not just escape, but a way of making myself present to myself. I imagine myself as winding a wormhole of inwardness, of memory and reverie, around the small world of the cancer ward, winding it as tight as I could around the hard invisible core of my dilemma, my awareness that I was sick and might die, that my life would never be the same. Like a cosmic one, my private wormhole connected impossibly distant points in the cosmos of my experience, fleetingly bringing points of my life into ironic and dizzying juxtaposition—a night in Oregon, with a day in the cancer ward, memories of views across vast landscapes dissolving into the moment “now” as I careened around the corner in the corridor, the quick greeting of a busy nurse giving way to memories of people distant in time and space, their faces, the feeling of them. In my reveries, I was connecting my past and my present, doubt and hope, the self I had been and the self I was becoming. I can imagine just going into denial and staying there. No doubt I did some of this. I can also imagine a relentless pragmatism as the basis for coping—I certainly pursued this approach. I also developed respect for the capacity to be “away” that human beings possess, for I did need to be away. My experience did, for me, verge on the intolerable, the unbearable; yet it had to be faced. To mobilize myself—to find the resources I needed, to sustain the gritting of the teeth, bite the bullet, let’s get on with it attitude that became central to my persona as a cancer patient—I also needed some sense of meaning that only memory and reverie could supply. I needed to reconnect with my life, my history, to find a way to experience a selection of my deeper meanings, those meanings by which I had lived and might live again. If this was escape, it was also creative. I needed an orientation to my disease, to my awareness of death. As part of this I also needed an orientation to the vastness of my own experience. How would I find the parts of my own experience that might guide me into my life now, which might make suffering sufferable? If I needed “meaning,” I also needed to be something. I needed to guide myself into a view of myself that could support me in my suffering, that could sustain me in my struggle to live, if I could, or, if necessary, to die with as much composure as I could muster. I am not sure I was completely successful in this task. As the imagery of mountains and rivers in my reveries suggests, it was not easy for me to shrink to the size of a hospital room. Yet I did it, and I probably


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did it well—I was told I was a model patient once—because my capacity for reality testing and pragmatic realism was as revved up as my capacity for reverie. The parts of me did not change. The inter-relations of my parts did. They changed to cope with the urgencies and constraints of my situation, and the net effect—so I see it now—was to make a life for myself in the world as it now was for me. I had lost control of my life—my body had turned against me. Death seemed a shadowy presence. It signified; I interpreted. I was aware of it as a condition of my own possibility and this made a difference in how I evaluated life and self. I had a new role as a patient, complicating my other roles. I had a transformed perspective on my existence—a sense of an expansive future lost, replaced with the thought that I might soon die. I had always had a sense of the fragility of life—this now had a new, personal, dimension. I had always had intuitions about the inexhaustible value of life, and this emerged, in a dizzying, dissonant way, as part of my experience of being hospitalized. I thought that I would die, and that this is what I would lose: everything. I rediscovered, too, a love of life, and a sense of my existence grounded in that love; but with this came an overwhelming grief. I found my life as I had to let it go, as it was torn away from me. All of this pushed into the core of my whole subjective existence. I pushed back. I had to cope with my psychological reaction as much as with the pressure of events, circumstances, disease. Parts of me emerged, erupted—offering themselves, almost, to the larger me. For it was disorienting, both the coping I had to do, and the improvising of a self I had to do, in order to cope at all. It shook me to the core of my being. It took time to orient myself to my new condition. Looking back on it, I see an almost ritual and obsessive quality to my walks and my work of remembering. Walking is not lying in bed—it has that meaning, too. It is not dying. I called these my walkabouts. As an undergraduate in a course taught by Robert Tonkinson, who worked with Australian Aborigines, I had read Stanner’s classic essay on their concept of the Dreaming, or Dreamtime, the period in which the creative ancestors had made the world, established the moral order to which humanity should conform, and then entered the ground, the land. I had a sense of how Aborigines might participate in this creative epoch, made present and immediate through ritual. Ritual participants could take part in events that defined the very character of existence. By doing so they defined the self in some basic way. I see my walks around the ward in somewhat this way; each one was a walkabout in memory and reverie, part of

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my California dreaming, putting me in touch with people who had made my world and shaped me. If the slightly obsessed shuffling of my steps offered me relief from the burden of the immediate situation, it also put me in touch with the sources of my own being. This is how I did my life review. Other people will do it in other ways. The next section tells of where I went, and what I found there.

What the Left Hand Wrote: Epitaph for a Small World Come with me, Imagination, into this iron house And we will watch from the doorway the years run back, And we will know what a peasant’s left hand wrote on the page. —Patrick Kavanagh

I have always thought it good to write on the margins. What is jotted there is often the thought that takes one a step farther, because it is a first response, and incomplete. I now have, in fact, some personal reasons for jotting notes down on the margins of my own existence, reasons that perhaps do shed a little more light on the problem of self. I have my new identity as a cancer patient, and I have to face up, not just to the possibility of my death, but to the loss of my life as I have known it. What awareness of self can I sustain in the face of my awareness of all that comes with having cancer? I cannot beg off by saying I am not a native, for I certainly inhabit existence as a self. I can’t escape the general condition of selfhood by standing somewhere else. This is true of my present predicament, too, and of the problem of self and meaning it involves. I cannot stand outside of the experience of being a cancer patient, a cancer “victim,” who hopes to become a “survivor,” a person with a terrible disease, any more than I can stand outside any other part of my life and experience. I was sick. I thought I was dying. One does not achieve some new awareness all at once: it creeps in along the margins, and only belatedly do you realize what you have been doing. What I found myself doing, by degrees, as I lived in the cancer ward was searching for models: models for suffering, models for dying. Death has a relevance it had not had before. In the hospital and out, there were plenty of reminders of my mortality—the line that fed me infusions and chemo; the nausea and sickness; the statistics on survival and death; the whole cultural aura


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of death that cancer has—and these were coming to shape my selfawareness. Psychologically, as I see it now, I am one of those more likely to embrace the thought of death than deny it. More accurately, I do some of both, but with a conscious tilt toward embracing it—perhaps my unconscious pushes just as hard for denial, because that is what allows us to go on. But as a conscious value, I believe that I should live in reality. I can read the statistics. I know what they mean. I am not going to distort knowledge to get the conclusions I want. Yet I see now that embracing the thought of death—telling myself that I had to have a sense of reality about it—tended to push me toward framing my reflections on my existence, and a good part of my experience of being alive, in terms of dying. Medical routines were just medical routines: my body had its place in these disciplines, in these necessary steps, in the progression of the treatment program. My self-awareness was not satisfied. It wanted more. It drifted off. I was not any good at watching television. I was good at remembering, at visualizing scenes of my life, now figured emotionally against the background of my death. I came to see myself as liminal: as having been separated from my previous existence, thrown into an uncertain state, between lives and selves as it were, and not yet rejoined to anything. I hovered in this ambiguous betwixt and between—hoping to rejoin life but thinking beyond that hope. It was a twilight existence, everything hanging in the balance. I don’t think I really have the words for what this is like. But I can try, trying to grasp it in an image, which is what I found myself doing while in the hospital. One of the memories that came to me in the hospital was of a night in rural Wisconsin, visiting family, staying in one of the last log houses in the area that these relatives own, nestled in a green valley with a creek flowing behind it. There are woods on top of the hill and no other houses close by. The place is an important part of my childhood. On this visit I went out at night and was amazed at the fireflies. I had never seen such a blooming of fireflies. They flowed along the creek like a milky way. In the hospital I revisited this memory—a vivid one. The memory was an escape. It was better than TV. I had revisited this memory before, over the years, because it was remarkable and beautiful; here was the floating essence of my childhood experience of midsummer nights. Now I found in it a kind of metaphor. My existence, my fragile hold on existence: like a firefly hovering in the space between life and death, as likely to fly off one way as the other, back toward the bright

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light spilling out from the doors and windows of the cabin, or into the dark, on the other side of the stream. The dark would not be so bad. Helen was haunted by Ted. I was becoming haunted by my own sense of death. I was cosmologizing my own experience, placing it in the natural order, and giving it a place in the most familiar and comforting images I have, which carry for me a sense of home and transcendence. This may not be the worst psychological defense. I needed to establish, not just rationally, but through imagery, that death was not so bad. You can see some of the significance of all this. In the face of cancer and the thought of death I became a new question to myself. What am I?—in relation to this. How do I respond? I found that the notes I was inspired to make on the margins of my life in answer to these questions are mostly about others and carry a burden of feeling, but offer the release of feeling, too. If feeling signals something about yourself to yourself—that you are in pain or doubt, say, or that you see yourself as a good or bad person—its also signals the possibility of change, of coming to grasp yourself and the world in new ways. Since here I can mostly write about others, then, who have emotional significance for me, I feel the comfort of solidarity, and I suppose offering some left-handed jottings about how the “years run back” for me may shed a little light on my experience of selfhood, and not do any real harm. I write, too, of the passing of a world. I grew up in rural Wisconsin, in a kind of ethnic and class community that I suspect barely exists anymore. My mother was the youngest daughter of a mother who had come to America from Norway as a seven-year-old child. Grandmother Sherpe saw whales from the boat on the way over. It was a dream-like story for us kids who had never seen the sea. My grandmother married a man in the town of Westby, in the Norwegian settlement area of southwestern Wisconsin. My grandfather had been born in this country, but somehow remained more embedded in the local Norwegian culture than my grandmother, who I suspect as an immigrant thought it important to speak English. My grandfather could speak English, but felt more at home in Norwegian. At some point I started to wonder why I had not had the long talks with my grandfather that others seemed to have with theirs, and finally realized my grandfather did not have all that much to say in English. In any event, silence was a fate that might await you, in the time and place he lived, where being reserved was a kind of dignity. My mother married a working-class man, my father, not Norwegian, who worked on the shop floor of a factory until one day several tons


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of steel fell on one of his legs, crushing it. Stubbornly, he refused to let his doctors amputate it. He suffered the rest of his life for this decision, living in pain. His leg often got infected, and as a child, I often thought of it as slowly decaying, rotting away, the limb of a corpse attached to the body of a living man. I remember him riding my bike once, his bad leg sticking straight out, down the long steep gravel driveway that led to our house, laughing as he made the turn toward the house. It is the only memory I have of him laughing, openly and expansively, caught up in the moment, just the moment. Mostly he was engaged in some task, some job, some deliberate effort toward some necessary end. It was a rare moment, then, that mad reckless swoop down the hill, risking life and crippled limb. He was mostly work, not play. He liked a quiet moment with his pipe, after he had given up first cigarettes and then cigars. I remember him blowing smoke and making not-so-funny jokes. Over the years, pain settled into the lines on his face. I imagine pain explained much of his exactness and irritation, and the way he was physically there but away. Despite his pain and bad leg—that is what he called it—he did what he was supposed to do. He made himself a good provider, in the classic working-class American sense of the term. He was an honest and decent man and he lived his pain honestly. It was not an excuse, just a fact. When he could not work at a job and my mother became the good provider, he diligently vacuumed the house, prepared lunches, and sent his sons off to school. He had a stock of proverbs that I still use. When he was older, and the endless hours of pain stretched on, he started drinking, but only one careful shot of whiskey a night, every sleepless night, as he sat in his armchair. The factory job was one source of income; my parents farmed on the side to supplement, and, I am pretty sure, because it was just more fun than factory work, and gave some satisfaction that being wage slaves did not. I formed the goal of not being a factory worker. Later in life I ran across an anthropological term that described us perfectly: worker–peasants. When the factory closed down for good, my mother went back to school and learned to be a nurse. It must have seemed a natural choice. She knew a lot about hospitals. Not only had she been here with my father during his year in one, but my older sister was at the Mayo Clinic for a long time being treated for the rheumatoid arthritis that eventually killed her. My sister was a happy child, even when she was dying. I found her physical symptoms strange, and she used to explain the disease to me, as she understood it, a seven-year-old sister talking to a five-year-old

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brother. She came home near the end. I remember the day she died. I came downstairs and they were just zipping up a blue body bag on a gurney. My father looked very sad, sitting on the edge of his bed, bent over, as slack as if the life had drained out of him, staring at the floor. My mother was weeping quietly. It occurred to me then that living involved a fair amount of dying. As we saw with Helen the widow, we often find out who we are with the death of others. What I take away from my sister’s death now, besides its revelation of realities to me—death and grief—was how cheerfully she went about dying. I may not remember her bad days, and my contact with her was probably carefully managed, but I don’t remember her as sad or angry. I wonder now if she was also conspiring to keep the living happy, in the way the dying sometimes do, even children (BluebondLangner 1978). I do not remember anyone acknowledging that she was dying. I wonder if my parents simply could not accept the fact. I would not be surprised. In any event, for me her death came out of the blue, even though she spent much time in the hospital. As for what her death meant to me—I don’t think I can even begin to think it through. I dreamt of being buried alive after her funeral, although I don’t remember the funeral. Against such fears, I kept a memory of being on a carnival ride with her, wildly spinning high in the air. I was scared, holding on to her. She was laughing with delight. I held on to the memory, because I found in it evidence that one did not have to be afraid.

Impermanence Life rushes along. The terms of impermanence are social, but also biological and psychological. When I was a child my father carried me in his arms on a picket line. It must have been hard for him. He was a union man, though, for he owed the union a debt. The union would not let the company fire him after the steel fell on his leg and crushed it. The company gave him a job as a clerk. He never made much money at it. Then the factory closed. He was left out in the cold, crippled, not highly employable. He moved the family to Arizona in what I imagine was an effort to create a new life. I did not go, until later. I lived with my great aunt, my last year in high school. She was very old, and I learned most of what I know about what is like to be old in America from her. I learned that the old


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do not always know how to take care of themselves (she used to eat very little), that an empty house is an empty house, that silence can be hard for some people to bear when it stretches on for days and seems to stretch out to the horizons of the world. I am sure I was an enigma, but it did not matter. I was someone to talk to, a human presence, and a connection with living, a break in the silence settling over her existence. I sensed that the basic act of human solidarity is simply being there. My father’s move to Arizona did not seem like much of a success to me, when I eventually went out to begin my college career at the University of Arizona. But then success is not the right concept. It is a middle-class notion—success at school, success at work. What my parents did was survive. They survived and they kept a little dignity for themselves. My father’s last job, I remember, was as an attendant at a gas station. I felt something, as a young man, seeing him work there, and not being able to help him. The job was too much for him, and eventually he had to quit. My mother worked as a nursing aide in a local psychiatric hospital. They scrimped and they survived. They had little pleasure in life, and much pain; but they took pleasure in people and children, my mother with calm good sense, my father with the intermittent interest of someone in physical pain. I don’t think his body supported much of an interest in the world, those long last years. He was, I think now, shrinking, imploding by slow degrees in his last decade of life, vanishing. The frailty of his body took him away, who knows where—sleep walking toward death, I suppose. Parts of him had started to wink out long before the final, fatal, heart attack. The closing of a factory, the birth of a child, dying and death, a high school graduation, a new job, a rift in the family—these make a difference. The social and the biological are present in the same space of existence. In this space, birth, human connection, and death form the basic and inescapable human cycle in which selfhood develops. Many changes can provoke psychological transitions, but we should not neglect birth and death as facts of the human world. These events define becoming and impermanence. Having experienced all of this—the factory closing that threw my father out of work and my mother into the world of work; the birth of my children; death in my family, marriage and divorce—I know we respond with the work of self, that kind of fitful art by which we try to make and manage our lives. I take seriously Hannah Arendt’s (1958) focus on the existential structure of human experience: birth and death in a world of others is

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the human condition. Human selves can never escape some encounter with birth, death, and other selves. I recall the death of my father—how my mother’s phone call left me crying helplessly in the hallway of my Boston apartment. Remembering his death, and him, I am tempted by the thought that we are reborn each time someone close to us dies. It is a more bearable to think this than to believe we die a little each time. Perhaps someone else might be brought to some new consciousness of self and world with our own death. This whole mode of thinking constitutes a psychological defense, in the sense of taking a little of the pain out of loss and grief. Like Helen and Benjamin, I was haunted by other people. I am sure these people are my objects, in the sense we have discussed, are integrated into my capacity to live, my repertoire for feeling and being, in ways that go far beyond what I experience consciously. I also had the experience, however, of being somehow engaged with them as part of my conscious experience. I experienced them on waves of emotion, and oriented myself to them. At moments, this had an overpowering intensity. The moviemaker Spielberg in his war movie Saving Private Ryan portrays men wounded and dying on a D-day beach calling out for their mothers. In my room in the cancer ward, I called out for my father in this way. I confess I was shocked by my own vulnerability, and need. I should have known—I had broken down when I had heard of his death. I knew how deeply connected to him I was. Now I wanted, and needed, his emotional presence. It provided an orientation on some basic emotional level. Death would not be leaving the world forever. It would be joining my father. I did not believe this consciously. I felt it, powerfully. For it is, I imagine, a possibility that I have, to find my way back to my father. Not in death, but in memory: to discover what he meant to me, to make emotionally palpable to myself the way he supported my entry into life, and to use this to cope with the crisis in which I found myself, which taxed my capacity to endure. A deep connection broke to the surface in response to my predicament. I could give the experience meaning; I could orient myself in terms of it. I could make him a model for suffering through what I was suffering, for my conscious evaluation of him was that he had suffered successfully. This process of orienting my self using my father as a beacon existed in tandem with a gut-wrenching need to have his presence. There were moments when I not only used him as a moral model for how you suffer, but gave myself over to his emotional presence. There


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were moments when I called out, when I wanted his presence, and no other presence would do. All this is perfectly obvious, but quite remarkable. Human beings do not die or suffer alone, however alone their death or suffering may be. They die and suffer with others insofar as their capacity for awareness and self-awareness has been marked by others. I had people— family—to support me, but I also revived my significant objects as part of my experience. This parallels Helen’s revival of Ted, and Benjamin’s revival of his mother. It is a human capacity, to make our objects appear in our self-experience. Visiting the rag and bone shop of the heart, we each find something to work with, as we try to master our experience and create images—perhaps very incomplete ones— that will help us enter our lives. Where else would I go to suffer—to seek support—than to those who had supported me in my entry into life? For me, at least, it makes emotional sense that the end of life would bend back to the beginning of my life. I expect this is the emotional circuit my life review was meant to close. Maybe I won’t die. Even if I am off the hook for a few years, I expect to revisit this place where objects surface. In such evocations we can find self.

Numbering the Dead When my grandmother was dying of cancer, at night she would lie on the couch in the living room of her house talking to herself. She was counting her dead. It was a way of preparing to join them, I think. She would speak the names. Then she would tell herself where they had lived. She might say something about them, but it seemed more important to her to say where they had lived, to locate them in places. Then she would say: they’re dead now, too. They’re gone now. Sometimes she would try to work out when they had died. Mostly, though, she just whispered that they were dead. She was a tall woman with long gray hair that she braided and wrapped around her head. My grandmother was living with my uncle; he had taken over the farm. My uncle and I didn’t say anything to her. I didn’t know what to say. I was helping my uncle with his work, and trying to make some money so I could go to college. We were both tired at the end of the day. Some years later, in college, I ran across a phrase—it was supposed to be a phrase from French peasant culture—that described

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my uncle and myself at the end of a day: Their work had entered their bodies. Our work had entered our bodies. We sat and listened to my grandmother speak, saying nothing. There was nothing to say and she was not speaking to us. Death was entering her body and she was leaving it. She was counting her losses. This was literally part of what she was doing; you could see her counting on her fingers in the shadows. She numbered her dead, I suppose, as a way of numbering her days. I am next. Soon I will be dead. I did not give any thought to the importance of placing her dead on the land. Thinking back, though, it makes a kind of sense. She identified persons with places. She lived in a kind of familiar moral landscape; places had people and people had places. What does death do? It empties places. In her world, a person had an identity connected to the farm or house they lived in. After death, they are remembered, in passing, when the living pass by, and mark these places. So-and-so used to live there. They moved. They died. They are buried some place. Maybe we can find their gravestone, in some little cemetery along a country road, by a country church. My grandmother’s dying was about relationships. She numbered her days by numbering her dead, placing herself in her own geography of loss. They passed out of the country. She would pass out of the country. Maybe she thought she would join them. But she feared death, I am certain. She numbered the dead with anxiety. Not peace. I think it more likely that she thought she was going to lose them again. I do not feel she numbered her dead and let go of them. She had not made her peace with death. She was not raging against the dying of the light, either, however; it was more like she was unraveling herself, letting threads attached to others spin off into the dark, taking parts of her with them. Thinking back on it now, I think she was afraid; she faced a sad and frightening loss of self that she had no power to stop. She could only let herself be carried away a little with each name, away into a darkness and oblivion far away from the places she had known. I feel that when she lay down and began to name her losses, nothing but loss existed for her, or nothing but more loss—the world and herself shrinking down to a point, the point vanishing. Her dying does not seem to imply individualism to me, although there is a self there, involved in that death, an individual self that had a life, in a cultural world, and faced its own disappearance in terms of memories of others. Her life was not, I think, any more individualistic or less relational than her dying.


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The fact that her dying haunts me a little also speaks, perhaps, to a quality of experience not embraced by individualism—or registered or done justice to in critiques of individualism. She died; I wonder and regret. The individual selves involved here cannot be wrenched out of their attachments. Neither can the existence of the individual self be wrenched out of these experiences. *

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Two paragraphs from Hannah Arendt (1958): The birth and death of human beings are not simple natural occurrences, but are related to a world into which single individuals, unique, unexchangeable and unrepeatable entities, appear and from which they depart. Birth and death presuppose a world which is not in constant movement, but whose durability and relative permanence makes appearance and disappearance possible, which existed before any one individual appeared into it and will survive his eventual departure. Without a world into which men are born and from which they die, there would be nothing but changeless eternal recurrence, the deathless everlastingness of the human as of all other animal species. A philosophy of life that does not arrive, as did Nietzsche, at the affirmation of “eternal recurrence”. . . as the highest principle of all being, simply does not know what it is talking about. The word “life,” however, has an altogether different meaning if it is related to the world and meant to designate the time interval between birth and death. Limited by a beginning and an end, that is, by two supreme events of appearance and disappearance within the world, it follows a strictly linear movement whose very motion nevertheless is driven by the motor of biological life which man shares with other living things and which forever retains the cyclical movement of nature. The chief characteristic of the specifically human life, whose appearance and disappearance constitute worldly events, is that it is itself always full of events which ultimately can be told as a story, establish a biography; it is of this life, bios as distinguished from mere zoe, that Aristotle said that it “somehow is a kind of praxis.” For action and speech, which, . . . [belong] close together in the Greek understandings of politics, are indeed the two activities whose end result will always be a story with enough coherence to be told, no mater how accidental or haphazard the single events and their causation may appear to be. (96–97)

These paragraphs serve well enough for my grandmother’s dying. She was a single individual. Her body died, but it was the death of a self. She experienced it as something more than a biological process: disease

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killing an organism. Dying was a departure, felt to have finality. It was not envisioned as “eternal recurrence.” Bodies are formed of matter made, ultimately, in stars; but my grandmother did not approach death as a reforming of atoms, or as biological recycling; dust to dust, stardust to earthdust. There was no sense of a return to earth or oneness with nature. Death was the loss of a world, the loss of others, the loss of self. At least this is how I experienced it, then and now. For what it is worth, I feel she did, too—that numbering her dead was leave-taking. It was a private ritual. It said, how much have I lost, not how much have I got; it was not about compensation or making another world to live in, but about the loss of a world, piece by piece, ending up at this moment. She was saying good-bye; and preparing herself for disappearance. She had appeared in a world; it would exist after her. The land, its habitations, dwelling places, places of worship, would be there after she was gone; the barns, roads, houses, farms, country churches that she used as landmarks to locate people, herself, would exist after she died. But it already was not her world: too full of emptiness where people had been. I am not so sure her life, at that point, constituted a life in any meaningful way. It was reduced to litany. If there were stories implied in her recitation of the dead, they all ended the same way, in death. Ending in death, people had an end, but no beginning. Their appearance had no significance; their disappearance did. *

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For in every action what is primarily intended by the doer, whether he acts from natural necessity or out of free will, is the disclosure of his own image. Hence it comes about that every doer, in so far as he does, takes delight in doing; since everything that is desires its own being, and since in action the being of the doer is somehow intensified, delight necessarily follows . . . Thus, nothing acts unless [by acting] it makes patent its latent self. (Dante, quoted in Arendt 1958, 175)

Alas, I disagree with Dante. He claims too much. The doer may only intend to get something done—a chore, a task—and not primarily intend to disclose a self-image. Even dying—maybe especially dying—may be something you just want to get done, a chore, a necessity. I altered Dante’s quote in memory. I do not know if I should count this as a deficiency or a creative act. When I looked the Dante up in


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Arendt, I thought it would say something to the effect that “every doer by acting makes itself make self,” and “seeks to transform selfimage into being and actualize it in action” or every human “makes self as it attempts to make a life for itself.” I suppose this marks me as modern, and Dante as part of antiquity. Dante conceived of agency as expressive—one might find the self in the cosmos, discover it, and so disclose to oneself what exists. I imagine that Michelangelo might have seen the sculpture in the stone. I don’t believe it was there before he set his chisel to the marble. He might have discovered. I think he made. My version does not place the self out in the universe, where it might await discovery and the moment of discovery cause delight. I see human beings as caught up in interaction with the world. They constitute themselves in this interaction, and must deal with the consequences. Only sometimes do they catch themselves in the act of creation. The self seizes a scattering of possibilities to face up to existence, to grasp the experience of being alive. Doing so, it returns the self to life—where else could it go?—to deal with whatever this involves. Dying in Wisconsin is just an example. What self-agents intend is not the disclosure of self-image as if such an image existed before one ever had a chance to live. It is the creation and transformation of the self and its relation to a world, undertaken in response to the way that world and that self have become intertwined. One disclose one’s contingent becoming, not one’s absolute being—one grasps the self-image that reflects engagement with the world, the way it has been explored in the course of living. Then what has been created may need to be disclosed and transcended, in the process of development, in rites of transformation, and occasionally in acts of self-destruction (Kegan 1982). Think of Helen. No doubt from time to time selves intend to know themselves. So the disclosure of self-image, the making patent of a latent self, is an important process. But selves as agents may also attempt to alter or transform or optimize or sooth or destroy themselves. When the self acts on itself it seeks not only to make patent its latent self, but also to participate somewhat in its own creation and maintenance, transformation or adaptation, guiding itself here rather than there in the world, all in light of culture and personal experience. What self must adapt to is not only external circumstances; self must adapt to self. What did my grandmother intend? She disclosed her world, these places, churches, lands, and a habit of placing persons in them.

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She hung on to life; she was not dead. Others were. She anticipated her own death. She made death yield a community. She enumerated the members of her own community of the dead. She alone was not dying; she was dying as others had died. Yet she was dying. I detected no will to live or die. *

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Jorge Luis Borges (1998) says something that seems relevant to me: There is nothing very remarkable about being immortal; with the exception of mankind, all creatures are immortal, for they know nothing of death. What is divine, terrible, and incomprehensible is to know oneself immortal. I have noticed that in spite of religion, the conviction as to one’s immortality is extraordinarily rare. Jews, Christians, and Muslims all profess to believe in immortality, but the veneration paid to the first century of life is proof that they truly believe only in those hundred years, for they destine all the rest, throughout eternity, to rewarding or punishing what one did when alive. (191; italics in the original)

What we know is that we are mortal. We bring this awareness to dying. I have no sense of whether my grandmother was devout or not. She went to the country church down the road from her farm. She is buried there. Somehow I don’t think an afterlife would have seemed to her the same as the family farm, the same as the places where she lived her life, unless heaven was exactly the same as home, with a pickup parked by the kitchen door, and onions growing in the kitchen garden. She would not have imagined that kind of continuity. I can only see her in the way Borges describes: as entering a vast uncertainty. What interests me is that one can be dying, and what one feels is grief, mourning, loss, not fear, or not just fear. I saw fear in my grandmother; but why did she seem so lost in some private ritual of mourning? Death to her was the loss of a world, the loss of self, self and world interfused. She knew she had cancer and that she was dying; what vision of self develops to contain such self knowledge? In her case she numbered her dead; she remembered the land and the people. I suppose we can see this as her framing dying and death in terms of her conception of the good, her sense of what had value, meaning, and significance for her. I imagine that the awareness of mortality might weigh on consciousness in many different ways. Someone like my grandmother might turn her thoughts and feelings—all the richness of memory,


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feeling, desire, as these infuse a sense of self and world—on what really mattered for her in everyday life, on what she conceives as the good of life. So I imagine some one else might die religiously, turning his face toward the face of god that he imagines in the dark, even if Borges is correct about the ambivalence with which people envision afterlife and salvation. Others might die with regret, or might wish to forgive or be forgiven—dying has its moral dimensions. One might just want to get it over with—I imagine my father was a bit like that. He would have been tired, tired of the pain, and I believe he would not have wanted to have the last of his dignity taken away from him in well-intentioned efforts to save him. He thought in those terms—in terms of what the world could take away and not take away. He would not have thought the doctors could give him a life worth living, for he judged life by its quality, by his vision of the good of a life. But he would have thought they could take his dignity away. Some people may just want a chance to say good-bye. I know someone who spoke of death as the unraveling of the mind, as a dissolving and melting away of what a person had known, thought, felt. It leaves a void, he indicated, like having a poem erased forever before your eyes. No doubt there are other psychologies of death. Maybe one can die imagining it involves just oneself, and focus on the vicissitudes, and the meaning, of one’s own experience. Maybe one can even turn dying into a psychotherapeutic process, reviewing one’s life in a way that allows some acceptance of one’s life and, therefore, of one’s death. So I imagine there are many ways of dying. My grandmother died as she lived: a woman of just this land, just these places on the land, just these people. As I will die. *

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In wrongly remembering Dante’s words, I thought the phrase “the disclosure of his own self” should be “the constitution of his own self.” If the doing is directed to self—if self is the object of its own agency—what self seeks can be more than disclosure of its own image. The acting self seeks to make as well as disclose, to shape as well as express, and to orient its living to some vision of life in the process. Dante thought it a delight to discover the self. I don’t believe it is always a delight. The discovery is often done in distress, the disclosure forced, brought out by suffering, by the urgent problems of existence a person faces, as in Helen’s case. In numbering her dead, I suppose

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my grandmother disclosed her own self, and constituted it. She had a world. The lights were going out. Was she not waiting for her “time to be up” or for her “turn to come”?—and then in the act, the doing, that is dying, what image would be disclosed, what self made? In the end, there is an end, to disclosure and to making. Until near the end, however, my grandmother went on disclosing her world and self to herself, and, in a sense, fashioned self and world into a vehicle for dying. Dying is, after all, an inherent and necessary part of living. My grandmother hung on for a while. She finally died of breast cancer on March 6, 1974. I don’t remember the funeral. Like all deaths, it removed her from language. What was left unsaid remains unsaid. What was said cannot be unsaid. Who knows which might be more painful—more silent—and which might better define the finality of death for those who go on living? Death is someone absolutely disappearing from the world. Later my uncle would die in the same house, in the same room where my grandmother numbered her dead as she lay on the couch. I was not surprised that there was no one there when he died. I thought he might have preferred it that way. He had always been a self-isolating, difficult, and essentially lonely man. He had always been the scrupulously exacting caretaker of his own painful solitude. He had never married. He maintained his distance from others and wrapped himself in a deep reserve. His death seemed to me as lonely as his existence had been, and of a piece with it. They did not find him for several days after his death. When they finally entered his house, they found he had passed away, as they say, sitting upright in the large reclining chair in the living room. That chair was his prerogative, of course, as head of household. It was his throne, and it was fitting that he died in it. He was the master of his own solitude, and its victim. Like a mountain king in his hall he passed from silence to silence. People very often, I imagine, die in the way they have lived. My uncle never managed to overcome something in himself that would have allowed other people to be more fully part of his life, and death. A strong self had petrified in some way, become rigid in the presence of life. It served him in some way, made his life somehow possible. Yet he arrived at this point by some process. If in the end he could not change, adapt, sprout a new self, this process too was a work of self. I am (as I see it) luckier, more out-reaching, more flexible perhaps, but I doubt that my uncle and I differ in kind. He just took the process of entering life somewhere else. Like Helen, we try to maintain the central values of the self as long as we can.


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What am I doing with these memories? Some people, I am told, wrestle with god. That is not my direction. In the shadow of death, I wrestle with time and memory. What I am trying to do is take hold of time, turn on my own center of gravity, and lunge into life, taking all of these memories and meanings with me. The hope, I imagine, the irrepressible hope at the bottom of it all, is that I can become what I have to be, that there are lessons to be learned, that can be lived, even as you lie dying, at the end of your days. Why, on my circuits of the cancer ward, did I think of my grandmother, my father, and my uncle? I suppose I was seeking a model for dying. I seek to master death in the only way I think it can be mastered, by making it mean something, by placing it in relationship to life as I know it. I take it inward, and I let my inwardness embrace the world I knew and the life I lived. I master death, the prospect and imminence of death, by taking up death itself as a perspective on my life. I want to make it give me the meaning of my life. Making death reveal life is a way of gathering the stuff of my experience into a discernable form I can review. Like Benjamin with his mother’s madness, I try to make this a process of self-knowing. Looking at the world in light of my own possible death helps me see more clearly what events, place, and people have meant to me. This is a good, for me. I also need the solidarity this life review brings. I would not be alone, at the end. Would you? I wonder how alone my uncle was in the end, or whether, like my grandmother, he populated his dying with images of others, with memories of what transpired between them, and located these in the places that encompassed them, that brought them together. Perhaps Dante was right after all, about discovering the self. Yet perhaps I am not wrong, about making self in living, either. I discover what I have made. Looking back over the years, I see a life and a self, interfused. There is a kind of quiet delight in this discovery, and I am glad to have it. Wresting meaning from time, I find that I can make peace with my existence. It is a good enough peace. If I go on living— who knows? A cure may be developed—I am sure the peace will break down, and it may wear thin as things progress. But I have it, for moments, and that is a good. An irony here is that I am so completely prepared to die now that I don’t quite know what I will do if I live—I would have to sprout yet another self to cope with that situation. Rereading this whole section later, I realize that, like Benjamin with his mother, the meaning of my father is not “resolved” for me. If

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his mother’s distress was a problem of meaning for him, one drawn into the process of making meaning for himself—and so into feeling and emotion as they connect us to the world—my father’s agonies and long decline, his grimness, the way he was away, there but not there, have always been a problem of meaning for me, and his struggles have meaning for me, not just in my reveries and reflections, but in my capacity to endure, my determination to find meaning, and my orientation to suffer. I measure myself, in some ways, by my father, and I attempt to be as good as he was. My uncle represents the mystery of death and loneliness. My grandmother represents just the opposite. She always “kept the family together,” as my mother put it. Death for her was faced in this modus vivendi of solidarity. It had continuity with her life. It is, for me, an ideal. These passages are, then, like the postcards and letters my grandmother wrote while alive. They are meant to connect. They are meant to keep me from my uncle’s fate, part of a struggle to make death not only meaningful, but an act of solidarity, a human act that keeps together a self, a family, a tradition. My father’s life always represented pain and struggle to me, struggle against the longest odds, but he died affirming his life. My mother tells me that he told her, “I had a good life. I had three wonderful sons. Lynn was wonderful.” As I write this, a line of Japanese poetry floats into my awareness, nudges it way into my wonderment that a man in so much pain for so many years could in the end judge his life wonderful. I believe it was written by a man whose daughter had died: “The world of tears is a world of tears. / And yet, and yet.” I thought about my father’s grief when his daughter died: yet he died saying, “I had a good life.” Dying is not just a biological fact, not for human beings. It is a process that involves self-awareness. It is moral fact. We mark it with moral judgments on our lives, because we are moral creatures, prone to judging good and bad. Dying challenges us to come to term with our lives. I am glad my father could affirm the good in his life. My father seems a good model for dying.

Sifting through Cultural Models One day in the hospital I thought about ways I would not want to die. I thought of accidents, war, planes going down in fiery crashes. Sudden death does not allow you to prepare, to review, to say good-bye, to embrace what life has been for you.


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Then I thought about the antihero of Machado De Assiss’ novel Epitaph for a Small Winner. I realized I had never really absorbed the significance of the ironic premise. The narrator, Braz Cubas, is writing posthumously—that is, from a point of view where he could plausibly, if impossibly, judge his life as a whole. I had always read the book for the way it cuts through pretension and hypocrisy, for its irony and critical distance, its keen eye for the human comedy. Now I “got” the rest of it. For me, it becomes a model for how I would most not want to die, because it models how not to live. Sontag (1990) notes that the “main events” of the life portrayed are “those which did not happen or were judged disappointing” (xiv). The character could not, somehow, hold people close. The novel ends with the judgment that his life was really not lived. He killed time. He drifted. He went through the motions of living but never, somehow, really lived. It came to an end. It did not mean anything. I would not want to exit life with the misanthropic disillusionment, the despairing yet urbane bitterness of this fictional self. It seems to me unwise to judge life in terms of what did not happen—an infinite number of things did not happen. If you go that route you can be as disappointed as you want to be. Having decided this, by some intuitive act of will, the question is whether one can find meaning in what did happen. I would not want to echo Braz Cubas’s conclusions about his life. He offers a list of negatives: what he did not do, the fame and power he did not have, the loves and relationships he did not have, what he did not become. He says, finally, claiming it as a positive: “I had no progeny, I transmitted to no one the legacy of our misery.” I don’t think the self-awareness one achieves in the process of dying should be a pointless self-awareness of the meaningless nature of one’s absurd existence. I think it is perfectly appropriate for people to distill the good out of their memories of their lives and to hold on to this sense of the good as they lie dying. I don’t mind if near the end my father let go of the pain, and kept the joy. I am glad to know this. It suggests to me a kind of goal for dying—where you want to end up, psychologically, in the process of getting your mind around the fact that you are dying. It would not make much sense to hold on to the pain, and let go of the joy, unless your whole personality was for some reason wrapped up in holding on to the pain. Some people are like that, but, based on the people I have met in the past couple years, I rather think the dying mostly want to find meaning in their existence. This is not just a matter of

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ignoring all the pain and concentrating on the happiness, but accepting both, and then affirming what, for you, counts as the good of your life. I would hope that we have a chance, in living, and even in dying, to transmit to someone something other than the legacy of our misery. The pressures of making a living are such that it is easy to rush past such possibilities. Hope and ambition may rush us past them, too, as we devote ourselves to the pursuit of whatever goals we may have, or our society may have for us. Yet if in the end, like Braz Cubas, you don’t achieve fame or power, riches or glory, if you don’t become a minister of state or a Hollywood celebrity, you don’t really have to count this against yourself. If you have to accept that life was not everything you had hoped, then the thought in the face of death that you helped others in some way, that you were capable of some kindness, that you enjoyed life, won’t be unbearable. I find another model for dying in Kurosawa’s movie Ikiru (“To Live”). Here a Japanese government worker finds out that he has cancer, and tries to make up for the life he has not lived. He tries out several approaches to dying. His first efforts to bring closure to his life, to compensate for its limits, are not in the beginning entirely satisfactory. He tries to escape into “fleshpots,” blotting out the reality by drinking and carousing. But this is not who he is—the problem of course, is that he has never known, really, who he is, because he never tried to live, to exert himself against the world. He conformed and he settled for what his job as a minor official brought him. He tries to reconcile himself with his son and daughter-in-law, but does not disclose that he is dying. He tries to have an affair, of sorts, with a young woman. None of these offer him what he wants. Finally, he seizes on the idea that he can help a group of women through his job, although he had never done much on the job except avoid responsibility and risk. He helps them get a park built in their neighborhood. What I see in Ikiru is not just that the dying man wants to help others and wants to end his life with a good deed. I think doing so connects him with others. He does not need recognition as much as he needs this solidarity. His problem is not just that he is dying: his problem in dying, as in living, is that he has been in some profound way, alone. He needs to overcome this, to reach out, to overcome his isolation. I do not mean to diminish his ethical act. Knowing you acted to make other people’s lives better—feeling that you did something good with the time you had—no doubt helps restore the integrity of the self in the face of death. It does not diminish the ethical act to recognize this, since the act that restores the integrity of the self also helps restore the integrity of the world.


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I am just trying to point out the solidarity implied in just this ethical act. He could have used his last few months taking a trip—writing haiku—or lost himself in religious or aesthetic contemplation. Some might affirm the self by doing so, or seek to attenuate their attachments: to “let go.” This would be good, too. I imagine, however, that what mattered for this man was acting on behalf of others to make their lives better. He was not exactly seeking recognition, although he memorialized himself in the park, but seeking to disclose himself in a final, ethical act. Doing so, he harmonizes his life, and his death, his life, with a conception of the good. Surely most people would want to avoid the emptiness and pain implied in Braz Cubas’s act of writing a book after he died about how he never lived. He describes a life that meant nothing in the end—and no doubt there are many ways of avoiding this. What matters, I imagine, is that acts of the end register something of the necessities and choices of the life a person has lived. In Ikiru, the dying man chooses to help some strangers; it is what he needs to do. I see this as an act of solidarity and an act of completion. It is not that he simply wants others present—although he might have wished this. Rather, the movie suggests the meaninglessness of mere recognition by showing a gathering held in his honor after his death; everyone misses the point of his last act. I think the point is that he died a moral agent and overcame his isolation, the passivity that weighed down his existence, in an act of moral solidarity. Who am I, in the face of death? A person might want to define the self in terms appropriate to this problem of meaning and identity. He did, in the end, what he might feel he should always have done. He knows he should not have spent his life shuffling paper and acquiescing to the status quo. He knows he should act to complete the world. Finally, he makes a difference; he compensates for what he did not do. His act leaves the world he is leaving just a little different, just a little better. It matters. It is something. He finds more consolation in this than in his other responses. It is the response that stops or tempers despair, which carousing in the flesh pots or having an affair did not do. Why? I imagine the act of benevolence might have had more dignity. More than this, however, if you imagine that the world is leaving you, not you leaving it, you might wish it well. You might want to send it off with a gift—a gift to someone going off on a long journey on their own. Underneath his indifferent performance of his job, he may have seen himself as charged with taking care of the world. It is this duty that he did not fulfill. He seeks to rectify as much as he can of his own failure as a human being.

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I don’t know—I am just imagining. I am projecting. The novel and the movie are inkblots in which I try to find myself. I would never try to guess what people think and feel. I would ask, observe. Here I am asking myself, observing myself. A character in a movie is only a character in a movie; but the movie can mean something to me. Maybe I can understand what Kurosawa was trying to say, what he felt, the effect he was trying to achieve as an artist, by appealing to my own experience. Maybe I can even make some small difference in how I experience my predicament. I am looking for models, taking them for a test drive. I don’t see myself as an ethical failure, exactly. I wish I had done more good. I know I am not really in a position to make the world a better place, except in very small ways. Still, I cannot escape a sense that I would leave the world better if I could. Perhaps this is indeed the logic of the gift—but what can you give if you have cancer? Lacking the ability to help some neighborhood women build a park, you might give a bit of good humor, some encouragement to the living; nothing as grandiose as a prophecy or a blessing, and nothing as wry or subtle as Helen’s gift of farewell to me, a fruit cake—the gift that no one wants. These words are my gift, I suppose, my message from my bottle. I would like to do some small uncomplicated good. I am not sure uncomplicated goods exist in human life. The dying might give the living what they both want—hope—or at least the pretense that it is going to be okay. Some days, you need this. But it is not uncomplicated. What are you giving when you give hope? Reality?—or—illusion? What you can try to give people, and yourself, is a reason to go on. The character in Kurosawa’s movie gave himself a reason to go on, to the end. The idea of giving the world something preserves agency for the dying person. This gift has to do with exiting the world, not entering it. It is human to give gifts to create relationships and to manage and affirm these. Yet the gift, the good act, the ethical deed, works well enough as the act that ends all acts, that completes the series, that masters as much of death and life as can be mastered. There does not have to be reciprocity. The world bears the burden of gratitude, or the pain and joy of the memory. Its forgetfulness is deferred. The person lingers a little in memory, though the living self is dead. The act of kindness must be considered—in the movie the meaning of the good deed is discussed by coworkers. I doubt the dead man would want their incomprehension. What one wants is different. Such a gift is given to someone else, who will live; or to the world as the world sustains the living. Whatever


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the incomprehension—or rage or guilt—of the living, such “final acts” let some part of you enter the world while the greater you leaves the world forever. Giving empties and lightens; it is easier to float away; one is buoyant with the lightness of being; one is good, a moral self, as much an agent as one can be. It is a good way to face death. Enough. Let me bring this to a close. Let me step back into time. Let me close with one last possibility. Let me end with my first reflections on dying, written in the thick of my struggle with cancer, when I thought I was dying. It captures something of the feeling of falling, of having lost control, of rushing headlong into uncertainty and grief. It belongs more to the rag and bone shop of the heart than to the realm of masterful images, but perhaps these images, because incomplete, suggest the need for an art we don’t have.

I Fell Out of the World: The Art of Dying Did it matter then, she asked herself, walking towards Bond Street, did it matter that she must inevitably cease completely; all this must go on without her; did she resent it; or did it not become consoling to believe that death ended absolutely? —The character of Mrs. Dalloway, in the novel of the same name by Virginia Woolf, 9

I have fallen out of the world. Things happen, life’s contingency: I have an aggressive cancer, a non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma with a poor prognosis. I am at stage four. The median survival time from diagnosis to death is said to be two years. There is treatment; there is no cure. This is what exists for me now. Life and death converge in a new vision of a limited future. Death is always possible. I have to find my way forward by questioning what is possible (and what is not) for me in all this. Can I survive?—it seems unlikely, based on the evidence; but I will have to try, as much to reassure the living as out of any dubious hope. Going by the numbers, my death is a statistical certainty, even if it is not, yet, a clinical necessity. Okay. That is the way it is. I have had to ask myself: what kind of living is dying? If I am to die—we all do, I tell myself and a few friends—can one have a good death in a culture that lacks a philosophy of a good death? I wonder if I will be able to echo the poet Sylvia Plath when she wrote: “Dying Is an art, like everything else.”

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I doubt that I will, because death in this culture is too much of the rag and bone shop of the heart, and not enough of the work of culture. Dying is less art than it is marginalia on the medical text of death. There was the doctor who defined me on one of my trips through the emergency room by saying, while exuding a kind of satisfaction: you have a really rare form of cancer. As if I should be as happy about this as she is. I get it. I am not a human being. I am a good case. Even I see the interest, the clinical fascination, in the disease I have. It is a principle of adaptation. I identify with my doctors. I read journal abstracts. I experience a sense of wonder when thinking about the biological mystery of blood. I watch it drip from a bag down a tube into my vein and I think it would be interesting to be a hematologist. I am falling out of my world. My cancer offers me another world. In identifying with the physicians, and taking an interest in the medical science of cancer, I am trying to see myself in third person terms—as a clinical case. It is not something I can, do for very long, although being able to take this perspective has its usefulness. It helps me communicate with the medical world, because I grasp something of what the world looks like from their point of view—what I look like from their point of view. Yet I cannot eliminate my first-person experience. I cannot be clinical and detached about what I am experiencing. I have cancer. I am being treated. I will live or, more likely, die. It is happening to me. It comes rushing at me, knocks me down. I have to be something in relation to this. I have had to make myself something in relation to this. I am falling. I don’t know how to stop. I make myself a good patient. I earn the compliments offered by the doctors and nurses. I am disciplined, cooperative, and relentlessly rational. They recognize and value this. I do exactly as requested, until faced with critical decisions where I must be my own advocate. I am good at being that, too. I am an impeccable cancer patient. If it were any other role, I might be proud of my performance. Double bind: I am a cancer patient, but I cannot be a cancer patient. I have to be something else. I can’t just be what I am, in this world, the world of cancer. Not even when it comes to engulf most of my existence, and I lie in a hospital bed, tethered to the humming machines pumping cancer killing chemicals into me—into my body—my existence attached to it. I cannot just be a cancer patient. I have to be my children’s father. I hang on to that, and similar thoughts.


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It is now. It is time to make my procession around the boundaries of the world. I pull on my blue bathrobe and grasp my IV pump, pull it along as I enter the corridor. Going down the corridor one way, I pass the reception desk that is the gateway to this little world. Nurses look up, nod and smile, and then go back to their tasks. I turn left and go up the other corridor, then left again, and once again, and pass my room. Repeat. I pass other patients out for their walks. I glimpse others as I pass open doors. They read. They watch TV. They lie silently. The whole circuit takes only a couple minutes. It is a small world. I stop sometimes at a window and look out at the larger world. It seems slightly unreal. I like to watch the wind in the trees. I have time to think as I fall. I am all the things I have to be in this world. In fact it does not demand very much of me, so there is time for reflection. I give some thought to dying. How will I die if that is what I am going to do? I stop myself from thinking about it, quite a lot—suppression is a useful coping skill— but sometimes I reflect on it. Will I be like my father?—winking out one piece at a time over the span of a few years, in a cycle of treatment, remission, relapse? Will I lie on a bed, in the hospital, or at home, or in a hospice, and number my days and my losses in the way my grandmother did? Will they find me rotting in a chair the way they did my uncle? Will I have what it takes to say, “I had a good life.” Will I, like the character in Kurosawa’s movie, get a chance to do some good before I die? I can see that I attempt to grasp dying as something that I will do, not just as something that will happen to me. I want to be involved in it as an agent of some kind. I find myself thinking: dying this way is better than what happened to my aunt. I visited her in the nursing home and she was not there. There was just a body laid out on a bed, her blue eyes open wide, unwinking, and unseeing. I think: I have the chance to go out as myself, with my consciousness, more or less, as these things go, intact. I will die as myself. My self will not die before my body does. I recognize the coping style. One persuades oneself that life can go on. Whatever happens; one finds a good, a possibility, in any situation, no matter how bad. It is a habit I share with others in my family, and perhaps it has a cultural provenance. It is like a joke I heard or read somewhere. What does a Norwegian say, standing in the snow and freezing cold night wind, as her house burns down? “It could have been worse.” It is what my mother would say. In this spirit, one goes on. Dying could be worse. The hospitalization could be worse. The disease cannot

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take away everything (my father’s voice). There is always something good (my mother’s voice). You can always find something to keep despair at bay (my father’s voice, my mother’s voice, my voice). You can get through the day, the hours, the years (you hope) that run forward. You can even deal with the years that run back in memory. There is always some good, somewhere, a silver lining, the fact that you are not dead today, something that can’t be taken away, something, even if you can’t see it. There is always something that you have been and done, that can’t be taken away, that was yours, and was you. All this may be peasant philosophy, crude, rough, devoted simply to keeping you going, practical and life-serving to the point of banality, a peasant’s lefthanded way of coping, but I find it useful. I am what I am. One seeks an art for dying—I do, anyway—because I expect to die with some degree of self-awareness. Some months have passed, and I have been at this business long enough now that I know this. I need the art. So I will make the art. What sustains a self in dying? I don’t think of myself as having spent my life trying to “find” myself. I was just sort of there in my life, a presence with certain possibilities. That I have lived is simply a fact. I am rooted in life. I have taken hold of it. It has found me, taken hold of me. So dying is the art of letting go. You have to help people let go of you. You have to let go yourself. I am not sure how this fits the American ethos, if it does. I am not sure what death with dignity means in this culture, but I am getting some sense of what it means to me. This day, these hours, what they bring. I think back across the years, and mark what I did and I let it pass. These memories and reveries—this flowering of inwardness—are all I have. I want to make the most of them. I don’t want to hold on; I want to let go. I cannot spend the long hours watching television: numb, dumb, baffled. Part of me flows down the rivulets of consciousness that are fear, nausea, grief, sickness unto death. I am aware of my sick body lying beneath the florescent lights of the hospital room. I experience all the interminable nights and days where the passage of time is marked by the nurses coming to change bags of chemicals that are supposed to kill your cancer cells but also ravage your body. I face the reality. Yet I also send myself elsewhere. I get my steam of consciousness, of semiconsciousness, to go back down the years of my life. I escape. I suppose I have to call it escape, flying away on the wings of reverie, seeking images that might sustain me through just this moment, this night of all nights, seeking to come to terms with life and death.


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In coming to terms with my situation, raw feeling matters. It defines existence. So do my walks through memory. I remember the woods of my childhood, the silence under trees, how I watched the snow melt in the spring. I remember my father. I miss him, in a way I have not felt for many years, for most of my adult life. I feel what I feel. It has, for me, a kind of necessity. That, too, is an element of art. Dying is not death; it is part of the process of living. I may die: a consciousness of self develops to register this fact, to embrace and to cultivate it. I try to supply myself with the self that I need. As I feared, the cultural ingredient is missing in this most personal and inescapable art. I cannot find the tradition, the models, one can build on and make one’s own. One can take stock, review your life, write a will or living trust, grant powers of attorney, take hope, find meaning, even participate in rituals—and one does what one has to do—but it is hard to fashion an image or story that sustains a sense of personal wholeness. I think about the irony—I never gave personal wholeness a thought: I just lived. Now I want wholeness? How odd. Mostly, you simply try to do what the days demand. Maybe that is, mostly, enough. Yet it should be possible to have an art, a philosophy, for dying as for living. Maybe the only real basis for that would be to recognize that the process of dying engages you as a whole, as few other experiences do. Dying is done as a self, even if it best not done alone. You participate in it, with all the capacity for feeling and knowing you have, as long as you have these. The emotions can be strong—fear and grief, hope and loss, pride and guilt. The process of dying can involve all the capacities you have for reaching in: the capacity for reverie, for memory, self-reflection—and for reaching out: human solidarity, gifts to the living, accepting care, not being alone at the end. All life stories end in death, and all selfhood. There is a kind of solidarity in knowing this. I would be less than honest if I said I did not fear. It is like the fear of falling—and then you are falling. It is not panic. Yet fear is not the strongest emotion I feel. In fact, it does not, so far, even come close. Grief is the strongest emotion. It is palpable, piercing, sometimes overpowering—almost beyond bearing—this grief I feel for life, now and then. It hits hard, the sense of loss, the knowledge that death means I will leave my children behind, my family, my life, the life I share with them. I suppose the grief makes sense. I will lose everything if I die or when—more when than if in my case, if the statistics mean much. The world will not be gone, but I will have gone from it. My sense of

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myself in the world registers this as a loss, even though it is really just myself, blinking out. The world goes on. In grief we hold on and let go. In my grief, I hold on and let go. I feel sad, knowing that I will be gone from the lives of others, who may feel this loss. I think: my children are too young. I do what I can. I try. I try to fit myself into a world that I now find a little strange, the world of the living. After several bouts of chemotherapy, I get released from the hospital and go to see my son play soccer. The soccer field is on top of a small hill; you walk up from the road. It is the hardest climb of my life. I used to be proud of my ability to trek in the Himalaya; people who lived in those mountains used to laugh at me and say I had done three day’s journey in one. I enjoyed the mocking. Now I almost can’t get up this hill. I sit, exhausted, in the shade of some bushes by the side of the field. I did it, I think. I am proud, happy, but breathless, weak. Someone takes a photo of my daughter sitting by me. Later I am shown the photo. I barely recognize the man in the hat holding my daughter. He looks like no one I have ever seen—not like me. I feel vaguely sad, looking at this figure. No wonder people don’t recognize me, even pass me by. I am told my son keeps a picture of me beneath his pillow. I wonder what picture it is. I wonder how he will remember me. I look like death warmed over. I obsess, intermittently, about insurance and Social Security survivors’ benefits. I would obsess about the emotional effects on my children, but there is nothing I can do about these, except prepare my son and my daughter in ways that are appropriate for their ages. I have spoken to their pediatrician. I don’t hide the fact that I am ill from them, and they visit me in the hospital—but I try to hide the grief I feel. I try to be at peace. Maybe I am even at peace, most of the time. For me there is some truth to the ancient claim that there is no rational basis for fearing death. I will experience dying but I will not experience death. One’s own death is not a state that one can experience. I find that I can soothe myself with this thought, even though I am ironically aware I am managing fear. I fear the suffering of dying, the pain, the biomedical banality of it, the indignity of treatment. I dislike the thought of not being able to control my body or what happens to me. My father asked that no heroic measures be taken to revive him, but my mother could not bring herself to stop the doctors from trying to keep him alive. He was strong, they said. It took a long time for him to die. They worked very hard to save him. Everyone, I see, watching the nurses at work and doctors busy at their rounds, works very hard. In the end, like my father, I may fear their affirmation of life more than I fear death.


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Death is a mute presence in my life. What is this like? Just this— death is always possible. That can be threatening, but it is not always so. I don’t find that living with the prospect of death means living with obsessive, choking fear. When there is fear, it is often a mild, gentle fear, provoking you to live a little more, a little more vividly, not a shuddering, overwhelming fear that takes you away from yourself. Most days, it is the way it is. I look at the world, and I find it good. Death looks at it over my shoulder. The experience is, in this peculiar way, shared. I travel with a shadowy, mute companion. Death, my sense of my death, is a presence in my world, in my experience of living. Death asks, What is this for you? I answer, My life. My self—my efforts to orient myself and cope, to be an agent in the face of all this patienthood, my self-awareness, my attitudes toward life—my self coalesces and renews itself in the relationship I have with death. I have a reason to live, and this helps me deal with the process. I want to live for my children. Yet I have to prepare myself for the worst—for the possibility that this process of dying or living will be bad for them, that my suffering or my death takes something away from them, diminishes their possibilities or prospects, affects them psychologically or financially. I tell myself that children are resilient, that human beings are resilient. I tell myself that many children have flourished after the death of a parent. I remind myself to be realistic, not grandiose, about my place in my children’s lives. I am aware of what I am doing. I want to play a role in my children’s lives. I want to support them in the world. I want to matter—in some way—who does not; but I trust in their resilience. I am my daughter’s Daddy, my son’s Dad. This helps keep me going. I do not become the patient for them. Not yet, anyway. Not ever, I hope. Not even if I do die. I tell myself that I have given them what I could, that they have a strong core. They came to see me that day I got my stem cell transplant. I have no idea what they feel about it. I am lying on a bed with tubes leading into my body. I am hairless, I have no eyebrows. They hug me. They don’t know what to say. I hope they sense what I am trying to do. Live as long as I can. Death is always possible. Zen and the art of cancer, I tell a friend. You have to stalk your fears and hopes, your aversions and ambitions, try for a lucid, dispassionate awareness of them. You fail, in many ways, you fail—so what? You try again. I don’t want my fears or grief to be me—I let them be what is happening to me. I fear the false hopes that one gives oneself. There are bad moments when I fear that I am weak and I tell myself to shape up. I don’t want to break down in front of my children. I dislike

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what chemotherapy does to me and I dislike confinement in the hospital, the loss of freedom. I want to finish this book, some book, a last book. I want to hike up a mountain again. So there it is—fear, aversion, reluctance, ambition, hope. None of this is overpowering. It can be managed. Life, as they say, goes on. I try to say good-bye to people and places as I get a chance to do so. Just in case. It is not that I don’t hope for a miracle cure. I allow myself hope, a little at a time. If I have to die, though, I do not want to think I could have said good-bye, could have reflected on what a person, a place, a part of my life, meant to me, and did not. I try to go on writing through the chemotherapy, the stem cell transplant, the slow, recovery from it all, the hours, days, months, in the hospital and out. I am lucky, as a human being, I think. I think that thought frequently. I tap on it to see if it rings hollow, but it does not. I had the wisdom or luck to live. When I lived in Concord, Massachusetts, I used to walk around Walden Pond. This was Thoreau’s Walden Pond, where he grew beans and wrote his book. Nowadays kids splash in the water in the summer. A train still runs close by the pond. At the end of my walk around the pond there was a sign that quotes his book Walden. The word that came to me in the hospital do not do a great injustice to Thoreau’s actual words: When I come to die, I do not want to discover that I never lived.2 People have piled stones near the sign, an act that means whatever it means to them, and I long ago added my stone. I believe in being on the side of human life, with its sinuous curving back on itself in selfhood, on the side of its beauty, its possibilities. I have lived. I am glad—although I feel a certain irony about it—to be able to say it boldly. Life has a deep hold on me. After coming home from my first days in the hospital, I fell into a deep sleep and had a vivid, lifelike, dream. I was holding my daughter in one arm, and my son in the other. We were all laughing. I woke up, happy.

Coda: My Winter Fire I have struggled to find an identity in suffering. I searched for orientation. Not just consciously, but with my total being. I searched my sense of other selves, my history, sifted through my experiences, examined my cultural knowledge, looking for models of how to suffer, and, if necessary, die. It does not do me any good to know, in the abstract, how death is treated in American culture, or even to know how Americans face


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death. I need to know how I can face cancer, perhaps death. I need to modify the models of these available in American culture or—in many ways the same thing—in my personal experience. Perhaps I will come to the same conclusion as others; perhaps not. It is a matter of who you already are, and who you might be. Since I have little choice but to show up and make myself available to this experience, I will do the best I can. Recently I ran across a remark by someone, who happens to be a philosopher, which expresses my sense that I was seeking mastery of a predicament that perhaps cannot be mastered. Reflecting on his own experience of suffering and the solace he found in philosophy, Gordon Marino (2004) says he made a turn “from thinking of suffering as a fever to regarding it as an action that could be carried out with dignity.” It makes a difference, this turn from looking upon suffering as something terrible happening to you, to regarding it as something you can do with dignity. I resonated with this. It sums up my effort to orient myself. Even if this dignity does not come easily, perhaps is even never quite possible, it is worth struggling toward it. It defines a possible self.


Part II Self, Suffering, Subjectivity


Chapter Four Toward a Psychology of Possible Selves Maybe it is response, the will to respond . . . maybe a gritting of the teeth, to go just that much further . . . . . . to begin, to be, to defy —Denise Levertov

I have tried to write about “a gritting of the teeth” that plays an adaptive role in three lives. I tried to show the will to live, to “go on,” which I sensed in Helen and Benjamin and discovered in myself. Now I want to try to set this in the context of perspectives on the human self that have been developed in the field of psychological anthropology and beyond. I will review some conceptual tools and useful heuristics for thinking about the rich material of human lives. In doing so, I will continue my effort to bring together cultural, psychodynamic, and existential perspectives, but here I will stress how the living self spins its sense of self out of basic psychological capacities for “knowing” and “feeling” as these are applied to suffering. Certainly in these lives we have glimpsed how subjectivity and selfhood have been redefined in terms of suffering, and how elements of culture as diverse as anti-Semitism and literary theory have been personalized in efforts to respond to the questions that arise with suffering. Yet the persons I have described and their life situations are so different: what counts as suffering? What is it that we grasp as suffering in others’ lives, and in our own? And how should we imagine the selves that suffer—and respond to suffering? What capacities do they mobilize to face suffering?

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Selfhood and Suffering Suffering! Why it’s the sole cause of consciousness! —Dostoevsky

We might add that suffering is a cause of self-awareness; and the consciousness it produces coalesces in terms of psychological capacities and cultural understandings that orient the self to its existential predicament. The critical role of cultural meaning in suffering has been evident in the life studies I have presented, but we need a concept of the self as sentient and self-aware to grasp the full effect of culture on suffering. Understanding suffering requires us to understand selves as active agents of their own lives. Equally, to grasp fully the experience of suffering a theory of self needs to be united with a theory of culture. Ethnography has the power to show suffering—to invite us to examine it. The question of whether unexamined suffering is worth living, or whether examining it makes it more bearable, is one I will leave for others; but the nature of suffering, and of human responses to it, constitutes a fundamental problem in human understanding. The question of suffering—and the questions people become to themselves as they suffer, the way suffering challenges their basic capacity to make a life for themselves and forces them back on what they are as humans selves—stands as a fundamental problem for cultural theory and for self-psychologies. What the case material suggests is that suffering pushes people to develop the possibilities of selfhood, and this psycho-existential “push” has consequences for social practice and cultural meaning systems. It is not merely that people must change their behavior or find new ways of managing their existence; they must adapt their psychological organization, their capacity to be, to do so. In coping, people do not ignore what they have accumulated as possible responses and ways of being in the course of living, their subjectivity potential (Hollan 2000). Rather they mobilize it, and cultural models, in the process of coping. Emotion, I will suggest, plays a critical role in the ways people animate their cultural and personal potential, shaping how they compose themselves into a response. Emotions help us organize ourselves into the response. My life in the hospital involved sustaining a will to respond. Similarly, Helen’s efforts to find her way out of her labyrinth of selfhood were driven by a capacity to respond creatively: she had to face her possible selves and find a way to go on. Benjamin’s use of poetry


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as a means of creating and disciplining an empathic imagination in which he could know himself and his mother was an experiment in managing and directing his own “subjectivity potential” to try to understand his mother’s madness, and himself in its aftermath. What is suffering?—and why does it transform our relationship to culture? Having tumors proliferate in your body is not suffering, although it causes it. The suffering is what you feel, such as pain and fear, and what this failure of your body to support your existence does to your life. I would include in suffering some aspects of the knowledge you bring to it, your awareness of your mortality, for example, and your awareness of your suffering itself. I want to say that suffering is a disordering of our being-in-the-world; although this may only be a fancy way of saying it disorders our lives. If we need an academic definition of suffering, we might define it as an “ontological assault” on our being-in-the-world (Garro 1992, 104). In more everyday terms, we suffer when something happens that assaults our capacity to live—events “crash” into our lives, forcing us into struggles to adapt, raising questions about self and existence in the process. Suffering assaults our subjective existence, challenging our capacity to be, becoming an active, forceful presence in life, affecting not just one aspect of our existence, but many, including our models of self (Garro 1992). Suffering alters the terms of our existence, and so alters the terms of subjectivity and selfhood, setting in motion a search for a response adequate to the suffering, which may also set in motion a search for a self adequate to the suffering, and to the response. Patently, suffering provokes us to struggle, to try to rearrange existence, to rearrange ourselves. It may provoke us to give up. Yet neither the struggle, nor, if it comes, resignation is separate from the suffering. We may not easily be able to tear our reflexive powers of self-understanding and responsiveness away from the struggle with suffering. Suffering is not self; yet it is self. Who else bears and experiences it? Moreover, as we struggle with it we may in certain ways become remade, before our own eyes, as it were, as its creation. We may be remade, in our own consciousness, as its creature. Helen and I were struggling against this; but the struggle “against” is to take part in this transformation. Human beings are not passive in relation to the process of suffering, to the way their lives go tumbling out of control, or to the way they are thrown back on, even turned against, themselves in the process. They attempt to sustain life and self, even if life and self seem to keep collapsing as they do so.

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In fact, suffering may provoke efforts to transform, to remake the self, to renew life. Dostoevsky’s declaration that suffering constitutes the “sole cause of consciousness” is literary exaggeration; but suffering does incite and shape consciousness of the world and self. As people respond consciously and self-consciously to suffering, the suffering provokes developments in the self, and pushes the self to search for possibilities. They may sift through their cultural knowledge as part of this process, in a process of personalization that can give cultural conceptions an existential significance they did not have before. What is a self that it can do so?

The Self and its “Selves” My use of term “self” posits a relationship between several aspects of personal existence, each of which is sometimes treated as self (Spiro 1993). Let me begin by trying to clarify the way I am using the concept of self. The self, as I use the word, is what a person is in the process of living. Minimally, this involves the dynamic interrelationship of the following aspects of a person’s total existence: 1. The existential self is a whole person, the agent of a life and a mode of being—“someone” definite who knows, feels, experiences and acts from his or her own “first-person” perspective. A total existence attaches to a person, who exists in a state of existential embodiment, has a life history, a place in the world, certain relations with other people, a cultural setting, certain capacities for engaging and creating a life, and so on. 2. The process of self-appraisal by which the larger self organizes its efforts to live and enter the world. The biological, social, and psychocultural processes that constitute a person do not do so without coordination by the self as an agent capable of certain acts, disposed to grasp the world in certain ways, Such capabilities and dispositions interact and have to be integrated in reflexive processes and adjusted to the existential context in which a person must actually live. The person engages in a process of self-appraisal. The cognitive and emotional terms of the process of self-appraisal undergo developmental shifts over time (Kegan 1982). 3. The products of self-appraisal. The process of self-appraisal produces models of self, “self-representations”1 that register “the attributes of one’s own person as they are known, both


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consciously and unconsciously, to the person himself or herself” (Spiro 1993, 114). As these develop they can reset the terms of the process of self-appraisal. Some of these terms remain out of awareness; others enter conscious awareness where they have additional implications. 4. The sense of self that organizes awareness and the self formulated in self-awareness. People imagine, personify and assess themselves in self-awareness; the self becomes an object of conscious attention and evaluation. Examples are personifications of self that shape the attitude of self toward self. 5. Self-orientation through emotion. All selves are feeling selves, with emotional capacities for defining and managing self. I take this list in part from Spiro (1993), who identities seven different meanings of the term self in different studies. My point here is that the self can be viewed as an organization of a number of features that have been analyzed separately as self; but the self is better understood as the first-person project of living in which these aspects of personal existence play a role. In each person’s existence there is only one self in sense 1, but self in sense 2 can generate many images of, and feelings about, self. 2 In this chapter I will sketch in a model for understanding the form and process by which self in sense 1, the embodied, existential self, the person in their total existence, is related to self in senses 2–5, the more or less reflexive, conscious, and self-aware aspects of self. My perspective excludes three uses of the term self. First, the self is not the cultural conception of the person or self, although (as we have seen) such conceptions may strongly influence the process of selfappraisal. Nor do I view the self as the conception of “some psychic entity or structure within the person”—if this means some process detached from life. The process of self-appraisal does rest on basic human capacities, and does generate “structure” within the person, but this structure—the coordinates of existence it defines, the orientations it creates—does not constitute a self independent of the whole person. Rather, they are part of self through their relationship to the larger, existential self. I see “the configuration of cognitive orientations, perceptual sets, and motivational dispositions that are uniquely characteristic of each person” as products of self-appraisal, not as separately constituting a self (Spiro 1993). Such features of the person do encode life experience and embodied existence. They form part of the repertoire of capabilities that human beings apply to the task of living. I am trying to bring into

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focus the way such a repertoire (including specific cultural capabilities that come volitional control) are animated as people engage life. In themselves, however, cognitive and emotional orientations are not self as I use the term here: but they are key features of the process of self-appraisal. They should not, however, in my view, be substituted for the whole person: the switch is reductive. Developing a sense of how a person typically engages life is critical, but inventorying someone’s cognitive or behavioral repertoire is not the same as discovering how he or she actually engages life. We don’t want to take the self and “mechanize” or “depersonalize” it: the study of persons is not advanced by reifying mechanisms and ignoring life. We are not going to grasp how the self personalizes cognitive orientations, perceptual sets, motives, cultural goals, and models or gain a sense of how these fit into the process of living by depersonalizing the self. Developing skill at identifying “personality factors” and cognitive “sets” can, however, prove useful; it may provide crucial clues to the process of being a self. So on occasion it is useful to catalogue such factors or seek to identity them using various tests or experimental methods.

Self as Culture What about culture? I would rule out one approach: depersonalizing selves by reducing them to effects of cultural forms does not do justice to the way people are cultural. It is through the experience of selfhood that people take cultural form. Second, much of this happens through what Beckett (2006 [1930]) called our “extreme inattention”—living in a cultural place we do just grasp the way the world around us is. This is not a conscious, reflective, project. But the process is trickier than this—it becomes reflective. Having experiences, we are thrown into states of self-evaluation. A person will end up being cultural because his world is cultural: and all human worlds are. But this does not mean a self will passively replicate cultural forms or that people have no capacity to modify and transform not only cultural models, but the cultural selves they have become. Existentially, they may have no choice but to try for transformation. Quinn (1992) captures part of this, from a cognitive perspective: The process by which cultural schemas are incorporated into a sense of “self,” thereby entering into the definition of an individual’s existential concerns and life ambitions, is life-long and causally complex. Most of


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us would agree that crucial states of this process of self-definition occur in childhood and adolescence; however, traumatic or otherwise compelling experiences at any age can inspire redefinition of self or elaboration of prior self-understandings. (91)

What is incorporated into the sense of self may pose problems of meaning or generate existential concerns. People may try to neutralize cultural meanings that do so or seek to redefine self in ways that also redefine the implications of particular cultural conceptions. I have elsewhere examined how being stigmatized in a caste hierarchy mobilizes efforts to neutralize the cultural concepts that define people in caste terms. Many seek alternative, self-affirming terms for understanding self. In this case, the “traumatic or otherwise compelling experiences” that inspires the redefinition are generated by cultural practices and ideology, while the terms on which the self is affirmed are also drawn from the “pool of possibilities” available in that cultural world (Quinn 1992). People may redefine “culture” in tandem with self—as they elaborate on self-understandings they may also elaborate on cultural understandings (Parish 1996). Becoming a self does not, of course, always involve cognitive reflection or hyper-reflexivity: if people become reflective it builds on an intuitive, pre-reflective base. Csordas (1994) captures this part of the self-process from his phenomenological perspective: “The preobjective self is . . . a cultural constituted mode of being in the world” (14). This self is not standing still. As Csordas suggests, it moves through life. In existential motion, it can crash into cultural walls, collide with other selves, and in the process become an object of contemplation, emotion, value judgment, to itself and others. I have tried to show this in the case studies. Illness and loss trigger feeling and reflection, memory and imaginings as forms of self-objectification, allowing a person to experience self and culture in a more conscious, and sometimes new, ways. Think of Sartre’s characterization of Genet. The child was just there in the world that room was. Then he felt anxiety and was “away.” Then someone calls him a thief: he is objectified. A new relationship to existence is defined. He goes from being aware to being self-aware: he has an identity, a role, a meaning. This is what he is. He will define self in terms of the “pool of possibilities” available to him culturally and existentially (Quinn 1992). Csordas is right to suggest that the capacity for reflexivity and effort make self-objectification and self-awareness inevitable. When it arrives, people have to deal with the consequences.

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Cultural conceptions of the self do come into play: one may be taught and guided more or less explicitly in using such conceptions; this may or may not be consistent with the more tacit learning by “being.” The world perspectives of particular cultures are reflected in the process of self-appraisal; yet such conceptions of the self can fail to keep up with the experience of the existential self (Hollan 1992). Actual selves can break with them, bend or transform them, assign them different meanings, seek new possibilities in them and new ways of adapting them to their problems of living. Cultural concepts of the self may pose problems of meaning or existence for the self. They may be good to think, but hard to live. Both unreflective and reflective relations with culture make a difference in how selves manage their existence. A self is a mode of being; it is a coalescing of self-awareness; it takes self-understandings from culture, in terms of existential concerns. The case studies suggest a third key relationship of self and culture, one in which both unreflective and reflective processes play a role: selves orient themselves in terms of other selves. Benjamin seeks to understand himself in terms of his mother, while Helen has to make peace with Ted. I seek orientation in terms of psychologically significant figure in my life. People not only orient themselves to other selves in ongoing interaction, but also in terms of the emotional marks, the capacity for feeling, that life with others has produced. Since other selves are cultural—what is more cultural than a living person?— feelings and memories of other people mark cultural possibilities. This “sense of other selves” that modifies the sense of self may in various ways modify the intuitive grasp of culture, or may lead to reflections about explicit cultural conceptions. When some intuitive, primary selfhood no longer carries the self into life, when feelings or emotion signal trouble in the self’s integration into life, and a firstorder search of cultural resources does not provide a resolution, the self may search for other possibilities: if the questions of orientation are urgent or basic, the self may in feeling, memory, and reflection visit psychologically significant figures in its life as a way of examining and sorting through possibilities.

Models of the Self-Psyche Psychologies without selves abound in modern thought; yet in a peculiar irony culture theory, in rejecting psychology, ends up doing the same: it eliminates minds and persons (Linger 2005).


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To understand persons, as the cultural selves they always are, we need some sense of how psychological capacities support their existence. Paul (1990) says such a model should offer insight into “what one’s own actual experience of being alive is like” (433). It should provide insight into first-person experience and offer grounds for addressing what life is like for anyone who can experience it in firstperson terms. Paul notes that many anthropologists “shy away from strong formulations and close examinations of . . . subjective motivation.” They fall back on the assumption that people want what culture makes them want.3 Others take for granted narrow models of motivation, “rough and ready formula about people wanting power, prestige, resource maximization, reproductive advantage, or some combination of these” (Paul 1990, 432–433). Neither perspective seems adequate. The first fails to do justice to the “thickness” of human subjectivity in cultural life, while the second fails to do justice to the variety of cultural and psychological motives and the ways people apply these to their own existence. Helen wanted to be a good person; she was in pain. I did not want to die. Benjamin wanted to understand his mother. The challenge for psychocultural theory is to put mind back in persons and persons back in culture (Linger 2005). Hollan (2000) describes one approach to integrating culture, emotion, and subjectivity: According to this model, consciousness of ourselves and other things must be actively constructed out of our myriad engagements with the world. Many of our engagements will remain unconceptualized, unverbalized, and outside conscious awareness unless or until they gain representation through complex symbolic processes. Here, self-awareness, once developed, is not a seamless, unfractionated whole, but rather the end product of a complicated series of feedforward and feedback loops within a broad and open system of information exchange. This selfsystem encompasses the synaptic structures of the brain, intrapersonal processes of memory and symbol formation, and interpersonal selfother configurations as organized and shaped through familial, social, and historical processes. (539)

Notice what we have here: consciousness of ourselves actively constructed in engagement with the world; developing self-awareness; unconscious processes; symbolic processes; a mind that is not a seamless whole, but a system—and a self system at that—sustained by complex neural and psychological processes. The system is capable of divisions and unifications. The model embraces the synaptic structure

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of the brain without denying a critical role to social, cultural, and existential factors. It models a mind in which “possible selves” could coalesce.

Five Ways to Suffer: Human Capacities and Their Consequences D’Andrade (1999, personal communication) offers a useful model of five psychological systems that orient people to existence. My perspective on these “five systems of the psyche” is that they provide five ways to suffer; but they do so because people actually engage the world in these terms. They get into and out of existential quandaries through the operation of these systems, which organize and deploy the larger self system. The model conceptualizes the psyche as consisting of five interacting parts: a cognitive system, those human capabilities that map the world and test reality; an executive system that directs the efforts of the self to negotiate existence; an attachment system that forms bonds with others and incubates self in terms of these emotional connections; an identity system that finds or constructs meaning for the self; and a superego that evaluates the self. Imagine Helen, myself, anyone. The “work of self” in which we engage can be understood in terms of these systems, conceived of as modes of agency and reflexivity. Each of us, from our own perspective, in terms of our own experience of life, tries to figure out how the world works and how we relate to it—we apply our cognitive powers to the world. All of us have objects—people who were instrumental in some way to our entry into life, and who remain integrated into the self-system through processes of psychological attachment. Most of us try to define who we are, tacitly in our efforts to enter life, or in self-reflections. We evaluate ourselves as good or bad; we judge ourselves. Much of this was apparent in Helen’s report of her experience. She was challenged in her knowledge of the world (I don’t believe in ghosts; I smell like blood), unsettled by her inability to control her emotional experience (a mortuary sign set off thoughts of suicide), unsure about what she meant to others (did her husband always think she was selfish), and at a loss about how to place herself in the world (what is a widow, after all? who neglected or killed her husband). She was a victim of her own conscience.

Toward a Psychology of Possible Selves Table 4.1

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System Motives and Failures of the Five Psychological Systems

System

Motive (Mode of Flourishing)

Quandary (Mode of Suffering)

Executive

Autonomy, mastery, competence, safety, self-preservation

Inadequacy, powerlessness, helplessness

Cognitive

Truth, knowledge

Confusion, bafflement

Attachment

Forming and maintaining relationships; care (giving and receiving); nurturance; the self’s object world

Abandonment, betrayal, isolation

Identity

Identity; integrity of self, integration of self into world

Alienation; transgressions against the sense of self; identity loss, identity crisis and contradiction

Superego

Self-evaluation. Affirming the self as good

Bad conscience, self-reproach Struggling with the way self judges self as bad or unworthy

We can elaborate the model in various ways. A chart may help. As shown in table 4.1, I have used the terms D’Andrade uses as labels of the five systems and provide rows: cognitive, executive, attachment, identity, and superego system. What the table identifies are key motives, which are also system “virtues” or forms of flourishing that go along with each psychological system, and typical forms of system failure, which, when they occur, become “problems of meaning,” psycho-existential concerns, for people. I applied a version of this chart to Helen. I can apply it to myself. In my efforts to cope with cancer, I was seeking mastery and trying to avoid helplessness, confusion, isolation, identity loss, and selfcondemnation; but I could not avoid these completely. I wanted to master my experience of cancer, not remain a victim. I had to struggle with strong feelings of helplessness and powerlessness as my life escaped my control. I tried to understand my disease in practical ways, realistically; but I was baffled by the problem of why this was happening to me—why my life should, so arbitrarily and abruptly, come to this end. In dealing with my situation, I revived my “objects” in reverie and reflections. I revisited my life in other places, but the focus emotionally was on people who had been significant in one way or another. I looked to them for some sense of how to cope with my dilemma. I reflected on them consciously and I feel these reflections were crucial to my conscious effort to adapt and cope. Unconsciously, I may have tapped them

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in ways that went beyond this. I feel that I was sustained in this difficult period by the fact that I had been supported by my objects in my entry into the world: was I perhaps in some unconscious way reviving the life impetus and affirmation they had given me? I can only know that they filled my conscious reflections; but I suspect that my sense of self rested on this unconscious sense of support and affirmation. The hardest part of the experience was not my isolation, but a painful sense that I was failing others. I could not give them what I needed to give—I could not be what I should be. This struck at my attachments and my identity. I had problems with the identity of a cancer patient: it was “not me,” yet it was. I faced a loss of identity: I was no longer even recognizable to others, nor did I know who I was, at least not with the ease and fluency I had taken for granted. Based on my cultural values— self-reliance, being in control of my life—I judged myself rather harshly as failing in those aspects of being a person that mattered most to me: as a father, as an independent person, as a rational person, but my search for models of suffering (and if need be models of dying) was in part a search for compassion and, I suspect, for a certain absolution or release from the duties of life. I was at what I have come to see, based on the title of a volume of Samuel Beckett’s work, forced up to the Beckett point: “I can’t go on, I’ll go on.” It is a forging point: the way the world and the self are available to each other has shifted in the face of suffering. I needed to see at what point people let go of values and strivings that had guided their life. I could not go on as I had earlier; yet I had to go on, had to be someone in this life situation. I reproached myself for “being weak,” but I recognized there was something irrational in this; yet even the self-reproach kept me tethered to life. In elaborating on the chart, we risk reifying it—and one might want to add other “systems” to it, such as sexuality—but it usefully reminds us that these constitute critical dimensions of human experience. We can try to see how they fit into life histories. However we come to theorize them, it is important simply to recognize their significance in human lives. Obviously, any of these systems may be activated in terms of one or more of the others and they often are. Helen wanted to know the “truth” about herself, and about the judgments others made of her, in ways related to the moral question of whether she was a bad person, a kind of monster—all this, in order, I think, to prevent her selfdestruction. And that is a matter of self-control. Some part of her was


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battling her “bad” conscience, her as it took control of other systems— and not just these, but also sensory systems (her sense of smell). The resources of any system can be activated and allocated temporarily to other systems—or may be more or less structurally allocated to them. Such decisions are made in a competitive internal environment where other systems are seeking links and resources as well. We might think of the self system as involving the activation, coordination, and conflict of these systems. When translated into a first-person perspective, this psychodynamic view of the psyche as powers of the self suggests where and how existential concerns are going to impinge on the model that self makes for self. Cultural values are integrated into each of these systems. The different activities involve cultural conceptions as grounded in social and cultural experience: ● ● ● ●

knowing: cultural conceptions of reality; identity: cultural conceptions of person and self; evaluation: cultural conceptions of the good; executive: cultural values and goals, cultural conceptions of reality, concepts of person.

Attachment seems more complicated; it involves the experience of other selves who are themselves cultural beings, who embody culture in many ways. All the systems of the psyche feed into people’s efforts to guide the direction of their lives: the executive capacity. It seems harder to speak of conceptions that go along with self-control: agency draws on the powers to know, to identify, to attach, and to evaluate. D’Andrade’s “executive system” demarcates the action part of the self-system. If cultural factors modify each system and its relationship to the world, existential experience modifies each culturally modified system, in a complex series of interactions. This personalization of culture seems to be a fundamental process: without it, it is hard to see how cultural resources could be mobilized in the face of the unpredictable events of life. D’Andrade’s model offers us insight into some of the major constituencies of the psyche, any of which, activated in some life circumstance, may press for representation in consciousness. Claiming consciousness, through “parliamentary” maneuvering that activates some neural or cognitive capabilities while silencing others, can help particular existential concerns take charge of a person’s entry into life, until the concerns of some other constituency are appraised as more urgent.

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What we cannot get from the chart is any sense of how these existential concerns appear in consciousness, and appear in such a way that self-awareness follows, leading to efforts to modify self or world. For that we need a theory of feeling and emotion.

Emotion as the Medium of Self Jenkins (2004) has stressed the importance of examining “fundamental and ordinary human processes and capacities” in terms of the “dialectical constitution of culture and psyche, intentional person and intentional worlds” (30; emphasis in original).4 Robert Levy (1973, 1984) offers insight into such processes. Levy focused on emotions as experience that connects body, mind, and culture. A vital part of the sense of self coalesces in terms of emotions; Levy’s model suggests how emotions generate and propel self-awareness and push it into a search mode that helps the self finds it way through life. Levy’s model treats emotions as feelings without reducing feelings to bodily states cut off from cultural and personal existence. It treats emotions as cognitive judgments based on culture without detaching them from embodied experience. He begins by noting that not all feelings are emotions; only some are. Moreover, feelings are generated when awareness can play a role in integrating a person into the world. Levy (1984) conceives of emotion as a form of awareness, and as part of the larger capacity to feel. Neither awareness, feeling, nor emotion is necessary for internally adjustive or externally adaptive action. All kinds of bodily processes involving the central nervous system . . . respond to problems and initiate corrections without any awareness being involved. A minor lack of oxygen is “automatically” adjusted by unconscious changes in respiration. But if this response is not sufficient, then an awareness associated with a pressure for action, a feeling, arises and mobilizes a conscious program. One decides to open a window or stop running and sit down. (220)

This seems simple, but it speaks to larger issues of identity and adaptation. Helen, Benjamin, and I could not make “automatic” adjustments to our situations. Feelings rushed in, signaling problems in our existence, marking a beginning to efforts to respond, to be. It was a process: feelings and memories pushed us to reflect, pushed us to respond. However—and this seems critical—there were no wellformed preexisting conscious programs to apply to our experiences.


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At least, there were no conscious programs that did much good. Helen could tell herself that “big girls don’t cry” and to “get over it.” Her larger self did not accept this. She went on crying. The existential self was at stake, in question, in ways that required a more sustained process of self-evaluation. I tried to make this process palpable in the case studies. In the absence of easy solutions, our emotions prompted a search through our possibilities. We had to define our situations—find meaning for it—but more than this we had to define self to deal with it. We had to develop new capabilities as selves, new capabilities for understanding, for enduring, and for defining self. The basics of Levy’s model of feeling and awareness applied; but the argument needs to be extended. Neither automatic adjustment nor basic “conscious program” sufficed to settle the existential questions. An “awareness associated with a pressure for action, a feeling, arises” and should mobilize a conscious program—but what if there is no conscious program, no cultural script adequate to the life circumstance, available? One has the awareness. If it does not mobilize a conscious action program that immediately resolves the existential problem, it may mobilize a search for orientation and identity. When the awareness and the pressure for action has to do with the death of a spouse, an illness, when the task is assembling self to organize a life or a relationship, people may have to search through cultural knowledge and self-knowledge. They may have to put together a response by altering themselves—a task at which they may fail. In such situations, people do not just seek information about how to deal with other people, or the physical world, or their own bodily states; they seek knowledge about how to handle themselves. What will you do when your spouse dies, or you face death? The question goes not just to the values you might apply, but to your capacity to define and direct yourself. Helen was in crisis—but what she needed was a sense of self that could orient her to her experiences. Her emotions activated not one, but multiple models of herself. She stood confronted by alternative, branching possibilities. I have on occasion thought of this as a labyrinth of possible selves; but a better analogy might be entering a hall of mirrors in a heightened state of self-awareness, in a state of intense sensitivity to self. Everywhere one finds images of self—Helen the good wife, Helen the angry spouse, Helen who wishes her sick husband dead, Helen the anti-Semite or ex-anti-Semite—but what is defining and what is not? What “conscious program” can help? Helen has to go through a process of self-reflection, as did I. What she and

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I had to do was touch base with a range of subjective possibilities, and try to assemble them into something one could live (or die) with. Moreover, we were not just responding with emotion to the bare facts of our situations: we had to respond to our own responses, the feelings that happened. Self was involved as the whole, feeling person, as the process of self-appraisal, as the products of this process, as responses to fall out from the process, and this cycle repeated. It was repeated in terms of identity and loss of identity, self-control and helplessness, attachments and object relations, cultural models—the whole package (“self-system”) was involved. This is less like selecting and applying a conscious program than it is remaking the system that applies such programs. In this process of defining self, which is the other side of entering existence, the capacity of consciousness to shift and focus, to identify features of the world relevant to the goals of the self, seems critical. The role of cultural knowledge in this capacity also seems critical. Levy focuses on the way awareness has an organization—a definite structure—that makes cultural understanding available to the purposes of the self. This integration of psyche and culture integrates the person into the world: and woven into this world is what we call culture, but it is grasped in terms of possible selves. Levy is building up to these larger points. He says that feeling as a form of awareness involves “a sense of pressure for action of some kind, but an action that requires information about an ‘external’ world, information that must be learned and entails the whole organism’s relation to that world” (220). Levy is right to put “external” in quotes. The world of personal existence is the ultimate target of “feeling” and “information” alike— yet any action may be filtered and selected for in a series of internal adjustments that tailor knowledge to personal circumstances. This may be as complex as a journey through a fantasy world or a process of “self-therapy” to redirect the self, or a life review; but let me give a more mundane example. As I wrote this, I felt a stinging sensation in my right eye (a feeling, not an emotion) and I felt an urge to touch it—Levy’s pressure to act. Before I rubbed my eye, however, I had another experience, one that modified or supplemented the first. What entered my awareness was not at first a feeling—at least I am not sure I felt a second feeling at first—but a thought–image. It seemed to me it would be bad to touch my eye even though the sensation in my eye created an impulse to rub. With this thought, a slight feeling of anxiety then interposed itself between the first feeling and the impulse to touch. My thought processes caught up with the second, resisting,


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awareness and justified it. I recalled how I had made my eye worse in the past; this reinforced the reluctance to touch. I found myself thinking of the explanation given by a doctor for why my eyes sometimes sting in this way and what I should do about it. I resisted the pressure to act associated with the feeling of discomfort in my eye. Even when it is useful to understand a feeling as a response to the “external” world or as a response to an “internal” state, what the responses may have in common is the capacity to register selforganization in a palpable experience. Human responses postulate a self; feeling is a type of awareness but one sensitive to “models” of self maintained at different levels of self-organization: neural and physiological, cultural and psychodynamic. The feeling that you have when you are fired from a job—whether it is anger or quiet resignation—reflects the immediate assault of the world on your expectations and livelihood, and this is not like the feeling you have at the end of the long reverie about revenge or justice that may ensue as you drive home, unemployed. The “external” world is present in both experiences, and the self is present in the world, but not in quite the same way. Internal structure has more of a chance to intervene in the reverie, and such sequences may both delay behavioral responses and shape them. The feelings that happen when someone close to you dies or when a parent is violent, rejecting, or ill are “about” the self’s experience of the external world, the existential world in which other people exist; yet such feelings and the thoughts they provoke may themselves provoke responses. These secondary responses are about the primary responses. If some feelings register the world and react to it by creating a pressure to act, other feelings register these feelings in terms of their consequences for other aspects of self. Helen is a case in point. Her feelings were part of a process of response, secondary response, and additional response, carried forward in terms of her own organization as a human being. Feelings may entail a pressure for action of some kind, but the capacity for feeling and the pressure for action it triggers both involve learned cultural knowledge. The knowledge may concern the “external” world that the person is experiencing and coping with—that being ignored counts as an insult, for example. The knowledge triggered or pursued in this subtype of awareness may concern passing internal states (including states involving elaborate conceptual structures such as fantasies and reveries) or deeper and more enduring levels of self-organization. A person may become frightened by fantasies, for example, and try to stop. The content of the fantasy may have

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produced states—feelings and thoughts—while the need for the fantasy may reflect a deeper level of self-organization and its relation to the external world. So someone might define fantasy as dangerous and reproach themselves for not being able to “stop it.” The pressure to stop comes from a self-evaluation of content, but the fantasy itself comes from a deeper self-evaluation of the relationship of self to world. In this sense “models of self”—if that is the right phrase— interact. One part of the self may develop in opposition to some other part. Someone else might decide they are wasting their time on useless fears—“no use dying twice,” as someone once told me—and try to disregard their fears. Fear may be directed at the “external” world while the fear of fear is directed at the self. Clearly, not all emotional experience is of the form, “I am afraid of snakes, burglars, and demons.” These are fears defined as having an external cause. Yet the self can be a source of fear. Some emotional experience takes a reflexive form: “I was so into gambling, I frightened myself” might be a conscious formulation of this but it might be even more powerful as a not fully conscious fear of, for example, strong emotions or desires in the self. Helen feared that Ted would “get her.” She also feared she would kill herself. Feeling, as a subtype of awareness involving a pressure to act, can become increasingly dependent on self-evaluation and self-interpretation, even when the world clearly provides the impetus for the feeling. What is critical here is the capacity to bring knowledge into awareness in terms of feeling. The feeling enters awareness; the knowledge enters awareness. In Levy’s example the person gets up and opens the window. It is a neat matching of knowledge to a felt, bodily, experience. Yet we can easily think of cases where a feeling occurs, but no knowledge exists to guide action. It is also possible that the knowledge that enters awareness is the wrong knowledge. A person knows that opening the window lets in air. They might now know what to do when they get sick, when someone dies, when unexpected events occur. They may have had no experience with these, or their culture may offer little understanding of these. Here Levy’s concepts of hypercognized and hypocognized domains of experience come into play. A person may simply have more knowledge, more and richer understandings, to apply to aspects of their experience, those culturally hypercognized, and less about others, which are hypocognized. Helen was upset and frightened because she did not have understandings to explain many of her experiences. Feeling cannot be reduced to inner mechanisms; they have inner mechanisms, but the mechanisms support experiences that play a role


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in integrating persons into life. What Levy is trying to get at is the type of self-awareness that enables people to enter into social and cultural life. He argues that this has some continuity with other forms of awareness, feeling, and adaptation or adjustment, but also represents a kind of breakthrough in human experience. At some point in human evolution, feeling began to mark not the relationship of the organism to the physical world but also to the social and cultural world. Feeling is a signal from an unconscious adjustive system to a different kind of adjustive system. The signal of feeling calls for action beyond the capability of the unconscious adjustive system, action that requires information about a complex external environment—the utility of opening a window and how to go about it; the coordinated hunt for the flea set off by an itch; the search for any adequate action to escape further pain. Feeling and awareness mark the moment of an organism’s encounter with an understood external world, which is understood in large part through learning and for humans . . . through cultural processes. (220)

Feeling bumps problems into awareness. “Awareness” involves access to understandings about the world. It may be that a feeling and understanding relevant to the feeling gets raised into awareness—focal awareness, working memory, short-term memory—at the same time, by the underlying process of self-appraisal. When I feel hot, I know which window lets in the sea breezes. A “search for any adequate action to escape further pain” may not find “the adequate response.” Such a search would examine knowledge of the world, but also knowledge of the self. Emotions have a role in this. Emotions are about the self; they presuppose a certain degree of self-knowledge but they also pressure us to continue to develop our model of self. Helen’s problem was that she knew she was a bad person. Her search was for an adequate response to the emotional pain this caused her. The only adequate response was to reframe her existence in term that allowed her to forgive herself, or at least hold on to the hope that she could forgive herself. Our models of self do not stand still; like our lives, they move through cultural and existential settings. The self develops over time as we experience and engage life—what a theory of self needs to do is define how this occurs and what its human consequences are. Consciousness can “search” for what it can conceive—and what it can conceive depends in large part on cultural learning and experiential priming. I was sitting in the dentist’s office. I noticed a Picasso print.

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Bored, I examined the environment for other examples of “art.” I did the same with flowers, and finally with shoes. I became aware of all these as I thought about them. I began to pick out finer details: patterns on shoe soles; petals on (fake) flowers; the direction of light assumed in paintings. This is using the capacity for awareness as a search mechanism. I was using the visual field as the medium; but I could also search memory, although memory may often fly “under the radar” of conscious purpose. Notice how this “search mode” differs slightly from Levy’s examples, which take the form of something happening to the person, initially out of awareness; the person responds unconsciously to what happens with internal responses or adjustments to the current state of the organism; when a certain threshold is reached, or certain states develop, this in turn triggers feelings that enter awareness, creating a pressure to act. This leads people to orient themselves to their own states, and to features of the world relevant to their states. In my example, I register something in the environment that leads me to direct myself to examine my environment more closely. Of course, these examples suggest complementary processes that interact—feeling an itch, I might search my environment for something with which to scratch. “Feeling” conjoined with “focusing,” if we want to use these terms, helps shift the terms on which people act. To put it another way, Levy’s examples—an itch, feeling the room is too stuffy, and so on—begin with an adjustment in the organism, the bodily self, that propels awareness toward an adjustment of the person’s relationship with the environment. My example begins with the ability to focus on features of “the environment” dependent on the possession of concepts such as shoe, Picasso, art, flowers, dentist’s office. Awareness is partially dependent on “what’s really there” but also dependent on what I register as “there”—and that depends on my state, my purpose, my knowledge, my involvement in some activity, and so on. I am not, in fact, aware of every aspect of the environment. I am running a “spotlight” over it, bringing some things into focus, letting other things slip from focus. Levy starts with feelings marking a state of the organism; but we should also begin with the power of consciousness to grasp the world in terms of concepts—the concept of shoe, the concept of Picasso— and to interact with it in terms of whatever scripts apply (check in at the reception desk, sit down and wait) (Shweder 1991). Levy sticks with simple examples in explaining his basic sense of how the “mind” works. It is only with his ethnographic example that


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he moves on to more complex feelings that form emotion. “But what does it mean to recognize, or conceive of, a ‘feeling’ as an ‘emotion,’” he asks? In sickness, exhaustion, and so on . . . there is an emphasis on something wrong in the relation of a person to his own body, to his internal environment, to the physical support of the “I.” But in “emotion,” say anger, there is an emphasis on something wrong in the relationship of the person to his external physical and social context, the world of actions, plans, and socially defined meanings . . . The emotions are feelings that are connected with the external relationships of the self, of “I.” And this self in humans, and social animals, is intimately constructed out of group processes and interpersonal relationships. (221, italics in original)

Levy was combating a long tradition of treating “emotion” solely as an internal process, rather than setting it, as feeling, in its social and cultural context. However, shifts in the field have made it all too easy to think of feeling and emotion as defined in purely external terms, and to lose sight of the critical fact of embodiment—that feeling is felt, that emotion is someone’s experience, not just the product of a cultural discourse. Moreover, even on Levy’s own terms, some emotions can be felt in terms of the relationship of self to body, or self to self. He gives as examples of emotion, anger, desire, and fear and says these involve the “I,” the “person” as a whole, rather than a part of the person. But anger and fear can be felt about the state of a person’s own body, the support for the I and its social life. Cancer patients feel fear because of what is happening to their own body; they may feel anger, too. These exceptions do not mean that emotions are not generally about the social world in which a person makes a life. They do suggest that the core of emotion Levy seeks to define is not to be found in a dichotomy of external and internal, but in the power to relate the I, the imagined and experienced self, to the vicissitudes of existence, which include internal and external events. It bears repeating that people can have emotions about their emotions. These second-order emotions may not be in any simple sense about external conditions—he stepped on my foot so I am angry—or internal events—I fear pain—but about relations—I felt afraid of my anger, angry at my fear. When I was in the hospital, I often felt angry at myself for succumbing to emotions that I “felt” did not help me cope. In the hospital, I vigilantly resisted “giving way” to fear or anxiety or depression. (I believe I later paid a price for this when I experienced posttraumatic stress symptoms but that is another story.)

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For Levy, culture and psyche have an I, a self, a human agent, attached, and this self, or “whole person,” integrates the two. So we may say, tentatively, that the class of feelings that Tahitians deal with as “emotions” (a) involve the whole “person” (a complex psychosocial creation) and (b) implies something about the relation of the person-as-a-whole to his or her environment, especially to the other persons . . . in that environment. (221–222, italics added)

These other persons—other selves—are fully cultural. We can try to apply Levy’s ideas to a scene he witnessed, reported in this book Tahitians (1973). The question is how feelings define the world and self as suggested earlier, producing awareness that is the “leading edge” of agency, of participation in social interactions. One evening . . . , I showed Tara (then ten years old) and Ari (eight) how to make birds by folding paper. Ari quickly lost interest, but Tara was intrigued by hers. She carried it around with her, placed it under her mat at night, and brought it to breakfast the next day. At lunch she had it with her again and put it on the table. In the eating room were her mother, Mari; her sisters Rui (sixteen) and Ari; her nephew, now brother by adoption Etienne (five); and I. Mari and Rui seemed tense and restrained. Rui, who had been cooking and whose hands were dirty, walked over to Tara and roughly picked up the paper bird, asking, “What is this thing?” Tara began to cry. She continued for three or four minutes. Then her mother, who had been watching all this, began to yell at Tara. “Stop crying. What is the matter with you? Are you crazy?” (435)

Deceptively simple, this passage points to many difficult conceptual issues. It may not be obvious that something important is happening here, something that goes to the shaping of a sense of self. When I have students examine this passage, I ask them to transpose the scene into their own living room, and suggest that in my living room, the little girl with a paper bird might be seen as cute, or as expressing an interest in art—as developing her potential. Why is it not okay for her to keep on playing with the paper bird? If Levy is correct that the older sister and mother were “tense and restrained,” why were they? Why did the older girl roughly take the paper bird away from the younger one? We don’t seem to have any trouble understanding why the child cries; but why instead of, perhaps, reassuring or soothing the child does the mother yell at her: “Are you crazy?”


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Based on Levy’s ethnography, we might decide that the child was not supposed “to cling” to things, to get too attached. Here we have a piece of culture, certain “values” being applied. But how do the mother and older daughter “know” that this is an occasion to be “tense and restrained.” Levy does not say if he asked them what they felt or why they felt it—it is possible that he felt that he knew based on mood signs or facial expressions—but it is not implausible to imagine that they would not have been able to give any reason, or might just have indicated that the child was doing something wrong. An anthropologist might ask: “Well, I don’t understand. What was she doing wrong?” and get the reply, “Well, couldn’t you see? Just look at how she was behaving.” Verbally justifying a practice is a practice; people do not always do it. They know something is “right” or “wrong”—they know with their feelings. They may never have had any reason to justify verbally what they know in this way. They may apply what is called implicit knowledge; but how is it that this knowledge appears as a feeling? If people know with their feeling, how do their feelings know? I think the scene described suggests that people acquire emotional markers— keyed to their experience of objects—that form the basis of feelings that happen later: when, for example, a child behaves in ways that fall under the values marked emotionally or somatically. The value of these markers is precisely that they orient the self to the world, and especially to the other selves in a cultural world. Levy says that he proposes: “a sequence in which a primary knowing activates an ‘emotional feeling,’ which leads to the mobilization of a secondary kind of knowing.” Applied to the vignette, the mother and older daughter “feel” there is something wrong in the child’s behavior. They do not work it out consciously in advance of the feeling. The feeling happens—and shapes what happens. It is the feeling that happens when a child “clings” or shows “hubris”—but it is the feeling that defines this wrongful turn in the child’s behavior by generating an awareness and a pressure to act—in this case, to snatch the paper bird away, to ask the child if she is “crazy.” The feeling itself is a way of knowing the world. More than this, it is a commitment of self to the world. One could know this world in a different way—engulf the same event in a different awareness—and respond differently. One could be happy the cute child was playing with the cute paper bird, not grab it away and ask if she is crazy when she protests. Asking “Are you crazy?” expresses a kind of knowing, what Levy terms “secondary appraisal.” It is discursive, formulated in language. With this statement we get close to a conscious formulation of the

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cultural understandings that apply to the situation—but without the first kind of knowing, the felt appraisal of the situation, this framing of the child’s behavior would not be meaningful: the primary feeling triggers the secondary framing. It would be a mistake to see primary appraisal as “natural” or “biological” and the second as “cultural.” In fact, the primary appraisal, the feeling emergent into awareness, is as cultural as the secondary appraisal, as socialized. It is attuned to features of the cultural matrix and orients the self in cultural terms. The “taking in” of the world shaped by a feeling, and the “entering into” the flow of life it suggests, carries embodied cultural values with it. Equally, the secondary appraisal is just as dependent, ultimately, on neural and bodily processes. In this case, culture and nature form a seamless unity. Feelings are felt—this is a biological event—but the feelings are cultural. They are the feelings Tahitians have, as products of their cultural matrix. They have a recognizable human unity, but also a fundamental affinity with cultural experience. They are tuned to Tahitian concepts of the person and Tahitian conceptions of the good: in this particular episode, the feelings judge not the child’s cuteness, playfulness, or creativity, but her hubris. So how do the mother and older daughter know to feel tense and restrained? The obvious answer would be that when they were little girls, adults responded in the same Tahitian way to similar behavior on their part—so that this response has become part of their embodied sense of the world and self. They do not feel biological feelings and then think cultural thoughts; they have fully cultural feelings and then think cultural thoughts, all based on biological processes that become cultural processes. In the case of the Tahitian girl, she has to be something in relationship to the way in which the problem of self has been posed. What feelings happen when your sister snatches something from you and your mother then asks if you are crazy? What appraisal of self is made? Her relationship to “holding on” to the bird is transformed; it is bad, crazy, what the self should not be, what the world rejects; it is plausible that she will constitute herself in these terms. It is a moment of objectification—there is loss, anger, the self redefined—but what I suspect emerges from the self-appraisal of the experience is that this is “not self.” It is only this response that would produce an adult who would see in the child what the adult rejects in self. This process resembles up to a point what Sartre said of Genet, but then takes off in a different direction. Recall that Sartre claims Genet’s response to being called a thief was to be a thief; in our terms, he


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“took possession” of the charge that he was a thief and formulated the goal of constituting himself in those terms. I think it more likely the Tahitian girl would reject the self that her sister and mother reject and constitute herself in opposition to this “not self.” Levy (1973), quite plausibly I think, connects the cultural values organizing the “feelings that happen” in scenes such as this to Tahitian ways of coping with other matters, including death, illness, and mourning. If he is correct, a Tahitian would reach the point of accepting death, of letting go, more easily than an American. He describes dying and mourning as occasions for distress and grief, but writes that local practice stresses easing the process of dying (298–299). I read the contrast he draws between Tahitian culture and American culture as showing that Helen, Benjamin, and myself “cling” or “hold on,” seek to “fight” and “master” experience—we do not find it easy to accept, let go, resign ourselves. Our possibilities are cultural possibilities. And yet, there is no escaping the need to make these fit our experience, to engage them in terms of what life is for us. It is a matter of response, and of the will to respond. Feeling and culture inhabit subjectivity, make it a field of possibilities both cultural and personal. We should keep the existential “personalization” of culture, as well as the socialization of feeling, in mind when we evaluate conceptions of cognitive perspective shifting, such as this passage by Tomasello (1999): “As the child masters the . . . symbols of her culture she thereby acquires the ability to adopt multiple perspectives on one and the same perceptual situation . . .” (9). Tomasello focuses on linguistic symbols, but the point would seem to apply to any kind of cultural symbol, including visualized, remembered, or imagined scenes of various kinds: symbols are based not on the recording of direct sensory or motor experiences . . . but rather on the way in which individuals choose to construe things out of a number of other ways they may have construed them, as embodied in the other available . . . symbols, but did not. Linguistic symbols free . . . human cognition from the immediate perceptual situation not simply by enabling reference to things outside the situation . . . but . . . by enabling multiple simultaneous representations of each and every, indeed all possible, perceptual situations. (9)

Such shifts are, however, motivated; what I have done in discussing Levy on emotion is suggest the psychodynamic and cultural grounding of motivated shifts in perspective, including perspectives on self. We shift perspectives on the self by mobilizing cultural models, but in terms

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of feelings or somatic markers. The possibilities of a culture, and the possibilities of a life, are rolled together as part of our sentient grasp of our own existence; we personify ourselves in multiple ways but not in ways that are absolutely arbitrary. Life histories—life experience as a passage through cultural systems—mark up our capacity to feel. Feelings have a role in which symbols (Levy’s cultural programs) get activated and which do not. Here we might link this to the notion of somatic markers and object markers as a type of somatic marker: these inform the process by which symbols and perspectives are selected. Thus the emotional self is fully involved in a selection of possibilities. The self has a cultural repertoire of perspectives—of meaning it can use to frame a situation—but it has this in conjunction with an emotional repertoire. I have tried to suggest the unity of these two repertoires in subjective life. Damasio (1994) remarks that “somatic markers are a special instance of feelings” (174), generated from embodied experience and applied to the task of making meaning for the self, of orienting it in its own existence. The reader can consult Damasio and others for theories of the biological processes involved. I want to underscore the influence on self-appraisal and cultural context. In part, other selves become psychological objects by producing embodied emotional markers. These objects “highlight some options,” as Damasio says somatic markers do (174). They “make possible” some actions and judgments, while biasing the self against others. “Negative bodily feelings” may also provoke reflection, about possible actions, about the self, or both. Thus, the feelings that happen as a human self experiences life derive not from naïve and impersonal endogenous processes but from a life history that is interpersonally and culturally shaped. Human sentience and selfhood involve the capacity to frame ongoing life in terms of a selection out of multiple perspectives embedded in the subjectivity potential that develops in interactions with other selves (Hollan 2000). Since other selves are necessarily cultural beings, the emotional marks of encounters with them are always also cultural markers. A person’s subjectivity potential is cultural potential, up to a point.

The Feeling that Happens and the Possibilities of Consciousness Helen’s husband died; I learned I had cancer; Benjamin thinks about his mother because he is thinking about making a leap of faith into


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his own life. Our power to know the world, to evaluate and orient self, to find meaning in others and be something for others was challenged. The processes described by Levy were pushed into crisis mode. After all, there was no easy resolution for our quandaries. The basic processes described by Levy worked relentlessly, rather desperately, heightening awareness of self; since we could not find “adequate responses” to escape our dilemmas, the process forced us into a kind of hyper-reflexivity. We had to deal with the feelings that happened to us as well as cope with practical circumstances. If you think you are dying, or that you killed the one you loved and hated, what awareness of the world and self is possible? What I am suggesting here is that Levy’s basic sense of human awareness does apply. Yet here the pressure to act, to know, to identify self, does not achieve an easy resolution. Moreover, as I tried to show in the case studies, one feeling leads to another—what this sustains is not a single act, but a process of orienting self to existential concerns. In such situations, human beings may explore many possibilities as they seek to find ways to respond. They will sift through what they know in search of possible responses; they will examine and seek to personalize cultural models. They will review their lives. They will address and animate psychological objects and cultural models. Dostoevsky (1992) had a point: suffering may not create consciousness in the way neural systems do, but it provokes a search for the terms on which we will evaluate and act on our conscious experience. In producing such efforts, suffering can alter the relationship of self to culture, and of self to self. The case studies suggest the playing out of possibilities this sets in motion. This involves the kind of processes Levy describes. Some feelings are cultural forms of knowing, but embodied, existentially sensitive, in the way they work. They modulate the sense of self and may prompt a search for the terms on which self can adapt itself to the world, find identity and cope with suffering. Awareness takes form in terms of a pressure for action, but it gives form to the effort, and the self, by synthesizing or generating possibilities.


Chapter Five The Subjectivity of Suffering A cancer patient, asked how he was doing, reported that his daughter was ill and his wife was about to leave to visit her parents. He explained that he feared getting his daughter’s cold or flu because he felt this would send him to the hospital, since he had a suppressed immune system. He would miss his wife, and he was concerned about how he would take care of himself in her absence. He said he was thinking of these two things, and “getting down,” when he had the thought that it did “no good to worry or feel bad about it.” He then “felt much better.” He added that he “felt lighter.” In another context, the patient said he sometimes “talked to God.” Asked to elaborate, he explained he would address statement and questions to “God.” Asked if he did this verbally, he said yes, in words, but not out loud. He did not receive replies—he did not hear “voices,” nor did he fantasize that God responded in words or otherwise. He simply voiced his thoughts and feelings to his sense of God. Asked about his thoughts, this man reported that he would say things to himself about his condition. When he was by himself and “depressed” (his description—he did not, as far I could judge, meet the clinical criteria for major depression), he reported saying to himself “I am going to die and there is nothing I can do about it.” At other times, he reported thinking that “I have to live for my kids” or “I am going to fight it.” In his reports, there is an ambiguity in terms. When he reports what goes on “in his mind,” sometimes he speaks of “thinking” or “feeling” and sometimes of “talking” or “saying.” He addressed such thoughts, or mental speech, at himself and at mental objects: God, his physicians, his dead parents, among them. He says he thinks more about his parents and his childhood than he did before his diagnosis. In this chapter, I want to tease out something of the significance, structure, and implications of this ambiguous, but I think very human, capacity to reflect on the world in inward consciousness, to engage in reverie and fantasy, to address self and mental objects formulated imaginatively. I am particularly interested in its relationship to suffering,

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because it seems to me that suffering provokes, and the response to suffering makes use of, this human capacity of inward reflection and self-imagining. Inwardness would seem to be a medium for reflectivity, for the work of self. The tacit drama of the cancer patient’s confrontation with a silent God is an example: it projects consciousness of his plight into the religious field and casts his existential predicament in ultimate terms. We can only guess what God’s silence means—what the person is saying to himself—perhaps it is an expression of bafflement, of being driven up toward the edge of what he finds morally intelligible and endurable. I have little doubt, however, that he was doing something to himself with his mental performances. What comes into focus are elements of a person’s concerns and quandaries, desires or hopes—the whole “personality” of an adaptation. The field of consciousness crystallizes; something comes into focus—a cultural object, a person, a thought, a feeling. What the person dramatizes to self, the emergent “meaning” of their own intensified awareness, may have some adaptive, as well as emotional, significance. If we are to think of subjectivity as more than a passive response to circumstances or cultural factors, but as guided into engagement and development by the capacity we have to evaluate our own existence and respond to these evaluations, we need a sense of how this occurs. We need to examine inwardness as it takes in, and sometimes transforms, the experience of living. In short, we need to grasp how self converses with self, engages in a dialogue with itself (Colapietro 1989; Holland et al. 1998; Wiley 1994). The notion is likely to be controversial to some. I do not view “inwardness” as “private” in the sense of “detached from the process of living” or as enclosed on itself, without connection to the world. I do not see inwardness as private in the sense that it reflects some pristine “inner essence” unconnected to the challenges of living and existing that an organism faces, whether this essence is presented as a cognitive or neural process or ethereal soul-stuff. Whatever ghosts exist in the mind—like Helen’s husband—they do not derive from some mysterious entity that has no plausible connection to the process of living. Nor do I mean inwardness to be a Cartesian hyper-reflexivity or Shakespearian soliloquy—I think about thinking and therefore I am or am not—in a cycle that bypasses the world. No one interested in how human beings cope with the world would find a detour around existence very useful. It is interesting that people do attempt to bypass


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existence. Sometimes they even insist on doing so, or at least seem rather intent on creating the appearance they are doing so. In any event, I conceive of inwardness as a human capacity for engaging the world, a way of generating and rehearsing possibilities. States of inwardness—reveries, reflections, visualizations, fantasies, active memory, begin by capturing the world, by taking in, through the production of signs and interpretations, something the human organism finds significant. I think of this as an extension of the way each individual is engaged in a process of appraisal that interprets the data of existence, whatever these are. The cancer patient evaluates his world as a self: he “feels down.” This is an overture, not a climax; he says something to himself, and then he feels better. He does this in the medium of inwardness: he is attempting to orient himself and “optimize his experience” (Wiley 1994). He does other things in this medium. If thinking himself into “feeling better” is a minor modulation of experience, a larger coming to terms with his fate is suggested by his reported experience of God’s presence. It is hard, perhaps impossible, to say what this means to him. Yet I imagine God is not a random symbol. He thinks of God because thinking of God—addressing God, making God a presence— somehow alters the terms of his experience. I wonder if he is trying to master his experience by bringing it to what he conceives as the ultimate authority. But it may be no more than a way of having someone there—a witness, a presence—when the more tangible others in his life are away. The quest for solidarity plays a critical role in inwardness. One might imagine that the human organism, the person as a whole, distills meaning from experience, and examines it from multiple internal points of view, that the person’s “mental agents” identify and route the “stuff of experience,” a variety of sensory and cognitive inferences about existence, into psychological systems that assign it “value” in terms of some ongoing process of maintaining the integrity and enhancing the adaptive prospects of the organism. Think of “somatic markers” or “object markers” as like mental agents in the appraisal process: they mark aspects of existence that are of concern, which matter in terms of the human being’s entry into the world. But experiencing these “markers” and relating them to life circumstances is only part of the process: a kind of overture, a defining of initial terms. The process of self-appraisal proceeds with its search for understanding and possibility. When existential concerns spill into selfawareness the self works with what it has: the organism has to work with the material at hand, tweaking it, perhaps transmuting it a bit, assigning value and urgency to items, pushing some urgencies into

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conscious awareness and holding others back because they threaten the basic orientation of the self, while pushing still other urgencies back out as acts, in pursuit of goals, and to see what happens. One has a subject with definite dimension, and these dimensions shape its capacity for agency. Inwardness is simply one intrinsic medium of human coping and adaptation, one pliable enough to absorb from the body and the world the data of existence, the feedback from living, that can be appraised, evaluated, interpreted in ways relevant to the process of living. Inwardness is an extension of the self-appraisal process into consciousness awareness. We have seen how self-appraisal can be routed through conscious experience. Helen and Benjamin showed us this. What the appraisal process does, by integrating very different kinds of information, is model self and world. It routes some material to conscious awareness for extended reflection. Drawing on the modifications of Levy’s account of “emotional knowing” that I proposed in the previous chapter, I view inwardness as happening when something matters to persons: when some condition of life poses a difficulty or represents an opportunity, when it affects the process of living. Accordingly, I see inwardness as centrally, and often exquisitely and painfully, attuned to the outer world. This does not make the state of inwardness incapable of registering messages from the body and psyche. On the contrary, inwardness is part of the effort to integrate these varied sources of “feeling” or “information” about the living organism experienced as self and controlled as self. We experience inwardness consciously, but inwardness is not a particular state of consciousness like “happiness” or “rage.” It is an interface between consciousness and the appraisal processes that redundantly assesses the state of self. So inwardness is not a reflection of either the external world or of an inner essence, but an employment of consciousness by the larger self. It is, sometimes, a matter of self consciousness, because something about the self is at stake. For example, the cancer patient needed to address his anxieties and calm himself; he related himself to a series of mental images and presented himself with different evaluations of, and perspectives on, his condition, producing change in his feelings and in his mood. Human capacities are mobilized in the process. At a given moment, a person might be rummaging through memories or sorting impressions; having reveries about “success” or fantasies of revenge; registering feelings or body states; engaging in a cognitive rehearsal of some act; and, sometimes, saying something to self. All of this derives


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from the world, but it is not cognition as a public activity, tightly scripted by social conventions. No full account of the way people engage life can be made without an account of this aspect of consciousness, the ability to imagine, rehearse, reenact, remember, to hide and preserve, wait and ponder. Subjective reflections do not represent some autistic withdrawal from the world; rather they take in the world and generate responses to it. The cancer patient was asked how he was doing, and he responded by telling his interlocutor how he managed his feelings. Facing a loss (even if only a temporary one, his wife’s departure) and a threat (the contagiousness of his daughter’s illness) he evaluated his state of being. Without changing anything in his practical circumstances—he still had cancer, his daughter still had a fever, and his wife was still leaving—he changed what he “felt” about it. Of course, the fact that he felt anything at all at this juncture arises from capacities for attachment and for projecting the idea of self into scenarios about what might happen (he could get sick or not be able to take care of himself, he would miss his wife when she left). The notion of “inner” dialogue picks up the way in which responses may directly relate to previous images or thoughts, but could also introduce new topics and connections, as any discourse or conversation might. The notion of inner dialogue is misleading if the “inner speech” part of it is taken as a complete picture of the inner, world of course—visualization, either as “memory” or “fantasy,” form part of an “inner imaginary” as well. There are scenic, visualized, figurative, even “performative” and “ritual” as well as verbal components to the inner imaginary. Each self has a potential for generating subjective images and inner speech, for grasping mental objects, scenes, feelings, in reverie, fantasy, reflections, and creative thought.

Inner Imaginaries Let’s compare the case of the cancer patient with another example of reported inner experience. We face, of course, the paradox that we have access to such activity only when it is reported, that is, when it is no longer confined to the inner mode. It is possible, however, to elicit reports of it, and to evaluate these. The following passage was elicited by an anthropologist (Caughey 1984), who asked people to report their thoughts. It has been interpreted by the sociologist Norbert Wiley. The italics in the quoted passage are Wiley’s. This woman was reporting

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on her thoughts as she walked to work (Wiley 1994, 64). Notice how what she reports thinking is compounded of words, “visions” of social scenes, along with “sensations.” Some of the sensations are physical— hearing sounds, feeling hot—while others are related to what we usually term emotions, and seem to signal something about the felt integration of person with social setting. Thus, the woman reports “humiliation” as a sensation—that is, as a felt experience. “Only eight minutes, takes five to change. I’ve got to book (hurry).” Imagery: A disgustingly filthy locker room. Visions of me running from table to kitchen table. Sounds. Forks and knives scraping plates, customers yelling over each other. “I have to make money. At least it’s not as bad as last summer.” Memory imagery: A tiny dumpy diner. Visions of me sweating. Sensations of being hot. Visions of thirty marines eating and drinking. Sounds: country music on a blaring juke box. “Miss, miss.” “I’ll be right there, just a minute please.” Sensations of burning my arms in a pizza oven. Visions of dropping glasses. Sounds: Glass breaking, manager yelling, marines cheering. “Oh God, get me out of here.” Sensation: Cringe, humiliation. “I hate waitressing. Can’t wait to graduate and get a decent job.” Visions of a paneled. brightly carpeted office with scenic pictures and healthy plants. Visions of me fifteen pounds thinner in a new skirt suit from Lord and Taylor. A great-looking coworker is pouring us coffee. Sounds of a clock chiming five o’clock. “Sure, I’d love to go out Friday night.” (Quoted in Wiley 1994, 64; italics Wiley’s)

Wiley notes that there are “six bits” of dialogue, which he sets off in italics, “separated by sensory and emotional imagery.” There may be an artifact here—one wonders if the researcher, Caughey, may not have asked for reports on “visual images” and “sensations” as part of the process of “retrospecting.” It does not, I think, matter for present purposes whether this is a passage that is partly induced by research instructions. Subjectivity is always related to some set of external circumstances; the real issue is whether such subjective experience is more than a reflection of the circumstances, that is, whether any agency appears in it, and what the organization of this might be. In her report, the woman depicts something like an experience. It consists of speech acts and images, which are associated with sensations or feelings. Various kinds of others appear—marines, as customers, a manager who yells, and an imagined coworker who invites her out. Wiley interprets the passage in terms of a concept of cognitive “visitors.” He says that “the striking feature of this text is the strength of the visitors: the rowdy marines from the previous summer, the yelling


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manager, and the great-looking imaginary co-worker.” Notice how this juxtaposes scenes remembered and scenes imagined. Wiley’s concept of “the visitor” in an inner dialogue refers to persons “who are . . . present and available” to internal conversations and visualizations. Visitors are like objects, then, as we have defined them, and may overlap with them, but objects are not necessarily animated in consciousness; cognitive visitors are. They are represented consciously in imagery or animated as conversational partners. They are symbolic third parties to inner conversations as well as parties in remembered or imagined scenes. The role they play in conscious imagery and inner speech may be relatively passive or something more— although, short of a psychotic break, they cannot be fully autonomous. Wiley derives his concept from the writer Goethe, who evidently had elaborate fantasies about “guests” with whom he could converse. One suspects the autonomy achieved by these visitors, guests, or objects is limited in most human beings, for the same reason that sensory systems usually cannot be fully activated for “internal” purposes but require external input—allowing the “mind” to activate the senses would impair reality testing. The woman addresses God—“Oh God, get me out of here.” Wiley considers this expressive and conventional, not an example of a visitor. I agree. The cancer patient’s private “talks” with God is a better example of an inner situation in which the idea of God organizes thought and reflection, even though in that case the figure of God is not mentally animated to produce responses. God is simply silent. In the women’s introspections, on the other hand, she reports speech directed at her: “Miss, Miss.” This is minimal, however; most of the words reported are her own. Notice that her words might be interpreted as several kinds of speech acts. She reminds herself that it takes eight minutes to get to work, and urges herself to hurry. She announces an imperative—“I have to make money”—as a way, arguably, to overcome her reluctance to work in the unpleasant conditions she visualizes. She “keeps things in perspective” by telling herself it is “not as bad as last summer.” The statement “Oh God, get me out of here,” may invoke God in a conventional sense, not as an object or visitor, but the statement is a plea for help, and this may work better—be more felicitous, semantically and evocatively—when addressed to a figure able, in theory, to respond. Wiley’s (1994) overall interpretation of the passage is worth quoting. [T]he waitress is trying to calm herself in the face of immediate anxiety: being late for work. She uses the trick of comparing her present

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waitress job, itself not one she likes, with the one from the previous summer, which she liked even less. And she makes the further contrast between the present job and the one she is imagining for herself after graduation. In each frame—last summer’s horrible job, this summer’s difficult one, and next year’s highly gratifying position— solidarity and dissolidarity with visitors is an important secondary theme. (67)

She does not feel “good” about the manager yelling or the marines cheering when she broke some glasses—this is the “dissolidarity.” The solidarity is the “great looking coworker pouring coffee” and accepting the invitation to go out. Solidarity feels good. We can compare this to the cancer patient. He is trying to “calm himself” not just from the anxiety of having cancer—this exists, presumably, in the background—but from the more immediate anxieties of his wife’s departure and the threat that he will catch the flu from his daughter and be hospitalized. Like the waitress, he has a reflexive “trick” to play, an interpretive maneuver by which he can adjust how he feels in the present. He attempts—and apparently succeeds—in calming himself with the reflection that “it does no good to worry.” In his interpretation of the waitress’s maneuver, Wiley goes on to say that “the larger theme is the juggling of present, past, and future.” Trying to synthesize the work of G. H. Mead and C. S. Peirce, Wiley associates the present with the “I,” the past with the “me,” and the future with the “you.” He says that the waitress is “trying to optimize the relations among I, me, and you” in “the classic semiotic task of interpreting the past to and for the future.” She regulates her experience of the present by imagining how much worse the past was and how much better the future will be. It is worth noting that she is performing this “semiotic task” of optimizing dimensions of self-experience in terms of cultural schemas. To put it somewhat crudely, the me, what I am, the identity I have, my self-representation based on what the past has been; the I, the agency of self; and the you, what the self can be or should be—appear to selfawareness in terms of cultural images. The waitress invokes the goals of graduation and getting “a decent job.” She visualizes a “brightly carpeted office.” She gives herself a body and clothes to go along with this: “Visions of me fifteen pounds thinner in a new skirt suit from Lord and Taylor.” The visual schemas and the self they posit reflect, in a rather uncritical way, values of success and consumerism. Yet they free her from the immediate situation and allow her to optimize her experience by choosing perspectives that enhance the way she feels about herself (Tomasello 1990, 9).


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This passage of self-consciousness suggests the flow of subjectivity that helps push everyday life along. While the waitress’s subjective imagery falls short of critical consciousness, such imagery may help her get through a hard day. As such her self-imagery represents not simply a momentary optimization of experience, but a coping strategy. She gives herself hope for a better life, the kind of hope that American consumer culture endlessly exploits. There is an almost ritual aspect to her imagery. She separates herself from life as it is and undergoes a transformation that reintegrates her into a better life. The terms of transformation are presented in the bright colors of the office, with its healthy plants, and herself somehow “there,” with her new clothes and new personhood. This may represent the way a working person, in fantasy, looks “up” in the class system and imagines a future.1 Her fantasy, if we can call it that without demeaning it, has its correlates in everyday practice. This is nicely evoked in a poem by Denise Levertov (1970) in which she pictures people thronging through stores “where light, color, . . . dreams are . . . It’s their festival, ring game, wassail, mystery” (509). This kind of festive consumer play may be dissociative—taking the self “away” from jobs and lives where the lights are not as bright, the colors less alive, and dreams are slowly dying. Yet the slight quality of transcendence that emerges in consumer rituals deserves recognition. People supply themselves with the experience of being other than what they are to regulate what they feel about their lives, to redirect the feelings that define them, to repair the self. They may make use of the gap between work and home as a liminal space, where they can freely, even wantonly, make feelings happen. They may want or need to feel the world offers light, color, dreams—distraction and release of some kind. The enchantment of consumer culture may be the only enchantment some people have in a “world of urgency and necessity” (Wikan 1995). I do not find it surprising that people find ways to release feelings that help them cope with difficult lives, feelings that help them define self in terms that go beyond a grim realistic appraisal of life. I wanted light, color, dreams, festival after my days on the cancer ward. This quest to shape “the feeling that happens” constitutes, for human beings, part of an existential effort that Unni Wikan (1995) usefully describes, adapting a line by T.S. Eliot, as “the endless struggle to think well of themselves” (277). It is not surprising, either, that consumer culture supplies mental visitors or seduces self-imagery. Everyday life, even everyday life at its most prosaic and in its most self-subverting forms, gives a certain spin

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to the work of self. Where else but everyday life would selves go to define self? They cannot leap over the cultural world that exists for them. Suffering, however, can propel the work of self in unexpected directions, making it pass through the possibilities of cultural life in new ways. Cultural conceptions can then come to have new meaning and play different roles in the effort to live and to be. This happens even when people are trying to preserve values experienced as fundamental to their lives and selves. Helen is an example of this, but the cancer patient I mentioned at the start of this chapter also seeks to manage his self-experience by mobilizing subjective imagery. He has to deal with the way his disease affects his everyday life, but he also pursues a religious perspective that goes beyond such specific concerns as his daughter’s cold and his wife departure. It seems he seeks a witness for his suffering—his silent God. He anchors self-experience in his sense of God. He provides himself with an “ontological presence” to counter the “ontological assault” of suffering on his life. Perhaps he exists intact in this relationship with his vision of divinity, when his life is not intact. I imagine that this sense of God might help him keep himself going. If cancer and chemo introduced chaos into his life, he could put all this aside when he “talked to God.” Having this presence witness his suffering perhaps not only provided him with a way of grasping his experience that constitutes it, potentially at least, as a meaningful whole; it also offers an enduring solidarity. He is not alone, even when others are away. He is not “gone,” even when nausea threatens to dissolve his self-awareness or the world dissolves into pain; he exists in the regard of God and of other selves. Yet he also has to get through this particular day, and through the next few days. This takes more than his sense of the presence of God, as important as this may be for him. Like the waitress the cancer patient seeks to regulate his experience of the present by imagining futures—when it comes to imagining catching his daughter’s cold and his wife leaving for a trip he imagines one future in which he continues to worry and one in which he does not. He decides that it is better not to worry—it will not bring about a better future but only a worse one, and this is not desirable. Yet he also faces the dilemma of having to imagine a future in which he no longer exists, but has died of cancer. This arouses feelings, and I imagine these feelings move him to such mental acts as noting his powerlessness, and communing with God, if that is what he is doing. Unlike the waitress, his reflections on his


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future per do not leave him where he wants it to be. He is not able to “optimize,” in the sense that he is going to be able to get things to come out right, by the standards that matter to him, but rather must anticipate and reflect on his losses. My best guess is that he is involved in shifting himself from judging himself in terms of how he lives to judging himself in terms of how he dies. There is an intermediate possibility, however, in which self-appraisal based on the life plans inherent in some vision of the “normal” good life has been abandoned, but the whole of experience is not framed in terms of anticipatory mourning or acceptance of death. Holding on to life and hope, the psychological theme is resistance, rather than resignation and acceptance of death. It is easy to see the cultural values at play in some of this—the notions that he should “fight” and “wants to beat it” seem straight out of pharmaceutical company advertising, and yet also reflect the wishes and encouragement of family members—but they have to incorporated in a rhetoric that he applies to self. His complexly socialized intuitions about what is good for self—to be safe, to be with others, to have what counts as a good life, to be able to “do things,” counterpoised with images of being confined to a bed, dependent on doctors and nurses, facing the reality of losing his life and losing his family—fill him with feelings and images. He gives voice to some of this. He is not absolutely passive in relation to this: this space of subjectivity (and its subject positioning, if we wish to use that terminology to describe the patient’s role) can itself be subject to psychological agency, to the work of self, to critical consciousness and efforts at self-control. It makes a difference whether one views “mind talk” as only expressive, or sees it as like a dialogue in key respects. The question is whether such internal experiences make a difference. Do they add something to a person’s view of self or world, modifying their model of self or world, and potentially shaping their engagement with the world—or simply express the state of the organism. A dialogue carries emergent possibilities: it can change what a person thinks or feels, offer new information or interpretations, force a shift in perspective. The question boils down to how unified the mind or self is. If viewed as completely unified, inner speech can only be expressive of its state. A cry of pain is not a dialogue. It expresses the state of the organism. The expressive mind simply declares what it is; the dialogical mind addresses itself and has a real capacity to modify its model of self.

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Actually, the human mind works both ways, but the dialogical mind is where the work of self begins. It takes up the expressive mind and attempts to cope with it, to model it, to integrate it into the world. I interpret my cry of pain as weakness, or I think that no one cares that I am in pain. Can I urge myself not to show pain? Does the urging make a difference? Do I nurture a sense of grievance at the way others overlook my pain—and plot a response? Do I seek to reconcile myself with my weakness, or reject my anger? I arrive at a certain understanding of myself; it develops, as understanding develops, in a dialogue. The idea of a dialogical mind—the kind of mind capable of persuading itself, making itself feel something—requires that the mind have parts. Dialogue is a useful metaphor, or heuristic, for conceiving of this deployment of self into parts that influence each other. Memory, reverie, subjective imagery all form part of this process. To take a relatively simple example from everyday life, a person recently told me how she had not been able to sleep because her hours at work had been cut, a threat to her ability to provide for herself and pursue her life plans. Lying sleepless in her bed, she rehearsed a confrontation with her boss. She also inferred from her sleeplessness and preoccupations that she was a certain kind of person. Speaking to me, she personified herself as much too sensitive to social relations, as too averse to confrontations, and as unable to handle stress. She then mumbled (I later wondered if this was in the nature of a soliloquy) what seemed to me a non sequitur: “free riders sleep at night.” When I asked what she meant, she explained that people who have “no conscience” and “who don’t care about others,” but are willing to “take advantage,” sleep well at night. They are not, she implied, kept awake by a moral sensibility. Part of the background for her comment is the fact that she had recently been accused herself of trying for a “free ride,” and had felt hurt and insulted. So she was motivated to deny and correct this. This was an opportunity to do so; she may have been repairing damage to her self-esteem, and this might explain why I experienced her statement as like overhearing a soliloquy. She took her feelings to signify that she was a relatively normal, moral person, responsive to others, not willing to take advantage or to harm. She may have been implying that is what made conflict and assertion difficult for her; it has the form of aggression, even when justified. I think it is worth speculating that formulating herself as a moral person is a way of formulating the agency needed to engage in


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a confrontation. Without the reassurance, and the impetus, of her characterization of herself as a moral person she might not confront her boss. If so, this is an example of what I term self-work. Sleeplessness and ruminations are signs for her, signs of herself and of the way the world is, that she interprets; and her interpretations lead to other interpretations.

All for One and One for All (or Not) What makes an inner dialogue possible is the fact that self exists in time. Wiley proposes that the orientations to self represented by the triad of “I,” “me,” and “you” emerge and disappear in time and subjective experience. That is, for human beings, time consists of a succession of different orientations to self, not one orientation all the time. Beckett’s “I can’t go on, I’ll go on” might be seen as declaring a fact, and resisting it. It suggests a “willing subject” leaping over an “experiencing subject.” Some “core” of the self is involved. “Why is this happening to me?” may, as a thought about a misfortune, present the self as a recipient of what happens. This “objectifies” self. Something like “you have gone wrong” in fact takes a perspective on “me”—the historical self, the product of its actions and experiences, which stands in contrast to the “I,” the willing subject, who stands in the present. This “you” objectifies the self in terms of its future: the self addressed as you can be directed or educated, reproached or warned, with a view to its future engagement with the world. This is complicated and perhaps we already see some of the ambiguities of Wiley’s (perhaps the ambiguities of any possible) account. Obviously, inner speech is not in all respects like “outer speech”—it does not involve another person, after all. Therefore it does not (directly) express solidarity or tension with another, or convey information or understanding to them, and so on. There will be moments when this difference is decisive. I find value in Wiley’s model. However, I think it more useful as a heuristic, a loosely scripted approach to understanding persons, than as a theory forced to produce some kind of final account of the self. It is important if you want to understand actual persons to know how they treat themselves as “parts” in integration or conflict, which have to be rearranged or reconciled: one wants to see how they judge and reproach themselves and gain some sense of what they don’t know or won’t accept about themselves. Denying reflexive capacities of this sort shuts analysis off what people actually do in everyday life.

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The triadic semiotic perspective on the self advanced by Wiley is best viewed as a heuristic of this kind—an illuminating way of organizing data and interpretations about persons, based on their existential activity. Wiley’s theory is complicated, and I do not have the space to do justice to it. What he proposes is an ambitious synthesis of G. H. Mead and C. S. Peirce. 2 In brief, and to oversimplify, the “I” is the self as an agent of willing and wanting or choice (it has limited freedom). The “me” is an object to the “I.” It is what the self has become as the “I” acts through successive moments of time—the self in light of its history. It is also what the self becomes as it internalizes cultural norms or the attitudes of others toward it—the self in light of its social commitments and objectifying experiences. The “you” is the self coming into being. It is the self in light of its potential. It will potentially assume the I position. The I may attempt to manage or direct the development of the you, just as it attempts to cope with the reality of the me. So the relations are: past—me, present—I, future—you; me— determined, I—free, you—possible. It seems to me that Wiley’s theory reinforces the view that the personification of self by self deals with an existential history and probes for existential possibility. People— think of Helen—personify and evaluate themselves (“me”) in terms of what they have done and experienced, as a way of guiding themselves into the future (“you” is Wiley’s term for a possible self, one detached from “me”), as a way of making themselves different persons— transformed selves. You can’t leap over what you are and what your life has been up to now; you can’t leap over your relation to what you are; you can’t leap over your relation to what you might be or do. Wiley quotes G. H. Mead: “If the ‘I’ speaks, the ‘me’ hears. If the ‘I’ strikes, the ‘me’ feels the blow” (quoted in Wiley 42). And C.S. Peirce: “Thinking always proceeds in the form of a dialogue—a dialogue between different phases of the ego . . . [A person’s ] thoughts are what he is ‘saying to himself,’ that is, is saying to that other self that is just coming into life in the flow of time” (quoted in Wiley 42). The key here, in my view, is the notion that the existing self has a relation to “that other self that is just coming into life in the flow of time.” Think of Helen. She was confronting her possible selves: “that other self” that had “come into life in the flow of time.” That “other self” made her a monster, a husband killer: she could barely live with this. Her “I” struck her “me”: she inflicted pain on herself, condemned herself to suffering. She needed to be something else. Her inner dialogue, as a work of self, hinged on finding some way to decide which


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of the possible selves coming into being really defined her. “I am a monster”—“you are not a monster.” For her, this corresponds to Beckett’s “I can’t go on, I will go on.” It is an existential sticking point: she tried to find an alternative to “monster” and its antecedents (“anti-Semite”). She needed solidarity with me to enhance her “you”— “you are not a monster—you are a human being struggling through a life crisis.” Let me back up and bring into focus existential simplicities that underlie these “semiotic” perspectives. I think the problem of solidarity, and the problem of existence, that forms the backdrop of inner dialogues have more force than the quotes from Mead and Peirce suggest. The self as speaker and hearer of its own urgencies is not ruminating in a vacuum. The capacity for reflexivity is activated to engage existence; the process is used to confront the urgencies of life. Inner dialogues have both the potential to take the self out of solidarity and to restore solidarity—to detach it from its intuitive grasp of self and to restore it to some adaptive, if fragile, equilibrium. It does so in response to problems of meaning and existence. The “me” can be a tragedy, the “I” a cry for help, the “you” addressed to self in a spasm of desperate hope. Wiley’s heuristic allows us to grasp some features of Helen’s process of self-evaluation. Helen’s “me”—this monster, killer, bad person. Her “I”—I can’t bear it. Her “you” addressing her: “you have to go out and get some help.” This process began with something else: “I wish he was dead.” Then he died and she thought: “You are a monster.” She condemned herself. It is easy to imagine that such experiences—whether verbalized or not—had a corrosive effect on the core of her selfhood: her sense of herself as being a good person. From Helen’s point of view, something terrible happened to her: it was herself. We can be more compassionate, but to understand her we have to grasp her process of self-reflection, her struggle with her possible selves.

Suffering, Solidarity, Identity Obviously, suffering has deep subjective dimensions. What could be more subjective than the experience of suffering? But what precisely are these dimensions? Suffering is potentially transformative—at least it often forces people to grasp themselves in new ways as they try to cope with the human possibilities that suffering offers. In suffering there is always “that other self that is coming into existence in the flow

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of time”: the possible self that one might be and the suffering, solidarity, identity it offers. There is also resistance to what one might be: dying, burnt out, a failure, a bad person, alone, incomplete, in pain. The struggle not to be transformed by suffering can be very real: to be normal, to conform to conventional standards, to put a good face on things for the sake of others, to collude in the pretense that nothing has changed, that life (for others anyway) can and will go on. In Arthur Miller’s play Death of a Salesman, the central figure is Willy Loman. I say “figure” advisedly, because his loss of agency in some ways defines him. He is something less than a protagonist. His grip on the world and ability to carry on with his life is slipping away. His family is disturbed. At one point in the play his wife says to her sons about their father: Willy Loman never made a lot of money. His name was never in the paper. He’s not the finest character that ever lived. But he’s a human being and a terrible thing is happening to him. So attention must be paid. He’s not to be allowed to fall into his grave like an old dog. Attention, attention must be finally paid to such a person. You called him crazy.” (56)

Notice how this pulls the sons and wife into solidarity despite all the reasons they have to distance themselves from their father, whose behavior has become disturbing, “crazy.” They are brought together in terms of the understanding that “something terrible is happening” to a human being, a husband, a father. Willy is not part of this understanding. Part of what constitutes “something terrible” happening is his inability to find the grounds of solidarity with his family, and his drift into a dreamlike solidarity with the dead. Outside of fiction, I think we all understand that someone might say this about self. “Something terrible is happening to me.” I think we can also grasp that part of the terror has to do with the loss of solidarity; that it disrupts relatedness. Another part of the terror is the disorientation: the loss of self is a loss of world, and the terror of this loss is in part the terror of being lost, of not knowing how to make your way. Fear of death or madness (or, at one remove, the desire for death or madness) projects a loss of self, with its loss of world: “something terrible happening” to self strikes at the symbiosis, the interfusing, of self and world. What such extreme cases make palpable is that the conversation between “I” and “me” has a third element, the world as it impacts the life of the self. The inner dialogue may be devoted to orienting self to the possibilities, and the urgencies, of life circumstances.


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When something terrible is happening to “me,” it is not willed. It happens. To me. It is a process experienced. The locus of experience— me—is passive in relation to the event; but the self as a whole is not absolutely passive. It voices a response—if only its recognition that something terrible is happening. It calls out—for help, for solidarity— from others, but also from its own “parts.” As we have already seen, this relating of self to a relation that exists for self is fundamental; people do it all the time. What we want to add here is a sense of how they call on parts of themselves that have a different potential for framing experience in their responses. It may not be wholly inappropriate to consider extreme examples in an era that values extremes. Here is a real life example: “I don’t have a positive attitude about anything. I just want to sleep and not get up. I don’t want to deal with it. I guess, basically, I want to die.” What we have here is a self-evaluation. “It” here refers to this person’s life—she believes she is getting nowhere, and finds her relationships unsatisfactory. What interests me is the quick movement to “I want to die.” She makes a similar statement in a journal entry, after listing some of the difficulties she was having in life, with her boyfriend, her classes, and her family: “Basically, I want to die.” Wanting to die may mean many things: here it is presented as a way out, an escape; it may also represent an intuition that suicide is an act of agency, that it allows a person to have some control over his or her fate, some choice in what happens. Suicidal thoughts are, of course, part of daily life for many people. As a cancer patient and survivor, I have become familiar with the struggles of cancer patients and their caregivers. Part of the larger struggle may be a personal battle with despair, against “wanting to die” or “give up.” “He said he was going to kill himself,” one woman reported. “I felt hammered . . . All he said today was shut up and no more doctor appointments ever, he [was] done.” What is being “hammered”? Not her body, but definite aspects of self—her capacity to cope and go on. What she experiences is the feeling that happens when your husband declares he is “done”—with treatment, with life. One can easily find other real life examples. Cancer patients and their caregivers often express hope or determination—they are going to fight the cancer; they are going to get their lives back, or go on enjoying life—but eventually some will say they don’t want to go on, or a struggling caregiver will report that a loved one does not want to struggle any more, does not want more treatment, wants to die, that they are done.

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The wish to die is one of the most poignant expressions of the human capacity for self-awareness. We, as vicarious witnesses to Willy Loman, my anonymous respondent and the struggles of people with cancer, understand the basic connection: Something terrible is happening to me. I want to die. What we recognize is a shift from experience to agency. This shift from the experiencing of something “happening to me” to the agency of “I want” seems primordial, one of the existential pistons of human experience. The self as an object in the world, emergent in experience, contingent on circumstance, formulates a response, and in doing so reconstitutes self as an agent. “I” takes an existential stand in terms of “me.” I have heard quite a few declarations about wanting to die over the years. This one stirred a memory for me, and I shuffled through old college books during one of my periods out of the hospital, in search of a footnote. That might seem like an odd reaction, or the eccentric reaction of an ivory tower type; but the footnote is to T. S. Eliot’s poem The Waste Land. In it, Eliot quotes the Roman poet Petronius: “For I saw with my own eyes the Sibyl hanging in a jar at Cumae and when the acolytes said, ‘Sibyl, what do you wish?’ she replied, ‘I wish to die.’ ” What “terrible thing had happened to her” to make her want to die? The story goes that Apollo gave the Sibyl everlasting life, but not youthfulness, so her body dried up and she could be put in a bottle. Why did I remember this passage I had read many years before? A memory of it welled up in me and I determined to track the reference down when I got out of the hospital. Here the shift was from inner experience to outer action, but inspired by “the world” that “I” enclosed in memory rather than the world that enclosed me on the third floor of the hospital. Yet the outer world, the world in which I was a cancer patient, ultimately triggered and shaped my passage through memory and reverie. I was in search of a response to elements of my predicament. The sequence running from recalling the footnote to hunting it down to reflecting on it was an expression of the sort of inwardness that I am trying to define here. This inwardness involves the capacity to imagine the world in ways that do not quite correspond to actuality, but which suggest some possible response to it. I was trying to cope with existence by reframing aspects of my relationship to it. Some part of me, and not such an obscure part, felt that reading the footnote would make a difference. The difference it


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would make would be in me, in my attitudes or my understanding, in my orientation to existence—but this potential difference was significant for me. It might, in fact, make a difference, at least to me, in the world. In fact, the difference it could make is that I might not have to be like Sibyl, wishing to die. Rather, I could define another stance on my experience, my suffering and my fear of dying, by “being something other.” I did not want to be despair. I wanted to be something else. But despair was a possibility, even a creeping reality. Some not so obscure part of me (call it my will to live) recognized, perhaps obscurely, that this footnote could help—by giving me a defining image of what I would not like to let myself be: shriveled up and fit into a bottle of despair. People need images of what they will struggle for and against. What the image of the Sibyl means to me is something like this: if you can feel compassion, then this compassion defines self. This compassionate self is, in a psychologically real sense, not the despairing self. I would certainly rather become a creature of compassion than a locus of despair. It is easier to suffer that way and compassion has more impact on the world, or at least a more positive impact. It is better for those you love. It is also a form of mastery. So, in any event, my reveries and reflections suggest to me. Existentially, I have every reason to maintain this slight discrepancy between Sibyl and myself. Yet I know I could experience what any other cancer patient experiences. That too is a possible self. There is a general point here. The reveries, the desires, that form in response to life circumstances, the memories that rise to conscious awareness in just the situation in which you find yourself, are in part the way the self tries to guide itself toward some response, to some resolution of its existential dilemma. Here we are back to Levy’s theory of feeling. But what exercises us so completely that we create inner worlds in not any simple kind of psychological itch waiting to for a culturally constituted scratch. It is the way we confront existential concerns, challenges to our entry into life. Such challenges provoke us to exercise our powers to imagine and feel; what rises into awareness is not one feeling but complex sequences of feelings, images, memories, thoughts—my capacities coalesced into what we might well call an inner imaginary and directed at my existence in the world. When a young woman, looking less sad than grandly perplexed, confided in me that her grandfather had just died—I think she must have been quite distressed to confide in me, since I was obviously a patient— what I felt was a chill, which I recognized as fear, and suppressed; this

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then slid off into that slightly sad focused regard (“attention must be paid”) that is how I would describe my experience of compassion. What I felt then was compassion and fear. It could be me; yet this person has suffered a loss. What I felt as a result of such experiences, registered in relationship to my own experience, was a kind of need to educate myself in compassion. I had joined the community of those to whom “something terrible was happening.” What was I going to be? I had to frame a response; or let some other part of myself frame a response. That was a danger: who was I going to be, what part of me would come to define me in this situation? Where else could this question be determined except in the self system? Depression, despair, a sense of futility, a judgment of hopelessness were making claims on self-awareness, on my capacity for response; but some part of me wanted to equip hope and acceptance with the means to seize the executive apparatus and self-awareness. How could I—it is a very optimistic phrase under the circumstances—“optimize my self-experience”? My functioning? My capacity to live? My powers of endurance? Anyone might face a similar challenge; anyone in a variety of situations does. I am like the waitress Wiley describes as trying to optimize her self-experience; I have to get through the hours, the days, of my life. Like her, there is a bias toward survival and flourishing in my efforts, an affirmation of (realistic?) possibilities, and a kind of appeal to relationships that I have had, or could have, with others. I don’t have God, like the cancer patient whose experience we started the chapter with, or the prospect of a romantic evening to keep me going, but I have the Sibyl. I was in the hospital when I first watched, then read, Death of a Salesman. So the memory that floated into awareness of this footnote in Eliot’s poem was perhaps a kind of response to my own condition and to images of the suffering of others. I had my own life shrivel up and get put into a bottle. I was not rehearsing suicide—far from it—but rather trying to equip myself with a capacity to suffer. I had an understandable interest in the way others responded to suffering because I was suffering. How does one endure? If, like others, I needed images of hope, I also needed an understanding of death and suffering. What can a human being bring to suffering? I provided myself with insight in reveries, and memories, and prompted myself to educate myself, a little. What are the dimensions of despair? How does one convert them into compassion? No easy


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task. The Virginia Woolf character in the move The Hours, reflecting on what fate she might assign one of her characters, realized that death is always possible. So it is. So is compassion. What inwardness offers, in waves of reverie, memory, and reflection, is the capacity to sift through all of what you know to see if you can define a possible response to the world, something adequate to the circumstances. Often, people can.

Solidarity Matters In this, I think solidarity, even implied solidarity, even the solidarity implied by one’s own constitution as a person, matters. Suppose that someone like Willy Loman sitting in a car in his garage with the exhaust hooked up to a pipe he places in the window suddenly says, “God, you don’t want to die, I don’t want to die.” The self addressed as “you’ would be a possible self, emerging; not wanting to die would define a possibility for self, and guide efforts to manage existence and maneuver into the future. If the “you” of Wiley’s semiotic triad can speak in harsh terms, can reproach and rebuke, it can also speak in reassurance and guidance, and can represent that implicit solidarity through which people in fact constitute some of experiences, some of their efforts to deal with their own existence. This sense of purpose, derived from some experience of solidarity, some experience of attachment with others, can support the self in its ongoing efforts to cope. The search for solidarity is in part a search for someone—or some part of the self—to take the role of “you” and guide the self. This “you,” if inward in the sense Wiley proposes, would stand slightly apart from the I–me structure: it implies or provides “solidarity” with something more than self. This something more can be of various kinds—one is addressed by another, by a higher purpose, by the “voice” of ritual orders, by the normative order, by religion, by a future or past self, by a self more moral, more committed, to some purpose or orientation beyond the “feeling that happens.” In a sense, the power of self to address self as “you” short circuits the feeling that happens and its immediate movement to action or appraisal consistent with immediate feeling. At least, this would seem to be one set of possibilities. I imagine there are others: the comforting you, the scolding you, the ridiculing you—all these possibilities that belong to the internal semiotic “you” suggest basic social orientations, and the presence of something in the nature of a “superego.”

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Inner Discontinuities When you talk to yourself, do you hear a voice? Is this voice yours—is it continuous with self—or not self? It seems the brain is capable of partial activations of sensory systems in the service of parliamentary coalitions of mental agents (Minsky 1986). For example, the sensory capacity coordinates with linguistic capacity to provide the “auditory imagination,” making possible the virtual experience of inner speech. As an academic, I have incentives to rehearse lectures and writing in my head. These activations are “partial.” I do not have an auditory hallucination of my own voice, although I can “hear” myself. If I start to talk out loud, the quality of the experience is altered. It makes a difference if sound waves activate the sense of hearing. Most people, most of the time, may have little trouble distinguishing inner and outer speech, and can distinguish actually hearing something from imagining it or having the virtual experience of hearing something. Not being able to distinguish would pose problems for adaptation and survival. However, certain people may not track the differences between auditory sensations and auditory imagining as others do. I will turn briefly to the case of “schizophrenics” in a moment. Almost anyone, moreover, may have an occasional auditory or visual hallucination, or something close to it. There is a kind of continuum, although perhaps not a smooth continuum, but one in which there are interruption points or “quantum leaps” between states. Let me describe a virtual experience I have had—the experience of phantom crying. As a new parent, I experienced a state of heightened attention that I would describe as a kind of hyper-vigilance. The sounds made by my children became perceptually salient and motivating, especially sounds of distress, like crying. Just as someone is more likely to pick out the sound of their own name being called out of background sound, I was highly sensitive to the sounds my infant son and daughter made. Sometimes I would wake up at night believing that I heard them crying. I would get up, listen, and then go check. Sometimes they were crying; often, however, they were not. The central feature of this experience is that I “heard” them crying. I did not “think” they might be crying. I did not have to persuade myself that I heard crying; I had to convince myself that the kids were not crying. The adaptive value of this kind of hyper-vigilance seems obvious. Phantom crying means the kids get checked on; it is a peculiar form of “invested regard.” The mental agent here is something like “concern for my child.” It is an agent generated by attachment. This part of me used my “mind” to


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generate a virtual experience of crying to sustain vigilance and ensure my children’s well-being and safety. No doubt this appropriation of my sensory system and the auditory imagination—if that is what it is— involved a coalition with anxiety. My anxieties about the safety and well-being of my infant children and my concern about being a good parent could, we might speculate, form a second, compound, agent. All this implies a self-system where the parts work together in some situations to generate subjective experiences consonant with self states. These mental agents expressed goals I had as a whole person; they were not autonomous agents, but creations of my life purposes. Notice that the self is larger here than the conscious sense of self; I did not deliberately plan on tricking myself into getting up to check on the baby. Nonetheless, I made myself do it. This “self” is not a monolithic whole, but a system of parts mobilized in terms of goals, one integrated as a process of adapting and doing. Helen came to me and reported what she thought and what she felt. I think aspects of her “internal dialogue” reemerge as an interpersonal dialogue. She also had vivid but illusory perceptual experiences—she felt that Ted was in the house and that she smelled like blood. If this symbolizes guilt, where does the symbol end and sensory experience begin? Was she just saying she smelled like blood, without having the sensation? There is no way to reach a decisive conclusion. However, a parliamentary model of mind allows for the possibility that guilt as a powerful self-evaluation may in fact generate a range of experiences, ranging from voices—I am a bad person, a monster— experienced in the auditory imagination to the activation of sensory systems to create phantom experiences. That she experienced Ted in the house with her is no stranger than the experience of phantom limbs reported by amputees. It is the activation of a model. In this case, it is not the image of the body in the brain that generates the virtual experience, but the image of self and other shaped by the human capacity for attachment. The experience of smelling like blood seems even more palpable and haunting because it edges the sensory “imagination” into sensory experience. This may represent a inner activation of sensory system under conditions of extreme emotional crisis. This raises questions about the intensity of activations, and about the experienced continuity of such activations with self. Recently Jenkins has discussed these issues in relationship to the voices that some people diagnosed as schizophrenic experience. The question of managing multiple channels of reflexivity arises in an exchange between Ira Glass (IG) and Patricia Deegan (PD), quoted

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and discussed in Jenkins (2004). Jenkins says that “at the outset, Glass mistakes the common experience of hearing songs in one’s head for the hearing of voices in schizophrenia. Deegan tries to correct this, describing voices as a ‘primordially, profoundly auditory experience, to the point where you can actually startle if a voice starts up suddenly.’ ” Deegan denies that this is “on a continuum” with what people hear in the auditory imagination (36–37). “Despite this . . . discontinuity with ordinary experience,” Jenkins writes, “Deegan does not count them as discontinuous with self.” IG: How do you conceive of the voices that you hear? As separate from your self, or do you conceive of them as part of your self that you can recognize? PD: I think that for me it’s a goal to eventually say these voices are a part of me, and that’s actually one of the self-help coping strategies that I do use sometimes . . . So, for instance, if I have a particularly derogatory or awful voice, that I might say, as a coping strategy, “today I am feeling like I am no good, today I am feeling like I’m a worthless person, these are my thoughts, these are my feelings.” IG: Is that because when the voice is saying that, literally you are not having the feeling “oh, I’m feeling bad today.” PD: That’’s right. (Quoted in Jenkins 2004, 36–37)

Note the obvious aspects. The experience is auditory and internal. As observers, listening to a report of “hearing voices,” it seems the person is saying something to herself. This seems like the experience of silently “talking to yourself.” In this case, however, the person experiencing voices does not take this mental experience as self. As Jenkins puts it, “the reflexivity that characterizes our capacity for orientation” to ourselves and the world “cannot be taken for granted by the self, and is crystallized, or rendered experientially opaque, in the voice” (37). In Deegan’s case, although the voices are not directly experienced as self, they are recognized as self. Jenkins terms this a “trained capacity for self-awareness” that allows “Deegan to reappropriate her own reflexivity by insisting that the voices are part of herself.” This is a second-order reflexivity. It presupposes a critical self, or reflective self—one that can be trained to monitor and evaluate experience in terms of certain canons of judgment (“a coping strategy”). Deegan does not experience the voices immediately and transparently as self but tells herself that they are part of herself. The interviewer, Ira Glass, asks Deegan if, when the voices are saying derogatory things, “literally you are not having the feeling ‘oh,


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I’m feeling bad today.’ ” This suggests that the voices are also a secondorder reflexivity—as surrogate for bad feelings—that are not integrated into the self as self. What is the difference between an auditory hallucination and an auditory imagining? Implicit in the earlier discussion is a difference in intensity. One can startle when an inner voice starts up. With Beethoven as an exception, an ordinary song in the head does not have the aural vibrancy or intensity, richness or volume that a song played on a stereo has. Mine do not, in any event. This suggests that auditory or speech centers in the brain are activated when someone is engaged in inner speech or hearing voices, but that the activation is somehow more complete in the case of hearing voices. Neuroimaging studies show the activation of speech perception and production network is involved in patients actually hearing voices (Jenkins 39). For Deegan, at least, self-evaluation is involved. The voices are, sometimes at least, “derogatory” and she responds by saying “today I am feeling like I am no good,” and “today I am feeling like I’m a worthless person.” Jenkins describes another person, Sergio Sanchez, whose voices tormented him. Now, let’s lie down on the bed and think about all the bad things you’ve done. You’re worse than a child molester. You’ll be lucky if you burn in hell. Imagine how it will feel to have your flesh burn. You think you’re something? You’re nothing and we’ll show you. (Quoted in Jenkins 45)

Sergio eventually decided this was the voice of God. From our perspective, he constructs his experience in terms of a cultural object; it is hard to imagine how palpably and urgently “real” the experience might be for him. Why would human beings have the capacity to experience self as not self? In terms of semiotic structure, people suffering voices seem to be locked in the “you” position of the semiotic triad. There is an agent addressing them. This agent is not “me.” This agent is not “I.” The agent addresses self as “you.” This agent can appropriate not just the speech system, but the sensory systems. This agent is on occasion a successful parliamentarian, a mover and shaker of psychological capacities. Its coup achieves a disordering of reflexivity, or perhaps it is a disordering of reflexivity that allows the “accusatory you” to achieve prolonged dominance and control over self-appraisal. The “safe voices” reported in another case study, and Deegan’s self-identified

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voices, develop in response—a parliamentary faction creating a “dialogic space.” Deegan notes that “these voices . . . present themselves as . . . all-knowing, all-powerful, ‘we know everything,’ ‘we see everything you do.’ ” She finds value in creating an alternative in which she can appear: “To find that I can interrupt that powerful a force, really creates a space for me to have some power” (quoted in Jenkins 38). Recall that this chapter began with a cancer patient’s report about how he talks to God. He hears himself speaking to God, but does not hear God’s voice. He reports a sense of the presence of God. Note the contrast with Deegan’s report; there is no reproach and the experience has coherence and context: it does not involve multiple, accusing, or garbled and unintelligible voices. Nonetheless the patient reported a sense of the presence of the god that is part of his religious faith. Jenkins makes the point that schizophrenia exists on a continuum with the experiences that a culture counts as normal. If this perspective is right, then creation of “presence” is a human capacity. When I was in the hospital and on occasions afterward I had a sense of the presence of “death.” I did not just consider what death is, or what it means to be dead; rather I personified death and made it a kind of presence in my experience, a presence in my “inwardness.” Death seemed to be “something terrible happening to me”—the conscious “I” did not set out to personify it but some part of me traveled this path, and I ended up having the occasional experience that death was in the room, behind me, watching and waiting. I thought about Helen, thinking that her Ted was in the room. Like her, I felt slightly haunted; but I did not feel attacked. It was not trying to “get me,” but waiting to take me. This personification of death formed a presence in my life—it was not as palpable a presence in my subjective existence as the members of my family, but in some ways it was more so than some of the doctors and nurses. I knew with my conscious mind that this was irrational—death is not a person and death cannot coalesce as a shadowy figure, nor does death “wait” or exhibit any intentions or feelings. I did not, however, reproach myself for having this experience, or try to “stop” myself from having it. I was not trying to force my psychological experience into a more realistic ontology. I thought they made psychological sense. I let myself have them. I never hallucinated or lost track of the fact that this presence was my creation. I knew perfectly well that death was not in my hospital room in the way the nurses were, who came in at night to monitor my IV pump and my vital signs. Rather I know I—I should say my larger


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self—was trying to cope psychologically with an extreme experience. It was useful to imagine death in this way. It gave form to fears, on the one hand, and gave my desire for mastery an object to confront. After realizing that I was imagining death as a shadowy presence, I allowed myself to fantasize that I had a relationship to death, in a kind of “directed imagery.” Drawing on cultural images—these may in fact have come from an Ingmar Bergman movie—I even imagined that I was playing chess with death. I found it ironic: I knew that in the end I would have to lose, but my desire to master the experience was expressed in the thought that I could drag the game out quite a while. I was not playing to win, but for time. My sense of the presence of death was coherent, not intrusive; my capacity to manage channels of reflexivity—to know that my experiences were continuous with me—remained intact. I could recognize that death was my projection. Yet it gives me some basis for empathy: I can imagine this projection getting out of control, perhaps because of some failure in the parts of the brain that manage reflexive processes and allocate sensory form to these imaginary constructs of the self-system. Today I read the accounts people like Deegan give of auditory hallucinations, the cancer patient reporting the presence of God, Helen’s report of Ted being in their bedroom, with a sense of solidarity, with a more nuanced sympathy and a deeper sense of the continuity of these human experiences with the possibilities of my own experience. *

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We can find no scar, But internal difference, Where the Meanings, are— —Emily Dickinson

Whatever happens, happens to someone. Borges (1998) captures this evocatively, if one-sidedly, in a passage in his story The Garden of Forking Paths. In it, someone asks himself a question and lets it inspire reflections: [W]as I, now, about to die? Then I reflected that all things happen to oneself, and happen precisely, precisely now. Century follows century, yet events occur only in the present; countless men in the air, on the land and sea, yet everything that truly happens, happens to me . . . (120, italics in original)

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The question is—how will one respond?—to the suffering that happens to me, now. We have returned to the issue posed earlier: is suffering like a fever happening to the self, or can it be converted into something one does and be conducted with dignity? This question marks a forking path through possibilities: on the one hand, helplessness may engulf the self, the self may get cut off from life, any one of us may enter a solitude in which nothing but suffering seems to exist, happening precisely now, happening to me. Happening to me implies a reciprocal: that I will try to respond. This may have a basic structure—if not exactly what I have presented in this volume, then something like it. People try to restore agency to a self “hammered” or “slammed,” made helpless and vulnerable; try to find solidarity for themselves when cut off from life by suffering. I think you try to convey something to your future self, that possible self coming into existence in time—you seek a certain solidarity with your past, your future, and other selves—and let the meanings gather that might make suffering sufferable. This is how I did orient myself in my little room in the cancer ward. I tried to teach myself how to suffer. So did Helen. Benjamin tried to teach himself how to live. I have tried to shed a little light on these matters in the course of this book. People respond, and gather up the will to respond, in whatever ways they can, cultural and personal, mobilizing their parts and their possibilities. Suffering assaults the possibilities of culture and self. What will you do about the feelings that happen as your mad mother does violent things and then disappears from your life, when you can’t take it anymore and wish your husband would die, when you learn you have cancer? There is a universality to suffering—I do not know anyone who has escaped it absolutely—and a critical cultural dimension, but it is, in the end, as completely personal as any experience can be. If a self is first defined by other selves, it is defined again by suffering. *

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Is life worth living, Helen asked? What makes it worth living? This sounds like Albert Camus (2004 [1955]), when he wrote: “Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental problem of philosophy.” I do not know if defining what makes life worth living should count as a fundamental problem of philosophy, but it was a fundamental problem of Helen’s life.


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I do not know if philosophy could provide an answer—but I know people often hang Helen’s question over their own lives. I lost much of what made my life worth living, and had to struggle to regain some of it. For me, freedom and being in control of my life really matter. But I suspect that solidarity may be as crucial, perhaps more so. Maybe, for many people, it is other selves who make life worth living. Maybe this is so even though other selves cause so much personal suffering. I think this might make evolutionary sense, as it makes psychological sense in terms of the role of emotional attachment in human life. The intuition of a man who wants cancer survivors to email his wife, undergoing chemotherapy, to tell her about life after chemo, assumes this: what he wants is to offer a future, to let her know she is not alone in her suffering, to let her know she can regain control over her life. The feeling that happens when you know you have a future is pretty important; think what it is like to know you do not. Yet even if moments of despair are likely, I can imagine ways of facing even this. If you can’t feel solidarity with the future, cannot connect it to your own realistic possibilities, you can feel something for the past. This is also a kind of solidarity. It breaks up the solitude of suffering: the sense that terrible things are happening and nothing means anything. Levi-Strauss’s (1967) discussion of a Cuna curing ritual for difficult childbirth remains for me one of the best accounts of a cultural practice of reaching out to someone disappearing into suffering. The rites, he argues, help “make acceptable to the mind pains which the body refuses to tolerate” (192). Embedded in a cultural world that is accepted almost without questioning, what the suffering person “does not accept are the incoherent and arbitrary pains” she experiences, “which are an alien element in her system but which the shaman, calling upon the myth, will re-integrate within a whole where everything is meaningful.” As I read the account, it was not just that the pain was given meaning—that there was a narrative that gave it meaning—but also that she was still part of a world of others. In cancer and bereavement, the physical and emotional pain is bad enough. Isolation—all this is happening to me, and it means nothing, and I mean nothing—makes it even less sufferable. Narratives do provide necessary “meaning” but a story launched into a world without other selves seems, to me anyway, less powerful than a story that brings selves together in a common response to a crisis.

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Yet there has to be someone there—a self, a subjectivity—to absorb the affirmation and the giving of meaning: whether conveyed in touch (a nurse tells me of giving a massage to a dying patient), presence (families gather), a ritualization (turning my stem cell transplant into a new “birthday”). Up to a point, self-reflection can help sustain a sense of solidarity with life, with other selves, with the past and the future. This seems adaptive to me, although it needs renewal in ongoing social life. Maybe self-knowing based on feelings of solidarity cannot answer the philosophical question of whether life is worth living or not; but just does help keep a person going. It is clear the solidarity people may want transcends the present: they may want to review, find meaning in, their whole lives. Neither Helen, nor I, nor Benjamin confined our reflexive efforts to the present: the search for our own meaning is launched in the imagination—and once set in motion turned inward, where meanings and objects are. I am tempted to think that if you don’t feel “connected” to you whole life, all you have is what is happening to me, precisely now. Solidarity with your past and future selves, with other selves, with things beyond the self, are where the feelings are that make life worth living—perhaps; but sometimes you have to detour inward to get there. Helen was alone in her anguish. All her supports were gone. Her body was failing her, her feelings out of control. Yet Ted was too much with her. She needed to hold on and let go. She had to struggle with her own, conflicting visions of self. Benjamin had a mother who was not there for him, but who had been too much there, making him “absent” himself. He needs to find himself and her. We saw him striving to master these experiences and make them work for him. He filled in his possibilities and made them his own. I shrink to the size of a small room in a cancer ward. I try to grasp my whole life. I try to grasp what people have meant to me. I needed to hold on. I tried not to let go. I made palpable my connections to others, used this to supply myself with meaning and motivation. Here we have the scars, the wounds, the possibilities that animate the work of self. What makes this work possible, what propels it, are other selves—one is marked by them, even scarred, but also made meaningful, made possible. Other selves cause suffering; but also keep us going. Despair may be is a failure of solidarity. It leaves you alone—without possibility or hope, in a solitude defined by pain, fear, doubt, uncertainty. In our own ways, Benjamin, Helen, and I were struggling against this possibility.

Conclusion Wandering Home To grasp anthropology’s attitude toward selves, we might turn inside out Marianne Moore’s notion that poets should “present for inspection ‘imaginary gardens with real toads in them.’ ” Anthropology has long offered for our contemplation cultural gardens with imaginary selves in them. It has done so at least since Marcel Mauss (1938) slyly insinuated that “the self” is a cultural creation (Carrithers 1985, 234–235). This perspective on selfhood remains vital, but incomplete. It dodges the question of how existential selves inhabit these gardens— and how they animate their own cultural selves. Cultural gardens have living selves in them, who slyly, stubbornly, painfully, inescapably make themselves present in their own lives. They seek some adequate response to whatever the world offers them, some way they can define self, be, live, respond, go on. Such selves must imagine themselves, must define their existence in terms of their powers of feeling and imagination. Helen, Benjamin, and I are all examples of the process. Think of death and cancer as existential facts, as something that can happen to you. Then try to think of the fact that this is happening to you as colliding, not just with cultural conceptions of death or disease, but with the cultural terms on which you define yourself. Such collisions place “the real” in the “imaginary,” push the cultural up against the existential, generate the search for possibilities that people pursue in the work of self. My discipline, curiously, often treats psyche and subjectivity, and even real persons, like weeds in cultural gardens (Linger 2005). Not everything is conjured into existence through culture, although the variety of cultural conceptions staggers the imagination (mine, anyway); but however richly the world gets imagined and constituted culturally, no culture can abolish such realities as other cultures, real toads, and possible selves. Nor has any culture done away with birth, death, and suffering. Cultures absorb moral and religious discourses that generate meaning for these, and selves may attach themselves to cultural discourses that

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diagnose problems of meaning (Geertz 1973). But people grasp such conceptions of existence not merely as concepts themselves—but as persons who have to live. When people bond with cultural conceptions, they do so as emotional selves, who feel their way into and through their lives. As part of this, they trade in cultural possibilities, find in cultural conceptions echoes of personal experience, and personalize cultural models in the work of self. We might, then, want to present for inspection not just cultural conceptions of the person, taken as having some shaping power over selfhood, but take the plunge into subjectivity and examine how human effort and reflexivity, psychodynamic processes and self-awareness, cognition and emotion, absorb and transform culture (Csordas 1994; Hallowell 1955; Levy 1984; Shore 1996; Strauss and Quinn 1997). We might start with something like Richard Shweder’s (1991) suggestion that people live in intentional worlds, where what exists for us exists because we have cultural conceptions that constitute them and connect us to them. His examples range from the weeds in one’s garden to practices such as taking communion, exorcism, and divorce, and such artifacts as the psychoanalytic couch and a living room, all of which exist because they are culturally defined and human lives are involved with them (74). He writes that none of these would exist without our conceptions of, involvement with, and reactions to them; “they exert their influence in our lives because of our conceptions of them” (74). There is a significant degree of truth in this. What counts as a weed for me may be your wildflower, and someone else’s lunch salad. I do not make use of the concept of karma to explain why I have cancer, nor any notion that I must have done something to deserve it—but others may. If you don’t care about weeds or Buddhist compassion, you might care about baseball or marriage, or about what counts as “success” or “moral law.” These are all cultural constituted, and have some force, evocative and directive, in human lives (D’Andrade 1984). The process, as Thomas Csordas (1994) has pointed out, involves the human capacity for effort and reflexivity; and this connects our personal existence to cultural conceptions. The question for me, then, is how we do this?—given the blows that life gives our expectations, the hammering our orientations receive. Our conceptions are almost never enough. What do we do when they fail? People respond: they may try out new self-understanding, put their conceptions on a new footing, thrust new experiences and draw new conceptions into the way culture and self “dynamically, dialectically, and jointly make each other up” (Shweder 1991, 73).

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Intentional and not-so-intentional realities clash in human existence. If baseball, say, or Shakespearean tragedy are culturally constituted, cancer has a double existence. It is cultural on the one hand, a brute fact on the other. Death has cultural meaning; but it is an existential fact. Suffering cannot be kept on a stage, nor experienced only in terms of generic cultural conceptions. I have argued that suffering is part of life in such a way that it sets in motion the work of self. The cultural meaning of suffering— whether of having cancer or losing a spouse—gets involved in this process, but in terms of processes by which an intentional person draws on the possibilities of culture and self. People die. They get sick. They go mad. Suffering challenges our capacity to generate and sustain ourselves as intentional selves in intentional worlds. How does one absorb existential facts into one’s intentional, cultural, life? I tried to capture some sense of the work of self in my case material. People assemble models of self; they use cultural models to build personal models, but this process depends on emotions and on evaluations of self themselves dependent on our experience of other selves. Our models are thus always personal and cultural, never simply reflections of culture, but always part of our “being-in-the-world,” our effort to live. The self is never independent of cultural life, nor ever passively a construction of culture. *

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An example. I have a friend who suffers from depression. She takes medication for it and sees a therapist. Witnessing her struggle I have had the thought that her depression is harder to bear than my cancer. Her depression strikes directly at her sense of self, assails her capacity to be. Her life expectations reflect her personalization of cultural models—she feels, strongly, that her life should be a certain way, follow a cultural script that orients her to existence. It has not. Not being able to make her life conform to these expectations causes her doubt and pain. The push from biochemical processes matters, too—her medication is not just a placebo—but however social and biological factors interact, what appears experientially is a depressed mood. This afflicts her experience of herself, and her capacity to feel her subjective world. Her “intentional world” crumbles around her, and she crumbles along with it. She feels she does not belong in the universe in which she finds herself—it is somehow, as Camus once put it, “divested of illusions and lights.” Divorced from her sense of cultural possibilities, she does

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not feel she has any real chance of living the life she imagines for herself in the world she finds herself inhabiting. It may be residual mind-body dualism that makes cancer and depression appear so different. Cancer is treated as a disease of the body, depression as a disease of the mind. In fact, both afflict the whole person. Cancer certainly transforms subjective experience—it is a wrinkle in life that cannot be kept apart from the sense of self; and depression is always possible. But insofar as cancer is viewed as a disease of the body this is minimized or ignored. It seems likely that cancer, in the way it is defined as a disease of the body, is not supposed to change the self. One is supposed to “fight it” with a kind of self-reliance and optimism—so I gather from the mass media. Cancer strikes at the body and causes death. The physical pain it can produce is acknowledged, but the work of self it may set in motion, and the range of emotions that accompany this, seem only thinly understood. When diagnosed with cancer, the self has to change—even if the tacit goal of such changes may be to preserve some sense of continuity in the self. In relationship to cancer, I suspect the bias in American culture is toward preserving the “sameness” of the self, not toward embracing change in self—even though I do not think anyone can say which orientation might be more adaptive for individual patients. Depression, in contrast, in popular intuitions seems to be taken as a disease of the self. In fact it is a disease of the self, even if it is also a physical effect of chemical imbalance in the brain. Many people know that depression may have a biological basis, but their immediate reaction to a person with depression may be to register the other person’s mood, not to think about “bad chemicals in the brain,” or reflect on the way social suffering may stress the brain’s capacity to sustain models of self. I suspect popular Cartesian intuitions are partly right about depression even if oblivious to its biology. Depression gathers in the capacity to feel. It may turn feeling against the self (my friend’s sadness, her self-reproach), or it may make feeling itself unavailable (my friend reports sometimes feeling empty, numb, as if nothing mattered). This is not a phenomenological awakening on waves of feeling, but the lights of feeling going out. Such states—when they come to weigh heavily on one’s being-inthe-world—affect the capacity to enter life, even the will to go on living. Emotions, I have tried to show, define and orient the self; they help produce the will-to-respond, the gritting of the teeth, to go on, just a bit farther, whatever life brings. My friend’s depression, I have

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reflected, attacks just those capacities I used to cope with cancer, darkening her life, making the self for her not the forging point of the effort to live and to find meaning, but a locus of suffering that expands to fill her world. My suffering assaulted my being-in-the-world; her suffering is her being-in-the-world. Her self-awareness itself becomes a source of suffering. What is the self except the depression? And there is no escape into memory or meaning, no way of finding the good of one’s existence, the beauty of life, peace of mind, some semblance of happiness, because nothing can be good to feel when all feeling is bad, or when the capacity to feel has gone dead because it brings nothing but pain. Something happened: maybe it was life (my friend’s personal suffering has been profound); maybe the body’s chemistry crashed in a molecular train wreck that made feelings rather than cancer cells. In either case, her neurons can no longer make feelings dance through her body in support of a model of self that can dance into life. Like Helen, my friend stopped dancing into life and started thinking about death. “I feel empty,” she told me recently. “I wish I was dead.” She is from South Asia, and has resources in her cultural repertoire for understanding her suffering, for giving it moral meaning, that I lack. I have seen her curl up in a fetal position, sobbing, and ask what she did to deserve to suffer, what sins she committed in previous lives. I see my illness as caused by a train wreck on the molecular level, not as the moral consequence of something I, as a moral being, did. Yet my friend also has, emergent in her cultural repertoire, the concept of depression—she found it liberating, for a while at least, because it did not blame her for her suffering, did not ask her “to tough it out” as she says in English, and allowed her to seek help. She is an intentional self in an intentional world, involved with concepts such as karma and depression. Recently, one of her other friends suggested she listen to a song by Johnny Cash. She began to play it over and over again, alternating it with Hindi songs that express “dukha and sukha,” the pain and joy of life. *

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All this raises questions about culture in relation to self and suffering. Perhaps we need to start by distinguishing the way people use culture to explain suffering and the way they may use culture to cope with it. In suffering, people do not just seek the moral or cognitive validation of cultural themes. They are trying to adapt and endure.

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People adapt through a process of personalizing culture resources— broad cultural patterns generate and limit these resources. Social processes create pools of cultural material that are socially distributed, which, if in fact culturally available to an individual, might be used to build a self: if the conditions are right (Quinn 1992). That is part of the story, but only part. Individuals have to grasp cultural conceptions and apply them to self. If people do not directly determine the pool of possibilities, and of course they don’t, then equally, cultural patterns do not in themselves absolutely determine what people will do with what they find in their cultural worlds. The relation of culture to self and suffering gets worked out in the process of living. I imagine, then, a subtle exchange between culture, self, and suffering. I have tried to suggest some of this: American culture has been a presence in the case studies, because subjectivity coalesces in terms of cultural experience, but in a dynamic, not static, way, making it possible for cultural models to be personalized, for cultural themes to be transformed along with the sense of self that suffering provokes. In trying to think about how suffering and subjectivity coalesce in American culture, I kept returning to something Tocqueville said about earlier Americans: But it must not be supposed that in the midst of all their toils the people who live in democracies think themselves to be pitied; the contrary is noticed to be the case . . . Life would have no relish for them if they were delivered from the anxieties that harass them, and they show more attachment to their cares than aristocratic nations to their pleasures. (Quoted in Riesman 1961, 141)

Many Americans make “the anxieties that harass them” part of their life narratives and use their cares to define self, as generations of my students have reported in my life history classes. Helen, Benjamin, and I do so. Yet my South Asian friend is attached to her cares as well, in terms consistent with her experience. Still, I believe one can find distinctive cultural patterns that influence the experience of suffering. For example, cruelty and pain, not dishonor or shame, may be the worst things that liberal moderns can imagine (Rorty 1989). Most modern Americans cannot suffer in their personal and family honor, because honor codes are not part of their intentional worlds or selves—although even here one wonder if subterranean honor codes do not make a difference in some lives. If many modern American are a little like Hamlet, perhaps a few are a little

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like Achilles. Nonetheless, societies have different moral conceptions (often multiple, competing conceptions) to apply to the problems of selfhood and suffering. These conceptions may offer very different perspectives. In some times and places, suffering is not a random and meaningless event, but proof that someone deserves to suffer (Parish 1996). In my own part of the modern world, the suffering of a person or class of persons does not signify the justice of a moral universe. Moreover, surely Tocqueville is at least partly right, and suffering has been democratized in much modern moral discourse. The reality of different standards of concern for the suffering of different kinds of people stands open to charges of hypocrisy, although the presence of such multiple standards can hardly be denied. Yet, in principle if not always in practice, the everyday suffering of ordinary people should matter—this book and the act of reading it in fact reflects this democratic valuing of everyday life (Taylor 1989). As part of this, suffering may be taken as having an authenticity, and so a claim on others, that is consistent with liberal and religious ideologies present in modern American life. Helen, Benjamin, and I are perhaps specimens of one aspect of modernity, that larger cultural process in which American culture is ambiguously embedded. We relate suffering to the self, not to the universe-at-large. We engage in bricolage, rather than embed ourselves in ritual cosmologies. This is not to say that suffering is done by atomized individuals in American culture. The concept of personal autonomy does play a key role in constituting the cultural world of suffering in the United States. For example, autonomy is protected by, and expressed in the exercise of, rights. Rights protect personal choices; such choices fall under concepts of freedom and privacy; “choice” itself is a central cultural value, one that helps define a concept of the person. While this is not the only perspective available in modern American life, its influence is surely seen in the lists of “patient rights and responsibilities” hospitals post on the walls of waiting rooms. One has the right to be informed and to make choices. The idea of rights provides a legal and pragmatic context for some of the decisions the sick and the dying may need to make. Rights also provide some protection against the abuse of institutional power. Such safeguards are crucial. Yet people may also want their suffering to have meaning. Neither rights, nor the value of autonomy itself can provide emotional meaning for the sheer experience of suffering. I have already suggested that generic American culture (my own American culture, anyway) does not provide much support for the art of suffering and dying. I think a certain defiance of fate is culturally

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encouraged, and fatalism frowned on, certain “positive” emotions are often more socially and psychologically acceptable than others, and so on. For example, drug and hospital advertising often present cancer patients as brave and self-reliant, as ready, even eager, to “fight” their cancer. In such ads, the “power of positive thinking” and the will “to fight” are paired with medicines or hospital programs that are pitched as supporting these key cultural values. In reality, fatalistic and depressed patients get the same medicines as cheerful ones. Hospitals will admit you even if you are not brave and cheerful. The ads are marketing ploy, but I think I detect a cultural propensity to put a happy face on suffering, without any deep consideration of what it actually takes to suffer well. Without wanting to deny anyone whatever benefits a positive attitude may offer, I wonder if it is wise to deny the more negative emotions, such as anger, sadness, and grief, which play a role in orienting the self. I worry that being pressured to be positive can complicate the work of self: perhaps a particular person needs to work through a fuller range of emotions in search of a fuller range of meanings. One might expect religion to provide emotional meaning for suffering. For many, it does. Hospitals do provide for pastoral care— religious figures make their rounds in the hospital. Patients pray and read scriptures. Religion may offer comfort, the promise of salvation, provide a theodicy, relate the self to divinity, imbue suffering with “sacred values.” Everyday life also offers a different standpoint for meaning-construction. It offers meaning not by aligning the self with higher powers and sacred values, but by confronting a person with the value and reality (even failures) of their own lives. A life review can provide validation of the life one has lived and constitute a potential standpoint of personal integrity in the face of suffering. Democratized everyday life is a source of meanings and feelings that can be mobilized for coping with affliction, as I have tried to show. I mention these sources of meaning only because they are there. American culture encompasses many different perspectives on suffering, which enter the work of self in many different ways. Sometimes I think American selves play multidimensional hop-scotch with the sources of meaning available to them, picking up certain orientations with each hop, skip, and jump. Arguably, the subjectivity of suffering coalesces—and even turns creative in the work of self—as persons apply and evaluate the various kinds of meaning made available in social and cultural life. Having the work of self take a religious turn, involving obligatory ritual practices that give coherence and order to life in a general

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way, differs from efforts to define self by opportunistically trying out conceptions that a person happens to encounter. This does not mean selfhood and subjectivity is somehow less present in the religious response to suffering, more present in non-religious responses. Indeed, no doubt there are “cosmological principles” in all cultural lives, secular or religious—and the work of self cannot escape such principles—but I would say the relative lack of ritual engagement, the way the self is conceptualized apart from collectively enacted canonical rituals, stands out in the particular lives I have examined, compared to what I observed in a rather traditional Hindu community in Nepal (1994). Yet again, I am not sure if this comparative judgment can be sustained. Some Americans have an “otherworldly” perspective—at least some of the time. If Helen, Benjamin, and I are bricoleurs in relation to suffering, undoubtedly there are also those Americans who more consistently and thoroughly cosmologize suffering, who invoke “conceptions of a general order of existence” (Geertz 1973) to explain suffering and who take the work of self to ritual rather than narrative. Those who take their suffering to religion can also seek meaning in memory and through reflection on their lives. In fact, I suppose religious subjectivity may be put together in somewhat the way they put together their fears and hopes. It is a work of self. This leads to a more general point. If one does not prejudge the matter, the difference between selves engaged in bricolage, who put together their sense of self from whatever material happens to be at hand, and those attempting to cosmologize the self, who want to define it in terms of canonical values, locate it in “the nature of the universe,” or position it in a religious system, may largely disappear (or we may take a very different view of their efforts) once the self is seen as a relational process. Everyone everywhere personalizes culture in one way or another—if some engage in bricolage while others cosmologize, this simply suggests the range of ways cultural patterns can become meaningful in the work of self. Some form of personalization of culture is likely a necessary condition of being in the world, just as culture itself is a necessary condition of human existence. American life gives a particular scope to this process—and limits in particular ways—that may form a set of distinctive patterns. I am not sure that everyone, everywhere, would immediately grasp the way an American might justify life in terms of everyday life or apply notions of privacy and choice to suffering.

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From the perspective I have tried to develop, suffering is, ultimately, a work of self. We have to be something in relationship to suffering and dying, at least when these are happening to us. Our sense of self will always reflect our effort to be, and our relational existence— what we are to people, what they are to us, what impact they have had on our emotions and lives. It will reflect our capacity to feel. And it will depend very much on cultural possibilities. *

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Something Stephen Greenblatt (2004) writes about Shakespeare offers a sense of the work of self as a quickening and thickening of cultural patterns. He writes that the Reformation presented Shakespeare with “an extraordinary gift,” “the broken fragments of what had been a rich, complex culture . . .” Shakespeare drew upon the pity, confusion and dread of death in a world of damaged rituals (the world in which many of us continue to live) because he himself experienced those same emotions at the core of his being . . . He responded not with prayers but with the deepest expression of his being: Hamlet. (321)

What a brave new world, with such creatures in it. Life in the ruins—a work of self. People living in ruins rummage and recycle; they forage through the cultural debris and put it to some use, in their lives and selves. Certainly, the work of self in American lives involves using cultural models, often fragments of a rich cultural history, to deal with the pity, confusion, and dread that suffering brings. Helen might have responded to her plight with prayers as well as therapy, but she certainly responded with the “deepest expression” of her being: her self. The pieces of culture she worked with just happened to include anti-Semitism, as Benjamin’s project made use of resources from the Romantic tradition. I worked with values of the “everyday,” which have arisen as part of the modern experience (Taylor 1989). Similarly, Benjamin and I engaged in projects with a “do-it-yourself” quality—not quite as if you could respond to suffering by going to the Home Depot for building supplies, but with a certain sense that one “improves” suffering, invests in it, makes something of it. The way we were attached to our cares was shaped less by ritual than by a concern for the evidence of our lives. This may reflect cultural developments in biography and autobiography that link us back to Augustine and

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Marcus Aurelius, and to early Greek biography and history (Momigliano 1985). The narrative emphasis on self in European and American culture is strong, but the work of self personalizes both narrative and ritual forms (Obeyesekere 1981; Parish 1994, chapter 5). If the work of self takes a ritual turn in many world cultures (Obeyesekere 1981; Parish 1994), this is also possible in American life (Csordas 1994). If selfawareness takes a narrative, rather than ritual, turn in the course of someone’s life passage through cultural life, then that is what happens: certain kinds of intentional selves and intentional worlds are possible given a particular conjunction of social and personal history. Narrative and ritual alike can be personalized and made to yield perspectives on self. There are forging points for this—life events such as I have described, but also life circumstances where people actively struggle with themselves as they actively struggle with the world. When taking an existential perspective, one looks for the personalization of culture, rather than assumes the mass production of cultural subjectivities—although forging points tend to develop as selves experience particular social and cultural conditions, or historical events (Fanon 1968; Jackson 2005; Linger 2005; Parish 1996). Perhaps capitalism, like the Reformation, supplies for the work of self the broken fragments of the cultural systems it allows, uses, then destroys when obsolescent (consider my nostalgia for a “working class ethnic community” that no longer really exists). Even as the cultural communities that incubated certain cultural forms vanish or recoalesce, American society has participated in a selective globalization of cultural forms. Japanese cinema and Brazilian novels become available for reflection, Hindu temples open in California strip malls, and Buddhists by choice meet in suburban homes. The process of being human—the work of self—registers the world as it is for self. How could one then prevent a certain eclecticism—reenforced by cultural values of choice and autonomy—from finding its way into the attitude of self toward self? Yet again I have doubts. I don’t think an eclectic, omnivorous, stance toward cultural conceptions is entirely peculiar to American culture. People resort to different cultural resources in Nepal as they cope with suffering. Every culture generates a pool of possibilities for coping with suffering and for defining self. Perhaps it is only the pace—the restlessness, the relentlessness—of the process that characterizes modernity. Modern societies have enlarged the pool of possibilities, and accelerated the cycling of different cultural forms through

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social life and subjectivity. No doubt forms of resistance, ways of maintaining boundaries, develop in response. *

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In this perspective, American culture represents a pool of possibilities; people grasp some of these as self. Person and culture necessarily interact in ways that involve basic self-processes and the adaptive design of the psyche (Hollan 2001). Cultural models are models that can be applied to life circumstances, if there is sufficient experiential priming (Quinn 1992), enough socialization of “primary appraisal,” to get them to register in feeling (Levy 1984) and carry them into “reflective consciousness” and self-awareness (Linger 2005). Accordingly I often find it more useful to think of “my American culture” or “Helen’s American culture” when I try to grasp the cultural aspects of dealing with personal crisis: cultural models both frame and enter into the work of self. In being personalized, a piece of culture is made to yield some of its possibilities to existential circumstances, which means it yields them to someone trying to define his or her own possibilities for living, coping, understanding. Culture theorists have been spinning the idea of culture as a “web of meaning” for quite some time (Geertz 1973) but I want to use a different web as an example of the personalization of culture: Charlotte’s Web, the children’s story by E. B. White. “Beloved by millions,” the book jacket blurb on my daughter’s copy says. I had been out of the hospital for a while when I sat down with her as she watched a video version (there are several of these). The story tells how a spider, Charlotte, saves a pig, Wilbur, from death by weaving words about him into her web. In the end, Charlotte dies, but not before telling Wilbur why she helped him. This is a piece of American culture, one bearing certain “messages” that circulate in parts of the larger society. It can be personalized. As I sat down with my daughter to watch this part of her American culture—this part of her American childhood—I recalled that Myra Bluebond-Langer (1978) found that Charlotte’s Web was the most popular book among children facing death in a pediatric cancer ward (186). I asked my daughter if she had read the book, too, and she said she had. She looked at me, looked quickly away, and said, “She dies in the end.” I could not avoid one of those feelings that happen—I hardly know how to define what I felt. After a pause, I found a response.

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I said, calmly, “People die.” My daughter said nothing more. I don’t know if she really grasps that I might die, if she has ever reflected on people dying, on her parents dying. We quietly watched Charlotte instruct Wilbur in life. We arrive at the scene where she explains to Wilbur why she helped him and then discloses that she will die. Wilbur asks why she helped him, and she replies: You have been my friend . . . That in itself is a tremendous thing. I wove my webs for you because I liked you. After all, what’s a life, anyway? We’re born, we live a little while, we die . . . By helping you, perhaps I was trying to lift up my life a little. Heaven knows anyone’s life can stand a little of that. (164)

Then Charlotte tells Wilbur she is dying; and Wilbur throws himself down “in an agony of pain and sorrow.” He makes himself feel better by making a commitment to Charlotte’s progeny. I don’t know where this story takes my daughter, subjectively. It takes me back to Ikira, the Japanese movie about the man with cancer who, approaching his death, tries to do something like this, and my own reflections on it—Japanese movies are part of my American culture, and this Kurosawa film has entered my personal experience, become a model for me, in my efforts to orient myself and respond to the dilemma of having cancer. E. B. White’s Charlotte has put it better than I could, but that is more or less, and in my own way, what I try to do, and what I imagine the man in the movie was trying to do. Thinking this, I feel a sense of solidarity: this is what we can do, lift up others a little, and in doing so, lift up our own lives a little. My daughter is not searching for models in the way I am, but she is acquiring them. Does Charlotte’s Web form part of her subjectivity potential—a resource she can potentially apply should someone she knows die? But it is not just Charlotte’s Web as a piece of culture that constitutes that potential, although it might come to play a role in it. The potential for defining self rests on the conjunction of this piece of culture in relation to me in relation to her. I have waged a gentle campaign to normalize the concept of death for my son and daughter, to present it as part of existence that one accepts. I have used Disney’s The Lion King and a dead possum as part of this effort, hoping to prepare them for the worst. I have no idea how or whether it will work, whether calmly acknowledging death as part of life will make a difference.

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Yet if the idea of intentional selves in intentional worlds has any merit, it should be possible to make, to echo Emily Dickenson again, an “internal difference,” a difference in the way meanings are attached to feelings. I think this occurs in interpersonal terms, which means it is deeply personal—and involves the personalization of culture. Responses to life are not based on arbitrary pieces of culture floating in the air, but on cultural understanding grounded in experience of other selves. In the case of my daughter, it would be her synthesis of culture, objects, and self that makes an internal difference—so I might hope. *

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Then I think back to the very different “world” in which my South Asian friend with depression lives, when she is depressed. She seeks models for her experience, but she feels helpless. She sees herself as a burden. She sometimes says that the best thing she could do for others is die. She listens to a song by Johnny Cash: I hurt myself today To see if I still feel I focus on the pain The only thing that’s real

I won’t address the question of whether she is a hybrid self—I think not—but she does take her pain to two cultures. Johnny Cash’s song is part of her emergent cosmopolitan culture—she listens to it on the Internet—but it is “made real” and personalized in terms of her distress. The song goes on to express one of her deepest fears: “Everyone I know/Goes away in the end.” I fear that I am for her, peripherally, an instance of this happening, but her fear that others will disappear from her world goes most of all to her family. She says “every one will die.” What she fears is being left alone. The fear may be unrealistic— the loss of others is inevitable—but it expresses the fundamental role of attachment in human experience, as a critical underpinning of our human identities, our evaluative capacities, and our imagined self. She grieves in anticipation of losses to come, and for an imagined life she never quite had, in a world that would not make it possible. She takes her depression to such reveries. Her sense of self, her beingin-the-world if you want to use such terms, coalesces in anticipation of the loss of solidarity; whereas I am, like the man with cancer in

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Ikuru and like Charlotte, trying, with a certain gritting of the teeth, to preserve just that ability to be lifted up that comes with trying to lift up others a little, that carries you away from despair and into acceptance. I suspect my friend, in her depression, cannot “feel” such efforts. And that is why I feel depression is worse than cancer. *

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The Brain—is wider than the Sky— For—put them side by side— The one the other will contain With ease—and You—beside —Emily Dickinson

The brain sustains intentional selves in intentional worlds; it does not eliminate either self or the sky. The human self is a multilayered process, a living system based on many kinds of self-appraisal, some neural, some psychodynamic, some shaped by cultural conceptions. The power of self to know self folds our life histories and hopes for the future into our encounter with the moment we experience as “now.” We are selves of flesh that feels, and our neurons weave a synaptic self to project us into the world (Le Doux 2002)—the brain’s best guess at how we might be sustained in the task of existing. We are equally creatures of imagination, who use culture to generate visions of self and world that we try to live, who personify ourselves in self-awareness to orient ourselves to life. We have the strange and marvelous capacity to feel what we imagine—our intentional selves and intentional worlds. Dickenson goes on, slyly: The Brain is just the weight of God— For—Heft them—Pound for Pound— And they will differ—if they do— As Syllable from Sound.

I want to say the brain is just the weight of the self; and they differ—if they do—only in the perspective we take on them. Living necessarily unites them and makes use of this existential unity, puts it in motion. The feelings that happen as we mobilize our cultural conceptions make a difference; the way our personal history is slyly, painfully,

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subjectively involved in animating and mobilizing culture, shapes our involvement with culture—its artifacts, conceptions, and forms of experience—just as much as it shapes our response to life crisis. We build peculiarly sentient lives for ourselves. Self-awareness begins with simple awareness, and awareness is “like” a sensory system—no doubt because it is, in part, a sensory system. Vision is part of conscious awareness; so is hearing and touch. So far, so good. We never escape our sensory selves: we touch, hear, see, and feel the world. What is peculiar is that this sensory system registers not only the world—those red tulips in the garden, the birds that sing at dawn, the sound of one’s own name called out by an old acquaintance, the taste of raspberries, the pressure and tactile sensations of a hug—but also much that emanates from culture, memory, and the imagination. I sit on my porch in winter, but remember spring. There are many subtle transpositions in my perspective on self. As I sit on the porch I may define myself as lazy, and tell myself that I should go chop a log for the fire. This addresses the self but pictures a future self. We can and do personify ourselves, evaluate ourselves, imagine what we could or should do, and urge ourselves to do it. That this “inner imaginary” registers many self-processes that are outside of awareness— the biology of the self, the psychodynamic tensions between needs and self-images, existence in a body, a time, a place, a culture that defines reality—does not make self-awareness any less important. Subjectivity mediates engagement with life: it is where our possibilities are assembled into the effort we will make to engage life and cope with its vicissitudes. On a given day, accordingly, we may picture and address ourselves from many angles, for many reasons, and hardly notice that we are doing so (Ewing 1990). If we transpose images of future and past selves, we might also juxtapose images of ourselves as good or bad (Helen), seek our possibilities in the possibilities of others (Benjamin). We might transpose roles: cancer patient one moment, daughter, mother, caregiver, or physician the next. Human awareness is exquisitely alive with concepts and categories—with possibilities for being-in-the-world. I believe the capacity of human consciousness to personify self in memory and feeling registers the need to enter a world that changes around the self. There may not always be a crisis that forces the issue, but an accumulation of small, sly changes. A self wanders through life, making whatever it can of what happens—even trying to make something of the suffering that happens along the way.

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It seems more than obvious that self-forming activity is not completely under the control of the self. I did not make my body or my society. If I could have, I would have made them a little differently— the one without cancer; the other, a better place. Nonetheless, the will to respond by means of self-reflection matters. The world makes a difference in all kinds of ways: a diagnosis of cancer, a death in the family, episodes of depression, or a parent or child’s illness. These give an existential bias, a deeply personal spin, to efforts to live, know, understand. Think of Ted and Helen drawing possibilities out of each other; think of their social and cultural milieu as doing the same, at the same time. Think of them as there, in their lives, struggling to go on. Think of Helen, in her distress, pulling possibilities out of herself, and trying to define herself in a way that would allow her to go on. Each of us bears a certain “subjectivity potential,” a set of possibilities that may be developed in the face of life circumstances, possibilities that interact with the possibilities of our cultural lives. The self has a critical role in its own formation—under pressure by the world it participates in its own formation through its capacities for self-appraisal. Levy argued that feelings reach consciousness because they carry a judgment about the relation of the person to the world. This relation might be changed, by applying some (cultural) knowledge that the conscious mind can access and apply. Where does the mind go for such knowledge? The argument has been that it goes to its repertoire of existential possibilities and its abilities, imaginative and emotional, to create more of these; to its self-constituting process of self-appraisal, and so, ultimately, to the objects and cultural forms that have shaped life experience. *

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We should not disentangle culture and self by depersonalizing them. Obeyesekere (1990) defined the work of culture as “the process whereby symbolic forms existing on the cultural level get created and recreated through the minds of people” (xix). In my terms, the work of self is the process whereby the possibilities of the self get created and recreated in life experience. I see an interchange: any human self acquires possibilities in cultural life, through a life history that engages emotional and image-making capacities. Reciprocally, as Obeyesekere’s case studies show (1981), symbolic forms acquire personal significance not in terms of Cartesian “mind”—some generic, detached cognitive process, unconnected to human lives. Mind, in Obeyesekere’s work,

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is a matter of existential engagement and “deep motivation”: it is personal, not impersonal. Existentially, psychological capacities and cultural meanings are attached to persons and their lives. They are in fact necessarily personalized in living, mobilized and modified in first-person existence, employed in the process of engaging life. Both mind and culture are personalized, made relevant to the self. In some sense, this tandem process of personalization constitutes a self, or the possibility of a self. Without a robust sense of this double personalization, I do not think we can fully understand how the work of culture meets the work of self. *

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Can I suggest what this means, now, to me, sitting at my desk in my living room, with “my American culture” unfolding around me on a late summer day? Distracted from writing, my senses take in the world—the geraniums outside my window, the ocean breeze that makes them gently undulate—and also register what I feel, what I remember, what I know. The world has personal and cultural meaning. I see, after all, flowers, geraniums, and not, in James’ phrase, a blooming buzzing confusion. I also grasp that these potted plants feel like home, that my grandmother and mother had them, and that I have always kept some around. Human consciousness is a convergence zone. It brings together feeling and imagination, creating a play of reverie, reflection, fantasy. This may do quite a lot for people. Slowing down the movement from having a feeling to acting on it is an important human capacity. Feelings can be absorbed in the images of reverie and fantasy, neutralized or deflected from real world objects, satisfied in some partial way by the partial activations of the inner imaginary. The path of sublimation—and artistic creation—lies here. As Peirce suggested, the inner imaginary is also where people formulate and “stage” much goal-directed behavior. Derived from interpersonal life, feelings, images, “voices,” and reveries are not only signals about one’s needs and wants, but clues to what one might be or not be, all of which may be inchoate, in process. This cycling of self-awareness through consciousness allows people to experience aspects of their own organization as selves in vicarious way, through subjective imagery, and potentially to reflect on these. Even without reflection, the coalescing formations of consciousness suggest ways of engaging the world—these formations not only signal

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something about the state of self, but generate possibilities, some of which may be acted on. They prime for action without throwing the person helplessly into action—which might not serve self-interest. To revert to the jargon of the social sciences: the adaptive value of having a repository of motivational and behavioral possibilities is likely to be significant. One has a basis for adaptation to new circumstances. New goals can be conceived. It would seem to be just as valuable to have a way of working through these possibilities, of trying them out in thought and feeling, before trying them out in the world. Subjectivity often drifts through its cultural “habitus.” Only sometimes does it probe the relationship of self and world. Yet the stream of consciousness can undermine naturalized, taken-for-granted modes of existence. Over time, the flow of subjectivity, with its quirky, randomizing, perspective-shifting synthesizing potential, can alter the habitus in which self-awareness begins, but from which it can emerge. If people are more unaware than aware of the cultural grounds of their lives, awareness can nonetheless in time synthesize perspectives that erode what is taken for granted. Suffering can motivate this process: consciousness may assail the world that assaults the self. If Dostoevsky was the grand inquisitor of suffering consciousness, Helen, Benjamin, and I are simpler examples of this fundamental human process (Jenkins 2004). Self exists not “in” consciousness, but in the dynamic relationship between the whole, embodied person, and the person’s life history and existential experience. To know self you have to grasp how people live, in the first person, how they have organized their lives, and how they attempt to “handle” and use subjectivity. This gives you the work of self. Human consciousness develops possibilities and invites us to live them. Awareness gives me what is—the red chair by the window, children’s voices outside the window, the hissing of summer lawns—and infuses it with conception, with the quality of “knowing.” The world becomes a conceptual world, without becoming less palpable or vivid. The red chair does not become less red, nor the child’s voice less a surge of sound as I “know” it. The sensing and the knowing are immediately present in each other. Things take conceptual form, sounds have meaning, relations form patterns—the world opens up around self. The red chair by the window is a red chair by the window and it is red, by the window. The voices outside the window are my son and daughter laughing and shouting as they play. The hissing of summer lawns is the sound of sprinklers turned on outside the window on this July day, and it is a literary allusion, and it is the feeling

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of summer. All this coalesces, and I coalesce, too, along with it—but I bring a past, and purposes, to this world, desires and memories that enlarge and enhance this world even more, even if, sometimes, they add pain or regret, anger or shame to it. The wave of life, my life, carried by my senses and feelings, washing over me, is one kind of knowing, and one side of consciousness. It crashes—gently, on this day—on the possibilities that I am. I have tried to show how awareness comes in another form as well; this other mode of conscious experience offers a sense of what is not and yet might be. It transports the past into the present, and pushes it—its message, if you like, its meaning, the sense of possibility if offers— into life, now. It takes what is and shifts it through possibilities. Human consciousness offers, precisely, an imaginary, a “picturing to oneself” that you can tinker with, inwardly, in advance of involving yourself with a world dramatically or subtly reimagined. Shakespeare had one of his players declare: As imagination bodies forth The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen Turns them to shapes, and gives to aery nothing A local habitation and a name.

I would say that as imagination grasps the forms of cultural life, the self turns them into subjectivity, giving culture a local habitation and a feeling. We might now describe selves as shapes of imagined feeling, incarnate in a body and a world, exquisitely expressive and self-aware, inhabiting cultural worlds with the particular identities of particular life histories. They inhabit such worlds through subjectivity: the feelings that happen as life happens are grasped in imaginative terms and define self. This self turns, in the act of imagining self, to face life.

Notes Chapter One Born into Our Lives: Other People in the Work of Self 1. Mitchell (1998, 332). 2. These do align neatly with the “instrumental–rational” and “expressive fulfillment” distinction; but it is probably simplistic to see them as directly derived. One might, however, wonder about how personal and social memory “capture” each other in the passage of selves through social life. 3. Garro (2001) discusses “remembering the past” as part of a “culturally meaningful life.”

Chapter Two What a Tangled Web She Weaves: An American Widow 1. Helen may have had the experience of smelling like “blood” during menstruation, so there may be resonances having to do with whatever meaning this has for her. 2. Yeats, “The Circus Animals’ Desertion,” 1939. Obeyesekere quotes this passage in Medusa’s Hair (1981, 192) using it to make the point that human “thought is the product of reverie, and the masterful images we create springing originally from the shreds and patches of our unconscious” (192).

Chapter Three California Dreaming: My Days on the Cancer Ward 1. Gender identity gets muted, but resurfaces. Men and women alike were gaunt, hairless, dressed in the same gowns—rather sexless figures. No doubt patients differ in their personal responses to this, in ways going beyond the fact that relatively more women wore wigs and head coverings on and off the ward. It did not occur to me to really reflect on this until later, though, when it was thought I might have breast cancer, and had to have a mammogram and a lump removed from my breast. It is no surprise

204

Notes

that cancer affects gender identity, or that different cancers are “gendered” in different ways. Being medically androgynous did not trouble me in the way being sick and lacking control over my life did, nor did it seem as significant as the prospect of dying—but I can understand how it might be difficult for people who identify themselves in terms of gender. Then again, I have to ask why I wore a blue robe on my forays outside my room. 2. Months later I thumbed through my copy and found the quotation: “I wished to live deliberately, to front the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived” (Walden 61).

Chapter Four Toward a Psychology of Possible Selves 1. Although wary of the notion “representation,” I cannot pursue the conceptual issues here. A model “structured into” a system does not arbitrarily represent the system but can set system parameters. The model and the system are “really affected” by each other. 2. This is not a theory of multiple selves, but a way of conceptualizing how existential selves adapt themselves to life circumstances. Ewing (1990) discusses how people have multiple, contradictory, often transient, selfrepresentations experienced as whole or timeless, and describes this as a “theory of multiple selves.” I agree: people often have inconsistent “selfrepresentations” (when we are dealing with self in sense 3). However, I treat the “whole” person (self in sense 1) as the existential ground of this production of multiple self-concepts. What is possible for possible selves might be thought of as a range with limits. What people “can be” allows considerable adaptive flexibility and psychocultural diversity, but there are limits, reasons, as Hollan (2000) notes, “the self can be neither too unitary and brittle nor too loose and fragmented” (546). 3. A view he ascribes to Bourdieu (1977), who is sympathetically critiqued in Strauss and Quinn 1997, 44–47. 4. See also Shweder’s (1991, chapter two) discussion of intentional worlds.

Chapter Five


1. Skinner and Holland (1996) discuss the way students in Nepal imagine futures and selves that do not involve traditional gender and caste practices. Modernity as it takes local form shifts the cultural grounds of the work of self. 2. Mead and Peirce, along with William James and Dewey, remain fruitful sources of ideas about the self as reflexive and dialogical. Dorothy Holland

Notes

205

and her colleagues (1998) have developed notions of a dialogical self based on Russian theorists: Vygotsky and Bahktin figured language, words, speech as the key means of subjectivity and consciousness, and both held “inner speech” to be the key intra-mental mode, where social speech penetrated the body and became the premiere building block of thought and feeling. ... The possibility of directing speech to oneself is . . . for Vygosky, the possibility of achieving at least a modicum of control over one’s own behavior. (174–175)


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Index Adaptation, x–xi, 6, 10, 72, 73, 76, 103, 114, 138, 154, 156, 188, 201 See also coping Agency (self-agency), 37, 47, 56, 103, 105, 112, 134, 137, 146, 156, 158, 163, 164, 168, 169, 170, 180 See also work of self American culture, see culture, American Androgynous, medically, see gender identity Anti-Semitism, 43, 45, 58–62, 139 Appraisal, primary and secondary, 49, 147–148; see emotion Arendt, Hannah, 7, 97, 101 Attachment, 9–11, 24, 36, 55, 98, 135–137 See also: other selves; objects Awakenings, experiential, 3, 6, 74, 75, 186 Awareness, self-awareness, 9–11, 49, 62, 69, 72, 76, 78, 80, 85, 88, 89, 90, 92, 99; of mortality, 99–104, 113–121 See also consciousness, subjectivity, subjective memory, evocative memory Beckett, Samuel, 27–28, 130, 167 Beckett point, 136; see also forging point Being-in-the-world, xi, 36, 55, 122, 185, 198 See also self; problems o f meaning

Bluebond-Langner, Myra, 96, 194 Borges, Juan Luis, 104–105, 179 Burke, Kenneth, 8 Camus, Albert, 180 Cancer, 183 As brute fact, 78; in intentional worlds, 183 Cancer and depression, see depression Cancer ward, description and experience of, 77–83, 84–86 Cultural attitudes towards, 79, 186, 189–190 And denial, 73, 80, 90, 93 Diagnosis of, 71–72 Escape (“being away”), 90, 93, 116 Experience of time on cancer ward, 84–85 And gender, 203–204 As life crisis, 71–81 And loss of control, 72, 78, 80, 85 As otherness/not self, 77–78, 136 Patient, 79, 88, 90, 91–92, 114, 136, 153–155, 157, 160, 162, 169–171, 182 And religious subjectivity, 153, 154, 155, 162 Ritualization and, 91 Self-awareness and, 72–92 Stem cell transplant, 88 Treatment and chemotherapy, experience of, 82–92 Wanting to live, 72 See also death; dying

212

Index

Cancer, contrasted with depression, 185–187 Cartesian view of the self (identifying self with conscious experience) 22, 65, 186 Charlotte’s Web, 194–195, 196 Class, social; see social class Colapietro, Vincent, 42 Compassion, 136, 171–172; as alternative to despair, 172 Consciousness Coalescing in intentional worlds, 198, 200–202 As convergence zone in intentional worlds, 200–202 In models of psyche, 133 In search mode, 139, 143–144, 149, 151 Self-consciousness, 42, 75, 161 And suffering, 42, 126–128, 151, 153–154, 201 See also self-awareness; inwardness; subjectivity; subjective imagery, memory, emotion Coping, 37, 72, 80, 90–91, 115, 116, 126, 156, 161, 170, 190, 193 Consumer culture, 46, 160–162 Cosmologizing self and suffering, 99, 191, See also ritual Creativity, 11, 16, 30–33; creative potential Csordas, Thomas, 131, 184 Culture, and self , 185, 187–196 consumer culture, and cancer patients, 190 personalization of culture, 188, 191, 200 and suffering, 187 Culture, American, 14, 36, 42, 82, 95, 116, 149, 186, 188–194 American values, 41, 193: Autonomy and self-reliance, 44, 136; Caregiving, 44; Everyday life, as a value,

188–189, 190, 192; Positive thinking, as value, 190; Rights and choices, 189; Success, 44, 46, 97, 156, 160, 184; Work as value, 17, 44 And facing death, 120–121 Good provider role, 95 Personalization of American culture, 187, 194–196 And work of self, 190 See also: Tocqueville; cancer, attitudes towards; gender, social class, ethnic community consumer culture; values Culture, Tahitian, 146–149 Culture, and cancer: see cancer D’Andrade, Roy G., 134–138, 184 Damasio, Antonio, 27, 62, 65, 150 Dante, 102–103, 105, 107 De Assis, Machado, 9–10, 109 Death, 39–40, 99–102, 104–105, 106–108, 113 As brute fact, and cancer, 183 Good death, 35, 113 Meaning-making in the face of death, 109–113 Personifying death, 82–93, 178 Prospect of death, 72–73, 79, 91, 92–93, 106, 107 And self-awareness, 92–93 See also: dying Defense, psychological, 45, 57, 64; as resistance to change, against thought of death, 94 Depersonalizing culture, 199–200 Depersonalizing self, 4, 199–200 Depression contrasted with cancer, 185–187, 196–197 Despair, 11, 26, 111, 116, 169, 171–172, 181, 182, 197 Dickinson, Emily, 179, 196, 197 Dignity, 94, 97, 105, 116, 121

Index Dostoevsky, F., 151, 201 Drinking, as problem, 47 Dying, 106 Art of dying, 113–114, 116–117, 189 Ethical subjectivity and prospect of dying, 108–113 Living with dying, 73, 79–80, 99–102 Models for dying, 92, 101–113, 104–107, 121 Personal reflections on the prospect of dying, 91, 113–119 Self-awareness and, 104–105, 108, 113–120 Wanting to die, 169–170, 187 See also death Eliot, T.S., 161, 176 Emotion, 12–13, 35–39, 63–65, 138–151, 156 Emotional markers and self-models, 25, 27, 61, 68, 99, 132, 147, 150, 155 Emotional meaning, 60, 189–190 Fear, 33, 35, 39, 40, 41, 49, 50, 54, 74, 104, 117, 118, 119, 142, 145, 168, 171, 172 And feeling, 6, 12, 16, 28, 32, 35, 40–42, 48–50, 51–53, 78, 117, 129, 132, 138–151 Feeling: See emotion Grief, 47–48, 52–53, 63, 74, 91, 96, 98, 104, 108, 113, 116–118, 119 Guilt, 36, 38, 41, 43, 45, 47, 48, 53–58, 60, 62, 66 As medium of self, 24, 41, 42, 138–151 Memory and emotion: see memory, evocative; subjective imagery Object markers, 150, 155 Somatic markers, 61, 150, 155 See also subjectivity

213

Ethical concepts, see moral conceptions Ethnic community as matrix of selfhood, 94–95, 100, 102–103, 193 Ewing, Katherine, 198, 204 Forging point, psychoexistential, 136, 167, 187, 193 Freud, 32, 68–69 Garro, Linda, xiii, 127, 203 Gender, as matrix of self, 8, 45–47, 56; and cancer, 203–204 Globalization of cultural forms, and subjectivity, 193 Good, conceptions of; good life: see moral conceptions Greenblatt, Stephen, 192 Guilt, see emotion Habitus, and subjectivity, 28, 201 Hollan, Douglas, xii, xiv, 126, 132, 133 Holland, Dorothy, 154, 204–205 Hospitals and hospitalization, 71–92 Cancer ward, 77–83, 84–86 Pastoral care, 190 Patient rights and responsibilities, 189 Hyper-reflexivity, 13, 135, 151 Identification, 5, 15, 18, 21, 28, 31, 48, 60–62, 68 Ikiru, 110–113, 195, 197 Impermanence, 96 Inner experience, 56, 63, 90, 157–159, 170, 171, 174, 177 Discontinuities, 174 And hyper-vigilance, 174 Inner dialogues, 159, 163; as work of self, 166 And mental agents, 175 And mental presences: see presences, phenomenological

214

Index

Inner experience—continued See also subjectivity, subjective imagery, inwardness, inner imaginaries Inner imaginaries, 55, 90, 157, 171, 198, 200; sensory aspects of, 55, 174–177 Inner imaginary, experience of, as intentional world, 200–201 Intentional worlds and selves, 184, 193, 197, 200–202 Inwardness, 55, 89–90, 107, 116, 154–156, 170, 173, 178 Relationship to world, 154 Reflexivity and, 154 See also consciousness, subjectivity, subjective imagery, inner imaginaries, inner experience Jackson, Michael, xi, xiii, 25 James, William, xv, 204 Jenkins, Janis, 138, 176–177 Kegan, Robert, 6, 63–64 Kurosawa, A., see Ikiru Levi-Strauss, Claude, 181 Levy, Robert, 138–151, 156 Life review, 89, 91, 92, 107, 182, 190 Lindholm, Charles, 10 Linger, Daniel, 132, 133 Marino, Gordon, 121 Markers, emotional, somatic, object—see also emotion, 61, 150, 155 Mastery, as motive, 23, 29–30, 67–68, 73, 85, 107, 120–121, 135, 171, 178, 179 Mauss, Marcel, 183 Mead, G. H., 160, 166, 167, 204

Memory, 3, 8, 12, 22, 69, 85, 89, 90, 93, 104, 107, 112, 143, 144, 155, 191, 198 Evocative, emotional, 27–28, 29, 89, 170 And habitus, 28 Voluntary and involuntary, 27–28 Miller, Arthur, 168 Mind, 133–134, 159, 163, 199–200 Dialogical mind, as aspect of dialogical self, 159, 163–164 Expressive mind, 163–164 Mental agents, 174–175 Mental visitors, 159 Processes, parliamentary, 137, 174–175, 178 See also: memory, subjectivity, psyche, emotion Mind-body dualism, 186 Mitchell, Susan, 3–5 Moore, Marianne, 183 Moral conceptions, 112, 113, 163 Conceptions of the good, 5, 104–105, 137, 148, 163, 167 Good life, 44, 104–105, 108, 109, 110–111, 163 Good person, being, 37, 38, 44, 55, 57, 64, 94 Motivation, 55, 58–64, 133–135, 149 Narrative, 15, 21, 62, 63, 101, 192, 181 vs. ritual in work of self, 191, 193 Nepal, 193, 204 Obeyeskere, Gananath, 54, 199, 204 Objects: see also other selves, 10, 26, 32, 33, 68, 77, 99, 134, 136, 147, 150, 151, 153, 159, 182, 196 Other selves, 9–11, 32–33, 67–69, 98–99, 132, 150, 181, 182

Index Paul, Robert, 133 Peirce, C. S., 160, 166, 167, 200, 204, 204 Possible selves, ix–xii, 6, 26, 28, 29, 35, 37, 61–62, 66–69, 103, 106, 121, 126, 134, 139, 140, 166, 168, 171, 173, 180, 182, 204 See also self; subjectivity potential Presences, phenomenological, 10, 15, 26, 32, 49–50, 78, 91, 98–99, 119, 155, 162, 178–179 Problem of self, 7, 92, 148 Problems of meaning and existence, 11, 13, 30, 36–38, 48, 49, 53–58, 64, 67–69, 108, 167, 184 Psyche, 132–138 Integration and conflict in system of psyche, 165 Reflexivity, and parts of psyche, 62, 165 Somatic and object markers, 150 Systems of, 134–138 See also emotion, mind, reflexivity, attachment, self Quinn, Naomi, 19, 130–131 Reflexivity, 25, 62, 65, 103, 131, 134–135, 151, 154, 165, 167, 175–176, 177, 179, 184 Religion And coping with cancer, 155 And suffering, 101 In American culture, 191 See also ritual Reverie, see subjective imagery Rights, see hosptial Ritual, 66, 87, 91, 161, 173, 181, 189, 192 In contrast to narrative, 193 Ritualization, 25–26; and suffering, 91, 102, 104 And work of self, 193 Romanticism, 18, 21, 26

215

Sartre, Jean-Paul, 74, 75, 78, 131, 148 Self, 6–7, 8, 13, 36–37, 50, 75, 103, 128–132 And brain, 177, 197 And culture, ix–x, xiii–xiv, 4, 8, 26, 37, 63, 183–197, 199–201 (see also culture, American) Dialogical dimensions of, 163–164, 204–205 Existential self (whole person), 128 Existing in time, 162, 165 Imagined, 12, 145, 196, 202 Intentional, 138, 184–187, 201–202 Models of self, in contrast to self-representations, 204 Multiple selves, vs. possible selves, 204 Personification of, 7–8, 38, 129, 166, 197, 198 Pre-reflective, 131–132 And psyche, 132–138 Questions of self, existential, 7–8, 11, 12, 13, 14, 16, 37, 37, 55–60, 69, 78, 99, 126, 139, 181 (see also awakening, problems of meaning and existence) Reflexive, 103, 128, 142, 175–179, 165 Self system, 63–64, 133–134 (see also psyche) Self-appraisal, 25, 32, 36, 63, 128, 129, 130, 132, 140, 143, 148, 150, 155, 156, 197, 199 (see also reflexivity) Semiotic triad and, 165 See also: emotion, possible selves; psyche, work of self Self-organization, 6–8; psychodynamic aspects of, 165 Shakespeare, 8, 66, 67, 192, 202 Shweder, Richard, 184, 204

216

Index

Sin, karmic, 187 Social class as matrix of selfhood, 36, 43–47, 56, 94–97, 161, 193 Solidarity, 69, 107, 182 As aspect of inwardness/ subjectivity, 165–173 And suffering, 167–173 Sontag, Susan, 11, 109 Sprio, Melford, 128–129 Subjective imagery, 23, 27–28, 29, 157–162, 164, 200 reverie, and fantasy, 72, 89–90, 91, 116–117, 135, 141, 153, 164, 170, 173, 200, 203 Visual images, 89–90 Subjectivity, 92, 158–160 Of suffering, 180, 189, 190, 196, 197–197 And cognitive visitors, 158–159 And culture, 192–197, 199–202 And habitus, 28, 201 And solidarity, 160, 182 Semiotic task of self-optimization, 160 Time dimensions, past, future, present, 160, 162 See also: self Subjectivity potential, xii, xiv, 26, 30, 126–127, 150, 157, 166, 195, 199 Suffering, x–xiii, 36–42, 52, 62, 67–68, 72–73, 81, 90, 92, 105, 118–119, 120, 126–128, 134, 136, 151, 153–154, 162, 166, 167–173, 180, 181, 183–201 And authenticity, 180 And consciousness, 42, 126–128, 151, 153–154 Cultural meaning for, 196–197 Defined, 127 Democratized, 188–189 Emotional meaning for, 189 And ethical subjectivity, 109–113, 120, 189, 196–197 Models for suffering, 92, 98, 120–121

Modes of suffering, 59, table 2.1, 135, table 4.1 Responses to, 167–173, 179–182 Self as locus of, 179–180 Self defined by, 180 Self-agency and, 167–182 And work of self, 162 See also: cancer, death, dying, despair, emotion, violence Suicidal thoughts, 40 Symbols, 149–150; blood as symbol, 47, 54–55 Symptom versus symbol, 54 Taylor, Charles, 26, 181, 192, 198 Thoreau, 120, 204 Tocqueville, 188, 189 Tomasello, Michael, 149, 160 Trauma, 29–32 Values, cultural, 33, 137, 139, 147, 148, 149, 160, 163, 190, 191, 192 Instrumental-rational vs. expressive, 16, 17, 26, 203 Values of the self, 27, 28, 106, 136, 162, 190 See also American culture, values Violence, as problem of self, 15, 18, 19, 20, 24, 47 Visual images, see subjective imagery Walden (see Thoreau) Wikan, Unni, 161 Wiley, Norbert, 157–173 Winnicott, D. W., 29–31 Woolf, Virginia, 113, 173 Work of culture, 199 Work of self, xii, 3–4, 10, 29, 32, 97, 106, 134, 154, 162–164, 166, 182–186, 190–200, See also self; possible selves Yeats, 67, 204

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