Orbach: Phantom Limbs and Loss

Sabbatical means curiosity reading, too.

From Susie Orbach, Bodies.  She offers a kind of common sense about the body and about grief, then totally undermines both by referring to neurology -- at least as I read it.

We know of widows who, having lost their husbands, often continue to put out two coffee cups and two cereal bowls.  We can understand how this occurs.  Less comprehensible at first glance is the disconcerting experience of a man who endeavours to attract a waiter's attention or to answer a telephone with an arm that no longer exists...

The widow, we can understand, is dehabituating herself, slowly unhooking herself from an identity and a long life with a husband.  She doesn't always get her new reality right.  Repression works to lull her into forgetfulness...

The phantom limb sufferer knows that something is missing, but his body seems to act indepedently, as though his absent limb were still present.  His mind has a kind of split, a cognitive knowledge of a physical reality and with it the continuing physical sensations of a present but absent limb.

She then discusses the neurological basis of phantom limbs.  It's not an inability to adjust to a new reality.  It is entirely an adjustment to a new reality.  I double-checked her neurology [because she's a psychotherapist, which is adjacent to but not the same as a neurologist].  The MIT Technology Review says that "neurons in the brain that receive input from a limb may rewire themselves to seek input from other sources after the limb is amputated."

These insights come from research I think I find unethical [the intentional damaging of nerves in monkeys], which led to more ethical experiments in humans.  The nerve endings that used to respond to an amputated arm rewire to accept input from a cheek [the most adjacent nerve cluster in the brain].

The goal, then, is not to "get used to it," the way we think a grieving widow must "get used to" the loss of a partner.  Because it's not just about acknowledging the loss.

The brain changes, it uses those resources in new ways, ways that acknowledge the loss but reintegrates the self.

Orbach makes me rethink phantom limbs and the body, yeah, but also makes me rethink grief.