Abstract
That when there is thought there has to be something ‘that thinks’ is simply a formulation of our grammatical custom that adds a doer to every deed.1
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Notes
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Vintage, 1968) 268.
Our use of the word ‘catatonia’ should not be construed as merely or strictly clinical (whatever that might mean); but see Lawrence C. Kolb, ed., Modern Clinical Psychiatry, 9th edn (Philadelphia: W. B. Saunders, 1977) 406: ‘In spite of the apparent ideational poverty, there seems to be every reason to believe that ideas and representations are by no means absent [in catatonia], but rather are centered on a dominant ideoaffective constellation.’ The medical literature on catatonia offers few attempts to map the interior of this thought. One such account, however, is given by Oliver Sacks in Awakenings: a patient with catatonic symptoms suffering from encephalitis, ‘Ros R.’, describes such a state as one of thinking about ‘nothing’. Sacks asks Ros how this is possible: One way is to think about the same thing again and again. Like 2=2=2=2; or, I am what I am what I am what I am. … It’s the same thing with my posture. My posture continually leads to itself. Whatever l do or whatever I think leads deeper and deeper into itself. … And then there are maps. I think of a map; then a map of that map; then a map of that map of that map, and each map perfect, though smaller and smaller.... Worlds within worlds within worlds within worlds. Once I get going I can’t possibly stop. It’s like being caught between mirrors, or echoes, or something’. (Awakenings, rev. edn [London: Pan, 1982] 69).
Robert M. Goldenson, ed., Longman Dictionary of Psychology and Psychiatry (New York: Longman, 1984), ‘cataplexy’. See Kolb 406–7: Many psychiatrists look upon catatonic stupor as a profound regression, a dramatization of death. Attention is called to the similarity between catatonia and the instinctive immobility reaction exhibited by certain animals when confronted with a life-threatening situation. Arieti has suggested that the immobility of the catatonic has its origin in family transactions wherein criticism is directed toward action tendencies of the growing child and is accepted by the compliant child. Catalepsy then is an expression of compliance to the demands of others … it may symbolize an ambivalent negativism and be used to discharge hostility in a passive way.
Dolls and doll’s houses are often presented as analogues of people and houses in Bowen: see, for example, HP 22, 26; WL 42, 60; CS 109; and an example from ‘real life’: in a letter from 1935, Bowen recounts to Virginia Woolf the experience of looking for a house to buy: ‘It is impossible to believe that the people discovered in rooms sitting stiffly about as dolls in a dolls-house attitudes [sic] are not to be sold with the house’ (MT 211).
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© 1995 Andrew Bennett and Nicholas Royle
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Bennett, A., Royle, N. (1995). Abeyances. In: Elizabeth Bowen and the Dissolution of the Novel. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230374355_1
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