In her beautiful book on ‘involuntary memories’ (A Collection of Moments, 1970), Esther Salaman speaks of the necessity to preserve, or recapture, ‘the sacred and precious memories of childhood’, and how impoverished, ungrounded, life is without these. She speaks of the deep joy, the sense of reality, which recapturing such memories may give, and she provides an abundance of marvellous autobiographical quotations, especially from Dostoievski and Proust. We are all ‘exiles from our past’, she writes, and, as such, we need to recapture it. For Mrs O’C, nearly ninety, approaching the end of a long lonely life, this recapturing of ‘sacred and precious’ childhood memories, this strange and almost miraculous anamnesis, breaking open the closed door, the amnesia of childhood, was provided, paradoxically, by a cerebral mishap.
Unlike Mrs O’M. who found her seizures exhausting and tiresome, Mrs O’C. found hers a refreshment to the spirit. They gave her a sense of psychological grounding and reality, the elemental sense which she had lost, in her long decades of cut-offness and ‘exile’, that she had had a real childhood and home, that she had been mothered and loved and cared-for. Unlike Mrs O’M., who wanted treatment, Mrs O’C. declined anticonvulsants: ‘I need these memories,’ she would say. ‘I need what’s going on . . . And it’ll end by itself soon enough.’
Dostoievski had ‘psychical seizures’, or ‘elaborate mental states’ at the onset of seizures, and once said of these:
You all, healthy people, can’t imagine the happiness which we epileptics feel during the second before our fit... I don’t know if this felicity lasts for seconds, hours or months, but believe me, I would not exchange it for all the joys that life may bring. (T. Alajouanine, 1963)
Mrs O’C. would have understood this. She too knew, in her seizures, an extraordinary felicity. But it seemed to her the acme of sanity and health—the very key, indeed the door, to sanity and health. Thus she felt her illness as health, as healing.
As she got better, and recovered from her stroke, Mrs O’C. had a period of wistfulness and fear. ‘The door is closing,’ she said. ‘I’m losing it all again.’ And indeed she did lose, by the middle of April, the sudden irruptions of childhood scenes and music and feeling, her sudden epileptic ‘transports’ back to the world of early childhood—which were undoubtedly ‘reminiscences’, and authentic, for, as Penfield has shown beyond doubt, such seizures grasp and reproduce a reality—an experiential reality, and not a phantasy: actual segments of an individual’s lifetime and past experience.
But Penfield always speaks of ‘consciousness’ in this regard—of physical seizures as seizing, and convulsively replaying, part of the stream of consciousness, of conscious reality. What is peculiarly important, and moving, in the case of Mrs O’C., is that epileptic ‘reminiscence’ here seized on something unconscious—very early, childhood experiences, either faded, or repressed from consciousness—and restored them, convulsively, to full memory and consciousness. And it is for this reason, one must suppose, that though, physiologically, the ‘door’ did close, the experience itself was not forgotten, but left a profound and enduring impression, and was felt as a significant and healing experience. ‘I’m glad it happened,’ she said when it was over. ‘It was the healthiest, happiest experience of my life. There’s no longer a great chunk of childhood missing. I can’t remember the details now, but I know it’s all there. There’s a sort of completeness I never had before.’
These were not idle words, but brave and true. Mrs O’C.’s seizures did effect a kind of ‘conversion’, did give a centre to a centreless life, did give her back the childhood she had lost—and with this a serenity which she had never had before and which remained for the rest of her life: an ultimate serenity and security of spirit as is only given to those who possess, or recall, the true past.
‘I have never been consulted for “reminiscence” only . . .’ said Hughlings Jackson; in contrast, Freud said, ‘Neurosis is reminiscence.’ But clearly the word is being used in quite opposite senses— for the aim of psychoanalysis, one might say, is to replace false or fantastic ‘reminiscences’ by a true memory, or anamnesis, of the past (and it is precisely such true memory, trivial or profound, that is evoked in the course of psychical seizures). Freud, we know, greatly admired Hughlings Jackson—but we do not know if Jackson, who lived to 1911, had ever heard of Freud.
The beauty of a case like Mrs O’C.’s is that it is at once ‘Jacksonian’ and ‘Freudian’. She suffered from a Jacksonian ‘reminiscence’, but this served to moor and heal her, as a Freudian ‘anamnesis’. Such cases are exciting and precious, for they serve as a bridge between the physical and personal, and they will point, if we let them, to the neurology of the future, a neurology of living experience. This would not, I think, have surprised or outraged Hughlings Jackson. Indeed it is surely what he himself dreamed of—when he wrote of ‘dreamy states’ and ‘reminiscence’ back in 1880.
Penfield and Perot entitle their paper ‘The Brain’s Record of Visual and Auditory Experience’, and we may now meditate on the form, or forms, such inner ‘records’ may have. What occurs, in these wholly personal ‘experiential’ seizures, is an entire replay of (a segment of) experience. What, we may ask, could be played in such a way as to reconstitute an experience? Is it something akin to a film or record, played on the brain’s film projector or phonograph? Or something analogous, but logically anterior— such as a script or score? What is the final form, the natural form, of our life’s repertoire? That repertoire which provides not only memory and ‘reminiscence’, but our imagination at every level, from the simplest sensory and motor images, to the most complex imaginative worlds, landscapes, scenes? A repertoire, a memory, an imagination, of a life which is essentially personal, dramatic and ‘iconic’.
The experiences of reminiscence our patients have raise fundamental questions about the nature of memory (or mnesis)—these are also raised, in reverse, in our tales of amnesia or amnesis (‘The Lost Mariner’ and ‘A Matter of Identity’, Chapters Two and Twelve). Analogous questions about the nature of knowing (or gnosis) are raised by our patients with agnosias—the dramatic visual agnosia of Dr P. (The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat), and the auditory and musical agnosias of Mrs O’M. and Emily D. (Chapter Nine, ‘The President’s Speech’). And similar questions about the nature of action (or praxis) are raised by the motor bewilderment, or apraxia, of certain retardates, and by patients with frontal-lobe apraxias—apraxias which may be so severe that such patients may be unable to walk, may lose their ‘kinetic melodies’, their melodies of walking (this also happens in Parkinsonian patients, as was seen in Awakenings).
As Mrs O’C. and Mrs O’M. suffered from ‘reminiscence’, a convulsive upsurge of melodies and scenes—a sort of hyper-mnesis and hyper-gnosis—our amnesic-agnosic patients have lost (or are losing) their inner melodies and scenes. Both alike testify to the essentially ‘melodic’ and ‘scenic’ nature of inner life, the ‘Prous-tian’ nature of memory and mind.