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What is this ‘warm sense’ of which Luria speaks? It is clearly the expression of something emotional and personal—which would not be possible if the defectives did not ‘respond’, did not themselves possess very real sensibilities, emotional and personal potentials, whatever their (intellectual) defects. But it is more. It is an expression of scientific interest—of something that Luria considered of quite peculiar scientific interest. What could this be? Something other than ‘defects’ and ‘defectology’, surely, which are of rather limited interest in themselves. What is it, then, that is especially interesting in the simple?

It has to do with qualities of mind which are preserved, even enhanced, so that, though ‘mentally defective’ in some ways, they may be mentally interesting, even mentally complete, in others. Qualities of mind other than the conceptual—this is what we may explore with peculiar clarity in the simple mind (as we may also in the minds of children and ‘savages’—though, as Clifford Geertz repeatedly emphasises, these categories must never be equated: savages are neither simple nor children; children have no savage culture; and the simple are neither savages nor children). Yet there are important kinships—and all that Piaget has opened out for us in the minds of children, and Levi-Strauss in the ‘savage mind’, awaits us, in a different form, in the mind and world of the simple.[19]

What awaits our study is equally pleasing to the heart and mind, and, as such, especially incites the impulse to Luria’s ‘romantic science’.

What is this quality of mind, this disposition, which characterises the simple, and gives them their poignant innocence, transparency, completeness and dignity—a quality so distinctive we must speak of the ‘world’ of the simple (as we speak of the ‘world’ of the child or the savage)?

If we are to use a single word here, it would have to be ‘con-creteness’—their world is vivid, intense, detailed, yet simple, precisely because it is concrete: neither complicated, diluted, nor unified, by abstraction.

By a sort of inversion, or subversion, of the natural order of things, concreteness is often seen by neurologists as a wretched thing, beneath consideration, incoherent, regressed. Thus for Kurt Goldstein, the greatest systematiser of his generation, the mind, man’s glory, lies wholly in the abstract and categorical, and the effect of brain damage, any and all brain damage, is to cast him out from this high realm into the almost subhuman swamplands of the concrete. If a man loses the ‘abstract-categorical attitude’ (Goldstein), or ‘prepositional thought’ (Hughlings Jackson), what remains is subhuman, of no moment or interest.

I call this an inversion because the concrete is elemental—it is what makes reality ‘real’, alive, personal and meaningful. All of this is lost if the concrete is lost—as we saw in the case of the almost-Martian Dr P., ‘the man who mistook his wife for a hat’, who fell (in an un-Goldsteinian way) from the concrete to the abstract.

Much easier to comprehend, and altogether more natural, is the idea of the preservation of the concrete in brain damage—not regression to it, but preservation of it, so that the essential personality and identity and humanity, the being of the hurt creature, is preserved.

This is what we see in Zazetsky—‘the man with a shattered world’—he remains a man, quintessentially a man, with all the moral weight and rich imagination of a man, despite the devastation of his abstract and propositional powers. Here Luria, while seeming to be supporting the formulations of Hughlings Jackson and Goldstein, is, at the same time, turning their significance upside down. Zazetsky is no feeble Jacksonian or Goldsteinian relic, but a man in his full manhood, a man with his emotions and imagination wholly preserved, perhaps enhanced. His world is not ‘shattered’, despite the book’s title—it lacks unifying abstractions, but is experienced as an extraordinarily rich, deep and concrete reality.

I believe all this to be true of the simple also—the more so as, having been simple from the start, they have never known, been seduced by, the abstract, but have always experienced reality direct and unmediated, with an elemental and, at times, overwhelming intensity.

We find ourselves entering a realm of fascination and paradox, all of which centres on the ambiguity of the ‘concrete’. In particular, as physicians, as therapists, as teachers, as scientists, we are invited, indeed compelled, towards an exploration of the concrete. This is Luria’s ‘romantic science’. Both of Luria’s great clinical biographies, or ‘novels’, may indeed be seen as explorations of the concrete: its preservation, in the service of reality, in the braindamaged Zazetsky; its exaggeration, at the expense of reality, in the ‘supermind’ of the Mnemonist.

Classical science has no use for the concrete—it is equated with the trivial in neurology and psychiatry. It needs a ‘romantic’ science to pay it its full due—to appreciate its extraordinary powers . . . and dangers: and in the simple we are confronted with the concrete head-on, the concrete pure and simple, in unreserved intensity.

The concrete can open doors, and it can close them too. It can constitute the portal to sensibility, imagination, depth. Or it can confine the possessor (or the possessed) to meaningless particulars. We see both of these potentials, as it were amplified, in the simple.

Enhanced powers of concrete imagery and memory, Nature’s compensation for defectiveness in the conceptual and abstract, can tend in quite opposite directions: towards an obsessive preoccupation with particulars, the development of an eidetic imagery and memory, and the mentality of the Performer or ‘whiz kid’ (as occurred with the Mnemonist, and in ancient times, with over-cultivation of the concrete ‘art of memory’[20]: we see tendencies to this in Martin A. (Chapter Twenty-two), in Jose (Chapter Twenty-four), and especially the Twins (Chapter Twenty-three), exaggerated, especially in the Twins, by the demands of public performance, coupled with their own obsessionalism and exhibitionism.

But of much greater interest, much more human, much more moving, much more ‘real’—yet scarcely even recognised in scientific studies of the simple (though immediately seen by sympathetic parents and teachers)—is the proper use and development of the concrete.

The concrete, equally, may become a vehicle of mystery, beauty and depth, a path into the emotions, the imagination, the spirit— fully as much as any abstract conception (perhaps indeed more, as Gershom Scholem (1965) has argued in his contrasts of the conceptual and the symbolic, or Jerome Bruner (1984) in his contrast of the ‘paradigmatic’ and the ‘narrative’). The concrete is readily imbued with feeling and meaning—more readily, perhaps, than any abstract conception. It readily moves into the aesthetic, the dramatic, the comic, the symbolic, the whole wide deep world of art and spirit. Conceptually, then, mental defectives may be cripples—but in their powers of concrete and symbolic apprehension they may be fully the equal of any ‘normal’ individual. (This is science, this is romance too . . . ) No one has expressed this more beautifully than Kierkegaard, in the words he wrote on his deathbed. ‘Thou plain man!’ (he writes, and I paraphrase slightly). ‘The symbolism of the Scriptures is something infinitely high . . . but it is not “high” in a sense that has anything to do with intellectual elevation, or with the intellectual differences between man and man . . . No, it is for all . . . for all is this infinite height attainable.’

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19

All of Luria’s early work was done in these three allied domains, his field-work with children in primitive communities in Central Asia, and his studies in the Institute of Defectology. Together these launched his lifelong exploration of human imagination.

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20

See Francis Yates’ extraordinary book so titled (1966).