This is why Jameson chooses Freudian psychoanalysis as another case study in fragmentation: the rise of psychoanalysis was bound up with the fragmentation of our psyches, which is itself a consequence of the relentless expansion of the capitalist project.

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.

In each case the writer was possessed of an insight that organized the writing, and in each case a persona had been created to serve the insight. I became enraptured, tracing out the development of the persona in memoir after essay after memoir (it was out of this rapture that I realized I was a nonfiction writer). I began to read the greats in essay writing—and it wasn’t their confessing voices I was responding to, it was their truth-speaking personae.

Narrative thinking, on the other hand, is necessary for understanding the unique

individual in front of you. Stories capture the unique presence of a person’s character and how he or she changes over time. Stories capture how a thousand little influences come together to shape a life, how people struggle and strive, how their lives are knocked about by lucky and unlucky breaks. When someone is telling you their story, you get a much more personal, complicated, and attractive image of the person. You get to experience their experience.

In order to see our son differently, Sandra and I had to be differently. Our new paradigm was created as we invested in the growth and development of our own character. Paradigms are inseparable from character. Being is seeing in the human dimension. And what we see is highly interrelated to what we are. We can’t go very far to change our seeing without simultaneously changing our being, and vice versa. Even in my apparently instantaneous paradigm-shifting experience that morning on the subway, my change of vision was a result of—and limited by—my basic character.