Kurt Goldstein, studying brain-damaged soldiers during World War I, was moved from his original, deficit-based point of view to a more holistic, organismal one. There were never, he believed, just deficits or releases; there were always reorganizations, and these he saw as strategies (albeit unconscious and almost automatic) by which the brain-damaged organism sought to survive, although perhaps in a more rigid and impoverished way.
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One critical step in this process is to re-imagine the symptom not merely as a sign of a pathological process but as an endeavour to find meaning and regain control. This would entail acknowledging rather than dismissing these often bewildering symptoms.
Thomas DeBaggio, a writer and horticulturist, was even able to publish two insightful memoirs about his own early-onset Alzheimerās before the disease killed him at the age of sixty-nine. But most patients are frightened or mortified by the knowledge of what is befalling them. Some continue to be severely terrified as they lose their intellectual competences and bearings and find themselves in a world increasingly fragmented and chaotic. But the majority, I think, become calmer with time as they perhaps start to lose the sense of what they have lost and find themselves shifted into a simpler, unreflective world.
This theme, the preservation of identity, is well brought out by Donna Cohen and Carl Eisdorfer in their fine book The Loss of Self, which is based on painstaking studies of a number of people with Alzheimerās. The title of their book is perhaps misleading, for it is not loss (at least until very late) but surprising preservations and transformations that we see in Alzheimerās, and this, indeed, is what Cohen and Eisdorfer show.
It is the nature of living a real life that experience is not uniform, but ever changing and ever challenging and requiring more and more comprehensive integration. It is not enough for the brain/mind simply to tick over, maintaining uniform function (like the heart); it must adventure and advance throughout life. The very concept of health or wellness requires a special definition in relation to the brain.
Most important is that feelings are so interwoven with thinking that to allow one and not the other is to diminish both. We can listen to words and we can listen to tears. It is all the same thing. I know that at the moment the world of brain talk is full of the separation of these two systems. But that will pass soon enough, just as almost all efforts at human compartmentalization have. Life is enough, just as almost all efforts at human compartmentalization have. Life is everything all at once. Even space is stuff that hugs us. Life is one lavish act of touching. Thinking and feeling are no exceptions. So we can rejoice.
And when someone is thinking along and starts to cry, letās just be glad they felt psychologically safe enough with us to do that. And then watch the fresh thinking that follows. And the bright eyes that say so.