Summer Detour I: The I in Me

If, as most of us assume, we pass part of each night in dreamless sleep, what is it, apart from the human being, that loses consciousness late at night and regains it in the morning? How can there be a mental subject, persisting over such an interval, whose identity over time makes it the case that the subject who hears the alarm clock go off is the same one who saw the late news on television the night before?

What does it feel like to be an octopus? Does it feel like anything at all? Many philosophers think consciousness is an all or nothing phenomenon: you either have it or you don’t. Humans have it, as do perhaps chimps and dolphins. Mice, ants and amoebas presumably do not. Part of the motivation for the all or nothing view is that it is difficult to imagine consciousness being possessed in degrees.

Grandfather’s skirts would flap in the wind along the churchyard path, and I would hang on. He often found things to do in the vestry, excuses for getting out of the vicarage (kicking the swollen door, cursing) and so long as he took me he couldn’t get up to much. I was a sort of hobble; he was my minder and I was his.

The contemporary autobiographical novel enjoys the prestige of confession and the freedom of fiction, yet within that rather vague context there is room for lots of new, concrete, idiosyncratic detail, as long as it does not depart too far from the ideal of the martyr. Genet can question the very roots of our way of perceiving the self, as long as that self is the suffering outcast child who is tortured by society in prison, yet emerges triumphant through his art.

Psychoanalysts have had good reasons for considering themselves beleaguered, but for the past twenty years at least, the world, being less interested in them, has been less interested than they imagine in finding them out. ‘No decent analyst would let his picture appear in the Times,’ one New York analyst snapped at another, as if he had caught him sneaking his image into the temple of Baal. Janet Malcolm speaks of the ‘chilly castle of psychoanalysis’ and admires its austerities. One might less admiringly think of it as Fortress Freud and question whether it too needs to be so insistently defended.

It does not always work as it ought, this sense that is not quite a sense. In certain cases, the feeling (or, worse, lack of feeling) of being embodied overwhelms us; the common sense fails and we succumb to one of a series of ailments that the medical imagination of the 18th and 19th centuries, only partially aware of the philosophical history of the inner touch, called coenaesthopathy. We feel too little, or too much, the fact of our own feeling.