‘In the beginning is the deed,’ Goethe writes. This may be so when we face moral or existential dilemmas, but not where movement and perception have their origin. Yet here too there is always something sudden: a first step (or a first word, as when Helen Keller said ‘water’), a first movement, a first perception, a first impulse— total, ‘out of the blue’, where there was nothing, or nothing with sense before. ‘In the beginning is the impulse.’ Not a deed, not a reflex, but an ‘impulse’, which is both more obvious and more mysterious than either . . . We could not say to Madeleine, ‘Do it!’ but we might hope for an impulse; we might hope for, we might solicit, we might even provoke one . . .
I thought of the infant as it reached for the breast. ‘Leave Madeleine her food, as if by accident, slightly out of reach on occasion,’ I suggested to her nurses. ‘Don’t starve her, don’t tease her, but show less than your usual alacrity in feeding her.’ And one day it happened—what had never happened before: impatient, hungry, instead of waiting passively and patiently, she reached out an arm, groped, found a bagel, and took it to her mouth. This was the first use of her hands, her first manual act, in sixty years, and it marked her birth as a ‘motor individual’ (Sherrington’s term for the person who emerges through acts). It also marked her first manual perception, and thus her birth as a complete ‘perceptual individual’. Her first perception, her first recognition, was of a bagel, or ‘bagelhood’—as Helen Keller’s first recognition, first utterance, was of water (‘waterhood’).
After this first act, this first perception, progress was extremely rapid. As she had reached out to explore or touch a bagel, so now, in her new hunger, she reached out to explore or touch the whole world. Eating led the way—the feeling, the exploring, of different foods, containers, implements, etc. ‘Recognition’ had somehow to be achieved by a curiously roundabout sort of inference or guesswork, for having been both blind and ‘handless’ since birth, she was lacking in the simplest internal images (whereas Helen Keller at least had tactile images). Had she not been of exceptional intelligence and literacy, with an imagination filled and sustained, so to speak, by the images of others, images conveyed by language, by the word, she might have remained almost as helpless as a baby.
A bagel was recognised as round bread, with a hole in it; a fork as an elongated flat object with several sharp tines. But then this preliminary analysis gave way to an immediate intuition, and objects were instantly recognised as themselves, as immediately familiar in character and ‘physiognomy’, were immediately recognised as unique, as ‘old friends’. And this sort of recognition, not analytic, but synthetic and immediate, went with a vivid delight, and a sense that she was discovering a world full of enchantment, mystery and beauty.
The commonest objects delighted her—delighted her and stimulated a desire to reproduce them. She asked for clay and started to make models: her first model, her first sculpture, was of a shoehorn, and even this was somehow imbued with a peculiar power and humour, with flowing, powerful, chunky curves reminiscent of an early Henry Moore.
And then—and this was within a month of her first recognitions—her attention, her appreciation, moved from objects to people. There were limits, after all, to the interest and expressive possibilities of things, even when transfigured by a sort of innocent, ingenuous and often comical genius. Now she needed to explore the human face and figure, at rest and in motion. To be ‘felt’ by Madeleine was a remarkable experience. Her hands, only such a little while ago inert, doughy, now seemed charged with a preternatural animation and sensibility. One was not merely being recognised, being scrutinised, in a way more intense and searching than any visual scrutiny, but being ‘tasted’ and appreciated meditatively, imaginatively and aesthetically, by a born (a newborn) artist. They were, one felt, not just the hands of a blind woman exploring, but of a blind artist, a meditative and creative mind, just opened to the full sensuous and spiritual reality of the world. These explorations too pressed for representation and reproduction as an external reality.
She started to model heads and figures, and within a year was locally famous as the Blind Sculptress of St. Benedict’s. Her sculptures tended to be half or three-quarters life size, with simple but recognisable features, and with a remarkably expressive energy. For me, for her, for all of us, this was a deeply moving, an amazing, almost a miraculous, experience. Who would have dreamed that basic powers of perception, normally acquired in the first months of life, but failing to be acquired at this time, could be acquired in one’s sixtieth year? What wonderful possibilities of late learning, and learning for the handicapped, this opened up. And who could have dreamed that in this blind, palsied woman, hidden away, inactivated, over-protected all her life, there lay the germ of an astonishing artistic sensibility (unsuspected by her, as by others) that would germinate and blossom into a rare and beautiful reality, after remaining dormant, blighted, for sixty years?
The case of Madeleine J., however, as I was to find, was by no means unique. Within a year I had encountered another patient (Simon K.) who also had cerebral palsy combined with profound impairment of vision. While Mr K. had normal strength and sensation in his hands, he scarcely ever used them—and was extraordinarily inept at handling, exploring, or recognising anything. Now we had been alerted by Madeleine J., we wondered whether he too might not have a similar ‘developmental agnosia’—and, as such, be ‘treatable’ in the same way. And, indeed, we soon found that what had been achieved with Madeleine could be achieved with Simon as well. Within a year he had become very ‘handy’ in all ways, and particularly enjoyed simple carpentry, shaping plywood and wooden blocks, and assembling them into simple wooden toys. He had no impulse to sculpt, to make reproductions—he was not a natural artist like Madeleine. But still, after a half-century spent virtually without hands, he enjoyed their use in all sorts of ways.
This is the more remarkable, perhaps, because he is mildly retarded, an amiable simpleton, in contrast to the passionate and highly gifted Madeleine J. It might be said that she is extraordinary, a Helen Keller, a woman in a million—but nothing like this could possibly be said of simple Simon. And yet the essential achievement—the achievement of hands—proved wholly as possible for him as for her. It seems clear that intelligence, as such, plays no part in the matter—that the sole and essential thing is use.
Such cases of developmental agnosia may be rare, but one commonly sees cases of acquired agnosia, which illustrate the same fundamental principle of use. Thus I frequently see patients with a severe ‘glove-and-stocking’ neuropathy, so-called, due to diabetes. If the neuropathy is sufficiently severe, patients go beyond feelings of numbness (the ‘glove-and-stocking’ feeling), to a feeling of complete nothingness or de-realisation. They may feel (as one patient put it) ‘like a basket-case’, with hands and feet completely ‘missing’. Sometimes they feel their arms and legs end in stumps, with lumps of ‘dough’ or ‘plaster’ somehow ‘stuck on’. Typically this feeling of de-realisation, if it occurs, is absolutely sudden . . . and the return of reality, if it occurs, is equally sudden. There is, as it were, a critical (functional and ontological) threshold. It is crucial to get such patients to use their hands and feet—even, if necessary, to ‘trick’ them into so doing. With this there is apt to occur a sudden re-realisation—a sudden leap back into subjective reality and ‘life’ . . . provided there is sufficient physiological potential (if the neuropathy is total, if the distal parts of the nerves are quite dead, no such re-realisation is possible).