The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat Part 5

Charcot and his pupils, who included Freud and Babinski as well as Tourette, were among the last of their profession with a combined vision of body and soul, 'It', and T, neurology and psychiatry. By the turn of the century, a split had occurred, into a soulless neurology and a bodiless psychology, and with this any understanding of Tourette's disappeared. In fact, Tourette's syndrome itself seemed to have disappeared, and was scarcely at all reported in the first half of this century. Some physicians, indeed, regarded it as 'mythical', a product of Tourette's colourful imagination; most had never heard of it. It was as forgotten as the great sleepy-sickness epidemic of the 1920s.

The forgetting of sleepy-sickness (encephalitis lethargica) and the forgetting of Tourette's have much in common. Both disorders were extraordinary, and strange beyond belief-at least, the beliefs of a contracted medicine. They could not be accommodated in the conventional frameworks of medicine, and therefore they were forgotten and mysteriously 'disappeared'. But there is a much more intimate connection, which was hinted at in the 1920s, in the hyperkinetic or frenzied forms which the sleepy-sickness sometimes took: these patients tended, at the beginning of their illness, to show a mounting excitement of mind and body, violent movements, tics, compulsions of all kinds. Some time afterwards, they were overtaken by an opposite fate, an all-enveloping trance-like 'sleep'-in which I found them forty years later.

In 1969, I gave these sleepy-sickness or post-encephalitic patients L-Dopa, a precursor of the transmitter dopamine, which was greatly lowered in their brains. They were transformed by it. First they were 'awakened' from stupor to health: then they were driven towards the other pole-of tics and frenzy. This was my first experience of Tourette-like syndromes: wild excitements, violent impulses, often combined with a weird, antic humour. I started to speak of 'Tourettism', although I had never seen a patient with Tourette's.

Early in 1971, the Washington Post, which had taken an interest in the 'awakening' of my post-encephalitic patients, asked me how they were getting on. I replied, 'They are ticcing', which prompted them to publish an article on 'Tics'. After the publication of this article, I received countless letters, the majority of which I pa.s.sed on to my colleagues. But there was one patient I did consent to see-Ray.

The day after I saw Ray, it seemed to me that I noticed three Touretters in the street in downtown New York. I was confounded, for Tourette's syndrome was said to be excessively rare. It had an incidence, I had read, of one in a million, yet I had apparently seen three examples in an hour. I was thrown into a turmoil of bewilderment and wonder: was it possible that I had been overlooking this all the time, either not seeing such patients or vaguely dismissing them as 'nervous', 'cracked', 'twitchy'? Was it possible that everyone had been overlooking them? Was it possible that Tourette's was not a rarity, but rather common-a thousand times more common, say, than previously supposed? The next day, without specially looking, I saw another two in the street. At this point I conceived a whimsical fantasy or private joke: suppose (I said to myself) that Tourette's is very common but fails to be recognised but once recognised is easily and constantly seen.* Suppose one such Touretter recognises another, and these two a third, and these three a fourth, until, by incrementing recognition, a whole band of them is found: brothers and sisters in pathology, a new species in our midst, joined together by mutual recognition and concern? Could there not come together, by such spontaneous aggregation, a whole a.s.sociation of New Yorkers with Tourette's?

Three years later, in 1974, I found that my fantasy had become a reality: that there had indeed come into being a Tourette's Syndrome a.s.sociation. It had fifty members then: now, seven years ( A very similar situation happened with muscular dystrophy, which was never seen until d.u.c.h.enne described it in the 1850s. By 1860, after his original description, many hundreds of cases had been recognised and described, so much so that Charcot said: 'How come that a disease so common, so widespread, and so recognisable at a glance- a disease which has doubtless always existed-how come that it is only recognised now? Why did we need M. d.u.c.h.enne to open our eyes?'

later, it has a few thousand. This astounding increase must be ascribed to the efforts of the TSA itself, even though it consists only of patients, their relatives and physicians. The a.s.sociation has been endlessly resourceful in its attempts to make known (or, in the best sense, 'publicise') the Touretter's plight. It has aroused responsible interest and concern in place of the repugnance, or dismissal, which had so often been the Touretter's lot, and it has encouraged research of all kinds, from the physiological to the sociological: research into the biochemistry of the Tourettic brain; on genetic and other factors which may co-determine Tourette's; on the abnormally rapid and indiscriminate a.s.sociations and reactions which characterise it. Instinctual and behavioural structures, of a developmentally and even phylogenetically primitive kind, have been revealed. There has been research on the body-language and grammar and linguistic structure of tics; there have been unexpected insights into the nature of cursing and joking (which are also characteristic of some other neurological disorders); and, not least, there have been studies of the interaction of Touretters with their family and others, and of the strange mishaps which may attend these relationships. The TSA's remarkably successful endeavours are an integral part of the history of Tourette's, and, as such, unprecedented: never before have patients led the way to understanding, become the active and enterprising agents of their own comprehension and cure.

What has emerged in these last ten years-largely under the aegis and stimulus of the TSA-is a clear confirmation of Gilles de la Tourette's intuition that this syndrome indeed has an organic neurological basis. The 'It' in Tourette's, like the 'It' in Parkinsonism and ch.o.r.ea, reflects what Pavlov called 'the blind force of the subcortex', a disturbance of those primitive parts of the brain which govern 'go' and 'drive'. In Parkinsonism, which affects motion but not action as such, the disturbance lies in the midbrain and its connections. In ch.o.r.ea-which is a chaos of fragmentary quasi-actions-the disorder lies in higher levels of the basal ganglia. In Tourette's, where there is excitement of the emotions and the pa.s.sions, a disorder of the primal, instinctual bases of behaviour, the disturbance seems to lie in the very highest parts of the 'old brain': the thalamus, hypothalamus, limbic system and amygdala, where the basic affective and instinctual determinants of personality are lodged. Thus Tourette's-pathologically no less than clinically-const.i.tutes a sort of 'missing link' between body and mind, and lies, so to speak, between ch.o.r.ea and mania. As in the rare, hyperkinetic forms of encephalitis lethargica, and in all post-encephalitic patients over-excited by L-Dopa, patients with Tourette's syndrome, or Tourettism' from any other cause (strokes, cerebral tumours, intoxications or infections), seem to have an excess of excitor transmitters in the brain, especially the transmitter dopamine. And as lethargic Parkinsonian patients need more dopamine to arouse them, as my post-encephalitic patients were 'awakened' by the dopamine-precursor L-Dopa, so frenetic and Tourettic patients must have had their dopamine lowered by a dopamine antagonist, such as the drug haloperidol (Haldol).

On the other hand, there is not just a surfeit of dopamine in the Touretter's brain, as there is not just a deficiency of it in the Parkinsonian brain. There are also much subtler and more widespread changes, as one would expect in a disorder which may alter personality: there are countless subtle paths of abnormality which differ from patient to patient, and from day to day in any one patient. Haldol can be an answer to Tourette's, but neither it nor any other drug can be the answer, any more than L-Dopa is the answer to Parkinsonism. Complementary to any purely medicinal, or medical, approach there must also be an 'existential' approach: in particular, a sensitive understanding of action, art and play as being in essence healthy and free, and thus antagonistic to crude drives and impulsions, to 'the blind force of the subcortex' from which these patients suffer. The motionless Parkinsonian can sing and dance, and when he does so is completely free from his Parkinsonism; and when the galvanised Touretter sings, plays or acts, he in turn is completely liberated from his Tourette's. Here the T vanquishes and reigns over the 'It'.

Between 1973 and his death in 1977, I enjoyed the privilege of corresponding with the great neuropsychologist A.R. Luria, and often sent him observations, and tapes, on Tourette's. In one of his last letters, he wrote to me: 'This is truly of a tremendous importance. Any understanding of such a syndrome must vastly broaden our understanding of human nature in general ... I know of no other syndrome of comparable interest.'

When I first saw Ray he was 24 years old, and almost incapacitated by multiple tics of extreme violence coming in volleys every few seconds. He had been subject to these since the age of four and severely stigmatised by the attention they aroused, though his high intelligence, his wit, his strength of character and sense of reality enabled him to pa.s.s successfully through school and college, and to be valued and loved by a few friends and his wife. Since leaving college, however, he had been fired from a dozen jobs-always because of tics, never for incompetence-was continually in crises of one sort and another, usually caused by his impatience, his pugnacity, and his coa.r.s.e, brilliant 'chutzpah', and had found his marriage threatened by involuntary cries of 'f.u.c.k!' 's.h.i.t!', and so on, which would burst from him at times of s.e.xual excitement. He was (like many Touretters) remarkably musical, and could scarcely have survived-emotionally or economically- had he not been a weekend jazz drummer of real virtuosity, famous for his sudden and wild extemporisations, which would arise from a tic or a compulsive hitting of a drum and would instantly be made the nucleus of a wild and wonderful improvisation, so that the 'sudden intruder' would be turned to brilliant advantage. His Tourette's was also of advantage in various games, especially ping-pong, at which he excelled, partly in consequence of his abnormal quickness of reflex and reaction, but especially, again, because of 'improvisations', 'very sudden, nervous, frivolous shots' (in his own words), which were so unexpected and startling as to be virtually unanswerable. The only time he was free from tics was in post-coital quiescence or in sleep; or when he swam or sang or worked, evenly and rhythmically, and found 'a kinetic melody', a play, which was tension-free, tic-free and free.

Under an ebullient, eruptive, clownish surface, he was a deeply serious man-and a man in despair. He had never heard of the TSA (which, indeed, scarcely existed at the time), nor had he heard of Haldol. He had diagnosed himself as having Tourette's after reading the article on 'Tics' in the Washington Post. When I confirmed the diagnosis, and spoke of using Haldol, he was excited but cautious. I made a test of Haldol by injection, and he proved extraordinarily sensitive to it, becoming virtually tic-free for a period of two hours after I had administered no more than one-eighth of a milligram. After this auspicious trial, I started him on Haldol, prescribing a dose of a quarter of a milligram three times a day.

He came back, the following week, with a black eye and a broken nose and said: 'So much for your f.u.c.king Haldol.' Even this minute dose, he said, had thrown him off balance, interfered with his speed, his timing, his preternaturally quick reflexes. Like many Touretters, he was attracted to spinning things, and to revolving doors in particular, which he would dodge in and out of like lightning: he had lost this knack on the Haldol, had mistimed his movements, and had been bashed on the nose. Further, many of his tics, far from disappearing, had simply become slow, and enormously extended: he might get 'transfixed in mid-tic', as he put it, and find himself in almost catatonic postures (Ferenczi once called catatonia the opposite of tics-and suggested these be called 'cataclonia'). He presented a picture, even on this minute dose, of marked Parkinsonism, dystonia, catatonia and psych.o.m.otor 'block': in reaction which seemed inauspicious in the extreme, suggesting, not insensitivity, but such over-sensitivity, such pathological sensitivity, that perhaps he could only be thrown from one extreme to another-from acceleration and Tourettism to catatonia and Parkinsonism, with no possibility of any happy medium.

He was understandably discouraged by this experience-and this thought-and also by another thought which he now expressed. 'Suppose you could take away the tics,' he said. 'What would be left? I consist of tics-there is nothing else.' He seemed, at least jokingly, to have little sense of his ident.i.ty except as a ticqueur: he called himself 'the ticcer of President's Broadway', and spoke of himself, in the third person, as 'witty ticcy Ray', adding that he was so p.r.o.ne to 'ticcy witticisms and witty ticcicisms' that he scarcely knew whether it was a gift or a curse. He said he could not imagine life without Tourette's, nor was he sure he would care for it.

I was strongly reminded, at this point, of what I had encountered in some of my post-encephalitic patients, who were inordinately sensitive to L-Dopa. I had nevertheless observed in their case that such extreme physiological sensitivities and instabilities might be transcended if it were possible for the patient to lead a rich and full life: that the 'existential' balance, or poise, of such a life might overcome a severe physiological imbalance. Feeling that Ray also had such possibilities in him, that, despite his own words, he was not incorrigibly centred on his own disease, in an exhibi-tionistic or narcissistic way, I suggested that we meet weekly for a period of three months. During this time we would try to imagine life without Tourette's; we would explore (if only in thought and feeling) how much life could offer, could offer him, without the perverse attractions and attentions of Tourette's; we would examine the role and economic importance of Tourette's to him, and how he might get on without these. We would explore all this for three months-and then make another trial of Haldol.

There followed three months of deep and patient exploration, in which (often against much resistance and spite and lack of faith in self and life) all sorts of healthy and human potentials came to light: potentials which had somehow survived twenty years of severe Tourette's and 'Touretty' life, hidden in the deepest and strongest core of the personality. This deep exploration was exciting and encouraging in itself and gave us, at least, a limited hope. What in fact happened exceeded all our expectations and showed itself to be no mere flash in the pan, but an enduring and permanent transformation of reactivity. For when I again tried Ray on Haldol, in the same minute dose as before, he now found himself tic-free, but without significant ill-effects-and he has remained this way for the past nine years.

The effects of Haldol, here, were 'miraculous'-but only became so when a miracle was allowed. Its initial effects were close to catastrophic: partly, no doubt, on a physiological basis; but also because any 'cure', or relinquishing of Tourette's, at this time would have been premature and economically impossible. Having had Tourette's since the age of four, Ray had no experience of any normal life: he was heavily dependent on his exotic disease and, not unnaturally, employed and exploited it in various ways. He had not been ready to give up his Tourette's and (I cannot help thinking) might never have been ready without those three months of intense preparation, of tremendously hard and concentrated deep a.n.a.lysis and thought.

The past nine years, on the whole, have been happy ones for Ray-a liberation beyond any possible expectation. After twenty years of being confined by Tourette's, and compelled to this and that by its crude physiology, he enjoys a s.p.a.ciousness and freedom he would never have thought possible (or, at most, during our a.n.a.lysis, only theoretically possible). His marriage is tender and stable-and he is now a father as well; he has many good friends, who love and value him as a person-and not simply as an accomplished Tourettic clown; he plays an important part in his local community; and he holds a responsible position at work. Yet problems remain: problems perhaps inseparable from having Tourette's-and Haldol.

During his working hours, and working week, Ray remains 'sober, solid, square' on Haldol-this is how he describes his 'Haldol self. He is slow and deliberate in his movements and judgments, with none of the impatience, the impetuosity, he showed before Haldol, but equally, none of the wild improvisations and inspirations. Even his dreams are different in quality: 'straight wish-fulfilment,' he says, 'with none of the elaborations, the extravaganzas, of Tourette's'. He is less sharp, less quick in repartee, no longer bubbling with witty tics or ticcy wit. He no longer enjoys or excels at ping-pong or other games; he no longer feels 'that urgent killer instinct, the instinct to win, to beat the other man'; he is less compet.i.tive, then, and also less playful; and he has lost the impulse, or the knack, of sudden 'frivolous' moves which take everyone by surprise. He has lost his obscenities, his coa.r.s.e chutzpah, his s.p.u.n.k. He has come to feel, increasingly, that something is missing.

Most important, and disabling, because this was vital for him- as a means of both support and self-expression-he found that on Haldol he was musically 'dull', average, competent, but lacking energy, enthusiasm, extravagance and joy. He no longer had tics or compulsive hitting of the drums-but he no longer had wild and creative surges.

As this pattern became clear to him, and after discussing it with me, Ray made a momentous decision: he would take Haldol 'dutifully' throughout the working week, but would take himself off it, and 'let fly', at weekends. This he has done for the past three years. So now there are two Rays-on and off Haldol. There is the sober citizen, the calm deliberator, from Monday to Friday; and there is 'witty ticcy Ray', frivolous, frenetic, inspired, at weekends. It is a strange situation, as Ray is the first to admit: Having Tourette's is wild, like being drunk all the while. Being on Haldol is dull, makes one square and sober, and neither state is really free . . . You 'normals', who have the right transmitters in the right places at the right times in your brains, have all feelings, all styles, available all the time-gravity, levity, whatever is appropriate. We Touretters don't: we are forced into levity by our Tourette's and forced into gravity when we take Haldol. You are free, you have a natural balance: we must make the best of an artificial balance.

Ray does make the best of it, and has a full life, despite Tourette's, despite Haldol, despite the 'unfreedom' and the 'artifice', despite being deprived of that birthright of natural freedom which most of us enjoy. But he has been taught by his sickness and, in a way, he has transcended it. He would say, with Nietzsche: 'I have traversed many kinds of health, and keep traversing them . . . And as for sickness: are we not almost tempted to ask whether we could get along without it? Only great pain is the ultimate liberator of the spirit.' Paradoxically, Ray-deprived of natural, animal physiological health-has found a new health, a new freedom, through the vicissitudes he is subject to. He has achieved what Nietzsche liked to call 'The Great Health'-rare humour, valour, and resilience of spirit: despite being, or because he is, afflicted with Tourette's.

11.

Cupid's Disease A bright woman of ninety, Natasha K., recently came to our clinic. Soon after her eighty-eighth birthday, she said, she noticed 'a change'. What sort of change? we queried.

'Delightful!' she exclaimed. 'I thoroughly enjoyed it. I felt more energetic, more alive-I felt young once again. I took an interest in the young men. I started to feel, you might say, "frisky"-yes, frisky.'

'This was a problem?'

'No, not at first. I felt well, extremely well-why should I think anything was the matter?'

'And then?'

'My friends started to worry. First they said, "You look radiant- a new lease on life!", but then they started to think it was not quite-appropriate. "You were always so shy," they said, "and now you're a flirt. You giggle, you tell jokes-at your age, is that right?" '

'And how did you feel?'

'I was taken aback. I'd been carried along, and it didn't occur to me to question what was happening. But then I did. I said to myself, "You're 89, Natasha, this has been going on for a year. You were always so temperate in feeling-and now this extravagance! You are an old woman, nearing the end. What could justify such a sudden euphoria?" And as soon as I thought of euphoria, things took on a new complexion . . . "You're sick, my dear," I said to myself. "You're feeling too well, you have to be ill!" '

'Ill? Emotionally? Mentally ill?'

'No, not emotionally-physically ill. It was something in my body, my brain, that was making me high. And then I thought- G.o.ddam it, it's Cupid's Disease!'

'Cupid's Disease?' I echoed, blankly. I had never heard of the term before.

'Yes, Cupid's Disease-syphilis, you know. I was in a brothel in Salonika, nearly seventy years ago. I caught syphilis-lots of the girls had it-we called it Cupid's Disease. My husband saved me, took me out, had it treated. That was years before penicillin, of course. Could it have caught up with me after all these years?'

There may be an immense latent period between the primary infection and the advent of neurosyphilis, especially if the primary infection has been suppressed, not eradicated. I had one patient, treated with Salvarsan by Ehrlich himself, who developed tabes dorsalis-one form of neurosyphilis-more than fifty years later.

But I had never heard of an interval of seventy years-nor of a self-diagnosis of cerebral syphilis mooted so calmly and clearly.

'That's an amazing suggestion,' I replied after some thought. 'It would never have occurred to me-but perhaps you are right.'

She was right; the spinal fluid was positive, she did have neurosyphilis, it was indeed the spirochetes stimulating her ancient cerebral cortex. Now the question of treatment arose. But here another dilemma presented itself, propounded, with typical acuity, by Mrs K. herself. 'I don't know that I want it treated,' she said. 'I know it's an illness, but it's made me feel well. I've enjoyed it, I still enjoy it, I won't deny it. It's made me feel livelier, friskier, than I have in twenty years. It's been fun. But I know when a good thing goes too far, and stops being good. I've had thoughts, I've had impulses, I won't tell you, which are-well, embarra.s.sing and silly. It was like being a little tiddly, a little tipsy, at first, but if it goes any further . . .' She mimed a drooling, spastic dement. 'I guessed I had Cupid's, that's why I came to you. I don't want it to get worse, that would be awful; but I don't want it cured-that would be just as bad. I wasn't fully alive until the wrigglies got me. Do you think you could keep it just as it is?'

We thought for a while, and our course, mercifully, was clear. We have given her penicillin, which has killed the spirochetes, but can do nothing to reverse the cerebral changes, the disinhi-bitions, they have caused.

And now Mrs K. has it both ways, enjoying a mild disinhibi-tion, a release of thought and impulse, without any threat to her self-control or of further damage to her cortex. She hopes to live, thus reanimated, rejuvenated, to a hundred. 'Funny thing,' she says. 'You've got to give it to Cupid.'

Postscript Very recently (January 1985) I have seen some of these same dilemmas and ironies in relation to another patient (Miguel O.), admitted to the state hospital with a diagnosis of 'mania', but soon realised to be suffering from the excited stage of neurosyphilis. A simple man, he had been a farmhand in Puerto Rico, and with some speech and hearing impediment, he could not express himself too well in words, but expressed himself, exhibited his situation, simply and clearly, in drawings.

The first time I saw him he was quite excited, and when I asked him to copy a simple figure (Figure A) he produced, with great brio, a three-dimensional elaboration (Figure B)-or so I took it to be, until he explained that it was 'an open carton', and then tried to draw some fruit in it. Impulsively inspired by his excited imagination, he had ignored the circle and cross, but retained, and made concrete, the idea of 'enclosure'. An open carton, a carton full of oranges-was that not more exciting, more alive, more real, than my dull figure?

A few days later I saw him again, very energised, very active, thoughts and feelings flying everywhere, high as a kite. I asked him again to draw the same figure. And now, impulsively, without pausing for a moment, he transformed the original to a sort of trapezoid, a lozenge, and then attached to this a string-and a boy (Figure C). 'Boy flying kite, kites flying!' he exclaimed excitedly.

I saw him for the third time a few days after this, and found him rather down, rather Parkinsonian (he had been given Haldol to quiet him, while awaiting final tests on the spinal fluid). Again I asked him to draw the figure, and this time he copied it dully, Excited elaboration ('an open carton') correctly, and a little smaller than the original (the 'micrographia' of Haldol), and with none of the elaborations, the animation, the imagination, of the others (Figure D). 'I don't "see" things any more,' he said. 'It looked so real, it looked so alive before. Will everything seem dead when I am treated?'

The drawings of patients with Parkinsonism, as they are 'awakened' by L-Dopa, form an instructive a.n.a.logy. Asked to draw a tree, the Parkinsonian tends to draw a small, meagre thing, stunted, impoverished, a bare winter-tree with no foliage at all. As he 'warms up', 'comes to', is animated by L-Dopa, so the tree acquires vigour, life, imagination-and foliage. If he becomes too excited, high, on L-Dopa, the tree may acquire a fantastic ornateness and exuberance, exploding with a florescence of new branches and foliage with little arabesques, curlicues, and what-not, until finally its original form is completely lost beneath this enormous, this baroque, elaboration. Such drawings are also rather characteristic of Tourette's-the original form, the original thought, lost in a jungle of embellishment-and in the so-called 'speed-art' of am- phetaminism. First the imagination is awakened, then excited, frenzied, to endlessness and excess.

What a paradox, what a cruelty, what an irony, there is here- that inner life and imagination may lie dull and dormant unless released, awakened, by an intoxication or disease!

Precisely this paradox lay at the heart of Awakenings; it is responsible too for the seduction of Tourette's (see Chapters Ten and Fourteen) and, no doubt, for the peculiar uncertainty which may attach to a drug like cocaine (which is known, like L-Dopa, or Tourette's, to raise the brain's dopamine). Thus Freud's startling comment about cocaine, that the sense of well-being and euphoria it induces '. . . in no way differs from the normal euphoria of the healthy person ... In other words, you are simply normal, and it is soon hard to believe that you are under the influence of any drug'.

The same paradoxical valuation may attach to electrical stimulations of the brain: there are epilepsies which are exciting and addictive-and may be self-induced, repeatedly, by those who are p.r.o.ne to them (as rats, with implanted cerebral electrodes, compulsively stimulate the 'pleasure-centres' of their own brain); but there are other epilepsies which bring peace and genuine well-being. A wellness can be genuine even if caused by an illness. And such a paradoxical wellness may even confer a lasting benefit, as with Mrs O'C. and her strange convulsive 'reminiscence' (Chapter Fifteen).

We are in strange waters here, where all the usual considerations may be reversed-where illness may be wellness, and normality illness, where excitement may be either bondage or release, and where reality may lie in ebriety, not sobriety. It is the very realm of Cupid and Dionysus.

12.

A Matter of Ident.i.ty 'What'll it be today?' he says, rubbing his hands. 'Haifa pound of Virginia, a nice piece of Nova?'

(Evidently he saw me as a customer-he would often pick up the phone on the ward, and say 'Thompson's Delicatessen'.) 'Oh Mr Thompson!' I exclaim. 'And who do you think I am?'

'Good heavens, the light's bad-I took you for a customer. As if it isn't my old friend Tom Pitkins. . . Me and Tom' (he whispers in an aside to the nurse) 'was always going to the races together.'

'Mr Thompson, you are mistaken again.'

'So I am,' he rejoins, not put out for a moment. 'Why would you be wearing a white coat if you were Tom? You're Hymie, the kosher butcher next door. No bloodstains on your coat though. Business bad today? You'll look like a slaughterhouse by the end of the week!'

Feeling a bit swept away myself in this whirlpool of ident.i.ties, I finger the stethoscope dangling from my neck.

'A stethoscope!' he exploded. 'And you pretending to be Hymie! You mechanics are all starting to fancy yourselves to be doctors, what with your white coats and stethoscopes-as if you need a stethoscope to listen to a car! So, you're my old friend Manners from the Mobil station up the block, come in to get your boloney-and-rye . . .'

William Thompson rubbed his hands again, in his salesman-grocer's gesture, and looked for the counter. Not finding it, he looked at me strangely again.

'Where am I?' he said, with a sudden scared look. 'I thought I was in my shop, doctor. My mind must have wandered . . . You'll he wanting my shirt off, to sound me as usual?'

'No, not the usual. I'm not your usual doctor.'

'Indeed you're not. I could see that straightaway! You're not my usual chest-thumping doctor. And, by G.o.d, you've a beard! You look like Sigmund Freud-have I gone bonkers, round the bend?'

'No, Mr Thompson. Not round the bend. Just a little trouble with your memory-difficulties remembering and recognising people.'

'My memory has been playing me some tricks,' he admitted. 'Sometimes I make mistakes-I take somebody for somebody else . . . What'll it be now-Nova or Virginia?'

So it would happen, with variations, every time-with improvisations, always prompt, often funny, sometimes brilliant, and ultimately tragic. Mr Thompson would identify me-misidentify, pseudo-identify me-as a dozen different people in the course of five minutes. He would whirl, fluently, from one guess, one hypothesis, one belief, to the next, without any appearance of uncertainty at any point-he never knew who I was, or what and where he was, an ex-grocer, with severe Korsakov's, in a neurological inst.i.tution.

He remembered nothing for more than a few seconds. He was continually disoriented. Abysses of amnesia continually opened beneath him, but he would bridge them, nimbly, by fluent confabulations and fictions of all kinds. For him they were not fictions, but how he suddenly saw, or interpreted, the world. Its radical flux and incoherence could not be tolerated, acknowledged, for an instant-there was, instead, this strange, delirious, quasi-coherence, as Mr Thompson, with his ceaseless, unconscious, quick-fire inventions, continually improvised a world around him-an Arabian Nights world, a phantasmagoria, a dream, of ever-changing people, figures, situations-continual, kaleidoscopic mutations and transformations. For Mr Thompson, however, it was not a tissue of ever-changing, evanescent fancies and illusion, but a wholly normal, stable and factual world. So far as he was concerned, there was nothing the matter.

On one occasion, Mr Thompson went for a trip, identifying himself at the front desk as 'the Revd. William Thompson', ordering a taxi, and taking off for the day. The taxi-driver, whom we later spoke to, said he had never had so fascinating a pa.s.senger, for Mr Thompson told him one story after another, amazing personal stories full of fantastic adventures. 'He seemed to have been everywhere, done everything, met everyone. I could hardly believe so much was possible in a single life,' he said. 'It is not exactly a single life,' we answered. 'It is all very curious-a matter of ident.i.ty.'*

Jimmie G., another Korsakov's patient, whom I have already described at length (Chapter Two), had long since cooled down from his acute Korsakov's syndrome, and seemed to have settled into a state of permanent lostness (or, perhaps, a permanent now-seeming dream or reminiscence of the past). But Mr Thompson, only just out of hospital-his Korsakov's had exploded just three weeks before, when he developed a high fever, raved, and ceased to recognise all his family-was still on the boil, was still in an almost frenzied confabulatory delirium (of the sort sometimes called 'Korsakov's psychosis', though it is not really a psychosis at all), continually creating a world and self, to replace what was continually being forgotten and lost. Such a frenzy may call forth quite brilliant powers of invention and fancy-a veritable confabulatory genius-for such a patient must literally make himself (and his world) up every moment. We have, each of us, a life-story, an inner narrative-whose continuity, whose sense, is our lives. It might be said that each of us constructs and lives, a 'narrative', and that this narrative is us, our ident.i.ties.

If we wish to know about a man, we ask 'what is his story-his real, inmost story?'-for each of us is a biography, a story. Each of us is a singular narrative, which is constructed, continually, unconsciously, by, through, and in us-through our perceptions, *A very similar story is related by Luria in The Neuropsychology of Memory (1976), in which the spell-bound cabdriver only realised that his exotic pa.s.senger was ill when he gave him, for a fare, a temperature chart he was holding. Only then did he realise that this Scheherazade, this spinner of 1001 tales, was one of 'those strange patients' at the Neurological Inst.i.tute.

our feelings, our thoughts, our actions; and, not least, our discourse, our spoken narrations. Biologically, physiologically, we are not so different from each other; historically, as narratives-we are each of us unique.

To be ourselves we must have ourselves-possess, if need be re-possess, our life-stories. We must 'recollect' ourselves, recollect the inner drama, the narrative, of ourselves. A man needs such a narrative, a continuous inner narrative, to maintain his ident.i.ty, his self.

This narrative need, perhaps, is the clue to Mr Thompson's desperate tale-telling, his verbosity. Deprived of continuity, of a quiet, continuous, inner narrative, he is driven to a sort of nar-rational frenzy-hence his ceaseless tales, his confabulations, his mythomania. Unable to maintain a genuine narrative or continuity, unable to maintain a genuine inner world, he is driven to the proliferation of pseudo-narratives, in a pseudo-continuity, pseudo-worlds peopled by pseudo-people, phantoms.

What is it like for Mr Thompson? Superficially, he comes over as an ebullient comic. People say, 'He's a riot.' And there is much that is farcical in such a situation, which might form the basis of a comic novel. * It is comic, but not just comic-it is terrible as well. For here is a man who, in some sense, is desperate, in a frenzy. The world keeps disappearing, losing meaning, vanishing-and he must seek meaning, make meaning, in a desperate way, continually inventing, throwing bridges of meaning over abysses of meaninglessness, the chaos that yawns continually beneath him.

But does Mr Thompson himself know this, feel this? After finding him 'a riot', 'a laugh', 'loads of fun', people are disquieted, *Indeed such a novel has been written. Shortly after 'The Lost Mariner' (Chapter Two) was published, a young writer named David Gilman sent me the ma.n.u.script of his book Croppy Boy, the story of an amnesiac like Mr Thompson, who enjoys the wild and unbridled license of creating ident.i.ties, new selves, as he whims, and as he must-an astonishing imagination of an amnesiac genius, told with positively Joycean richness and gusto. 1 do not know whether it has been published; 1 am very sure it should be. I could not help wondering whether Mr Gilman had actually met (and studied) a 'Thompson'-as I have often wondered whether Borges' 'Funes', so uncannily similar to Luria's Mnemonist, may have been based on a personal encounter with such a mnemonist.

even terrified, by something in him. 'He never stops', they say. 'He's like a man in a race, a man trying to catch something which always eludes him.' And, indeed, he can never stop running, for the breach in memory, in existence, in meaning, is never healed, but has to be bridged, to be 'patched', every second. And the bridges, the patches, for all their brilliance, fail to work-because they are confabulations, fictions, which cannot do service for reality, while also failing to correspond with reality. Does Mr Thompson feel this? Or, again, what is his 'feeling of reality'? Is he in a torment all the while-the torment of a man lost in unreality, struggling to rescue himself, but sinking himself, by ceaseless inventions, illusions, themselves quite unreal? It is certain that he is not at ease-there is a tense, taut look on his face all the while, as of a man under ceaseless inner pressure; and occasionally, not too often, or masked if present, a look of open, naked, pathetic bewilderment. What saves Mr Thompson in a sense, and in another sense d.a.m.ns him, is the forced or defensive superficiality of his life: the way in which it is, in effect, reduced to a surface, brilliant, shimmering, iridescent, ever-changing, but for all that a surface, a ma.s.s of illusions, a delirium, without depth.

And with this, no feeling that he has lost feeling (for the feeling he has lost), no feeling that he has lost the depth, that unfathomable, mysterious, myriad-levelled depth which somehow defines ident.i.ty or reality. This strikes everyone who has been in contact with him for any time-that under his fluency, even his frenzy, is a strange loss of feeling-that feeling, or judgment, which distinguishes between 'real' and 'unreal', 'true' and 'untrue' (one cannot speak of 'lies' here, only of 'non-truth'), important and trivial, relevant or irrelevant. What comes out, torrentially, in his ceaseless confabulation, has, finally, a peculiar quality of indifference ... as if it didn't really matter what he said, or what anyone else did or said; as if nothing really mattered any more.

A striking example of this was presented one afternoon, when William Thompson, jabbering away, of all sorts of people who were improvised on the spot, said: 'And there goes my younger brother, Bob, past the window', in the same, excited but even and indifferent tone, as the rest of his monologue. I was dumbfounded when, a minute later, a man peeked round the door, and said: 'I'm Bob, I'm his younger brother-I think he saw me pa.s.sing by the window.' Nothing in William's tone or manner-nothing in his exuberant, but unvarying and indifferent, style of monologue-had prepared me for the possibility of. . . reality. William spoke of his brother, who was real, in precisely the same tone, or lack of tone, in which he spoke of the unreal-and now, suddenly, out of the phantoms, a real figure appeared! Further, he did not treat his younger brother as 'real'-did not display any real emotion, was not in the least oriented or delivered from his delirium- but, on the contrary, instantly treated his brother as unreal, effacing him, losing him, in a further whirl of delirium-utterly different from the rare but profoundly moving times when Jimmie G. (see Chapter Two) met his brother, and while with him was unlost. This was intensely disconcerting to poor Bob-who said 'I'm Bob, not Rob, not Dob', to no avail whatever. In the midst of confabulations-perhaps some strand of memory, of remembered kinship, or ident.i.ty, was still holding (or came back for an instant)-William spoke of his elder brother, George, using his invariable present indicative tense.

'But George died nineteen years ago!' said Bob, aghast.

'Aye, George is always the joker!' William quipped, apparently ignoring, or indifferent to, Bob's comment, and went on blathering of George in his excited, dead way, insensitive to truth, to reality, to propriety, to everything-insensitive too to the manifest distress of the living brother before him.

It was this which convinced me, above everything, that there was some ultimate and total loss of inner reality, of feeling and meaning, of soul, in William-and led me to ask the Sisters, as I had asked them of Jimmie G. 'Do you think William has a soul? Or has he been pithed, scooped-out, de-souled, by disease?'

This time, however, they looked worried by my question, as if something of the sort were already in their minds: they could not say 'Judge for yourself. See Willie in Chapel', because his wisecracking, his confabulations continued even there. There is an utter pathos, a sad sense of lostness, with Jimmie G. which one does not feel, or feel directly, with the effervescent Mr Thompson.

Jimmie has moods, and a sort of brooding (or, at least, yearning) sadness, a depth, a soul, which does not seem to be present in Mr Thompson. Doubtless, as the Sisters said, he had a soul, an immortal soul, in the theological sense; could be seen, and loved, as an individual by the Almighty; but, they agreed, something very disquieting had happened to him, to his spirit, his character, in the ordinary, human sense.

It is because Jimmie is 'lost' that he can be redeemed or found, at least for a while, in the mode of a genuine emotional relation. Jimmie is in despair, a quiet despair (to use or adapt Kierkegaard's term), and therefore he has the possibility of salvation, of touching base, the ground of reality, the feeling and meaning he has lost, but still recognises, still yearns for . . .

But for William-with his brilliant, bra.s.sy surface, the unending joke which he subst.i.tutes for the world (which if it covers over a desperation, is a desperation he does not feel); for William with his manifest indifference to relation and reality caught in an unending verbosity, there may be nothing 'redeeming' at all-his confabulations, his apparitions, his frantic search for meanings, being the ultimate barrier to any meaning.

Paradoxically, then, William's great gift-for confabulation- which has been called out to leap continually over the ever-opening abyss of amnesia-William's great gift is also his d.a.m.nation. If only he could be quiet, one feels, for an instant; if only he could stop the ceaseless chatter and jabber; if only he could relinquish the deceiving surface of illusions-then (ah then!) reality might seep in; something genuine, something deep, something true, something felt, could enter his soul.

For it is not memory which is the final, 'existential' casualty here (although his memory is wholly devastated); it is not memory only which has been so altered in him, but some ultimate capacity for feeling which is gone; and this is the sense in which he is 'de-souled'.

Luria speaks of such indifference as 'equalisation'-and sometimes seems to see it as the ultimate pathology, the final destroyer of any world, any self. It exerted, I think, a horrified fascination on him, as well as const.i.tuting an ultimate therapeutic challenge. He was drawn back to this theme again and again-sometimes in relation to Korsakov's and memory, as in The Neuropsychology of Memory, more often in relation to frontal-lobe syndromes, especially in Human Brain and Psychological Processes, which contains several full-length case-histories of such patients, fully comparable in their terrible coherence and impact to 'the man with a shattered world'-comparable, and, in a way, more terrible still, because they depict patients who do not realise that anything has befallen them, patients who have lost their own reality, without knowing it, patients who may not suffer, but be the most G.o.d-forsaken of all. Zazetsky (in The Man with a Shattered World) is constantly described as a fighter, always (even pa.s.sionately) conscious of his state, and always fighting 'with the tenacity of the d.a.m.ned' to recover the use of his damaged brain. But William (like Luria's frontal-lobe patients-see next chapter) is so d.a.m.ned he does not know he is d.a.m.ned, for it is not just a faculty, or some faculties, which are damaged, but the very citadel, the self, the soul itself. William is 'lost', in this sense, far more than Jimmie-for all his brio; one never feels, or rarely feels, that there is a person remaining, whereas in Jimmie there is plainly a real, moral being, even if disconnected most of the time. In Jimmie, at least, re-connection is possible-the therapeutic challenge can be summed up as 'Only connect'.

Our efforts to 're-connect' William all fail-even increase his confabulatory pressure. But when we abdicate our efforts, and let him be, he sometimes wanders out into the quiet and undemanding garden which surrounds the Home, and there, in its quietness, he recovers his own quiet. The presence of others, other people, excite and rattle him, force him into an endless, frenzied, social chatter, a veritable delirium of ident.i.ty-making and -seeking; the presence of plants, a quiet garden, the non-human order, making no social or human demands upon him, allow this ident.i.ty-delirium to relax, to subside; and by their quiet, non-human self-sufficiency and completeness allow him a rare quietness and self-sufficiency of his own, by offering (beneath, or beyond, all merely human ident.i.ties and relations) a deep wordless communion with Nature itself, and with this the restored sense of being in the world, being real.

13.

Yes, Father-Sister Mrs B., a former research chemist, had presented with a rapid personality change, becoming 'funny' (facetious, given to wisecracks and puns), impulsive-and 'superficial' ('You feel she doesn't care about you,' one of her friends said. 'She no longer seems to care about anything at all.') At first it was thought that she might be hypomanic, but she turned out to have a cerebral tumour. At craniotomy there was found, not a meningioma as had been hoped, but a huge carcinoma involving the orbitofrontal aspects of both frontal lobes.

When I saw her, she seemed high-spirited, volatile-'a riot' (the nurses called her)-full of quips and cracks, often clever and funny.