benjaminteicher.com – freelance writer

For the last couple of days I have been working, although I would hardly call it work, a joyful rambling perhaps, through Oliver Sack’s Awakenings.

It consists of some analysis, some pharmacological background, but largely case reports from a group of patients who received L-DOPA to treat a rare and intense form of Parkinson’s Disease as a result of a mysterious virus that spread through the global population at around the same time as the Great Flu Pandemic.

I’m surely not the first to be surprised, but it is not at all how you would expect a text based in neuro-psychology to unfold. Nor is the deeply philosophical Dr Sacks at all like the hard-nosed devotees of scientism that I met when working for the Psychology department at the University of Melbourne.

In fact, what Sacks details is more like a set of incredibly beautiful, illuminating and sad short stories arranged around a common theme, of disintegrated minds chaotically reintegrated in unpredictable ways.

Together, these intimate portraits coalesce to reveal some outline of the being of the mind – not purely a mechanics, and not simply the dramas of the ego. It’s a moving-picture of the mind that comes out something like an Escher sketch.

It answers any model of human consciousness and behaviour that would arrange us on a bell curve of normality. What he details is much closer to a hive, an ever twisting, changing, growing root system.

The implications of his work span from scientific psychology to metaphysical philosophy and in a most dramatic way collapse the distinctions between the two.

Part I: The Encounter

‘You’re here to pity me,’ he says.

The following inferences occur: the maladjusted person is a patient, the patient is sick, the sick is drawn to pity like a fly to cloying treacle. The patient is the fly, overcome, overwhelmed, suffocating, sinking in the noble concern of others.

The patient catches hold of this insight, even as the flux of images and representations engulfs his limbs and regards suspiciously those who come to visit.

I, the friend, say that there is no such thing, as far as I am concerned, that we are Nietzscheans in this regard.

The maladjusted person relaxes.

But in defending myself against this claim of pity, I am only plausible if I have an alternative explanation to our time spent together.

When the adjusted person encounters the maladjusted person there is the perpetual question, overhanging and fluttering like a curtain: ‘Why are you here?’ It is is the question of time spent. It demands an answer.

Someone for whom normal or should I say consensus meaning has broken down is both fascinating and terrifying.

While the connections that this person makes between things, concepts, and senses are not our own, they possess an undeniable logic. This logic reveals our own to be, while surely practicable, also disturbingly provisional.

Meaning and sense becomes a matter of stitching, of finding the peg that fits the hole, the number in the sequence, the missing letter that looms underneath the hanged man.

The same child-like game is played by both the adjusted and the maladjusted, but the latter play with a different set of rules that yield interconnections of an undeniable profundity.

Those of us with insight know that our own logic of meaning, while it allows us to be sane, also facilitates our adjusting to, and complicity with an established social order that in our analytical modes, but not in our everyday existence, we know to be unethical, nonviable, destructive and banal.

Whereas we the sane find ourselves not courageous enough to do so, the maladjusted person with her or his alternative logic of meaning wholly rejects this social world.

At the same time, the logic of the maladjusted person lacks the means through which any social order would be possible at all. Reciprocity is gone, much of the external world is hostile, the very universe itself is malevolent.

For sure, the hypocrisies of our own everyday existence are obliterated by this searing insight, but so too is everything else.

Consciousness becomes an apocalyptic force which does not allow for hope, or a resourcefulness to change the world, for all things in existence are touched by the decay of a malevolent social and psychic order.

This awareness does not permit friendship, mutual concern, or basic reciprocity.

It is here, I think, that we find the beginnings of a plausible answer to the question of time spent between two people at this exceptional moment in their lives.

In place of the ‘visit’, that the pitying do-gooder pays to the ailing patient, I would like to promote the ‘encounter’ between two friends.

With the benefits and shortcomings of both psychic states in mind it becomes possible to see the encounter as one of mutual benefit and ultimately of creative power.

To take but a small example:

The fabric of his pants was of a peculiar jarring contrast that words cannot evoke. My friend was able to express this experience in guttural sound. As such, we shared an experience of the visual that would not otherwise have been possible were it not for his synesthesia.

At other moments, in evoking his beautiful alter ego, and in discussing how her potential has been sadly denied, he showed me, as well as any novel or film, the compromises to banality demanded by the everyday.

And I think that, in return, I brought him back to social reciprocity in some degree. I revealed that not all parts of the world are hostile, that fixations are only attachments to chimera, that the real takes place in the social world of give and take.

It is this give and take that rescues the visit and transforms it into an encounter.

The well-intentioned friend is not there to dispense pity and the insight of sanity, but seeks to learn from the divine poetry of this other person who sees the world differently, while at the same time inviting this person into a world of others.

This other person is no longer psychically sealed from the world of others while being subjected to the authority of its doctors, nurses, police officers, and so on. This maladjusted person subjects their insights to this world of others and in so doing, become a participant in it.

For sure, the encounter can only happen gradually, over time, and always imperfectly. But the thing which draws two friends together is not pity, but that which makes the social world beautiful.

Together, in the encounter, we gather the elements necessary to turn insight into practice – the first delicate charge of revolution – and we are both changed by the experience.

the song has replaced the album

rolling news has replaced music and

science has replaced the soul

The discovery of a ‘transsexual gene’ has been a cause for elation among many people in the fight against discrimination. The research shows that society has begun the slow crawl towards accepting those people who fall outside the rigid distinction of male and female.

While it is tempting to view such discoveries as an unambiguous victory, there are risks. If as a consequence of this research, we only accept transgendered people on the basis of biology, then this scientific mindset will lead us towards a new phase of discrimination.

Transgendered people continue to face discrimination by the law, in the workplace and in health care. As a result of such discrimination, many have been forced to conceal identities which feel so close to their sense of who they are.

It is little wonder then that members of the transgender community when scientists announced that they had uncovered a ‘transsexual gene’.

Sally Goldner, spokesperson for TransGender Victoria, says that the findings give transgendered people significant muscle in fighting discrimination

‘I think it’s pretty solid evidence…. You say, well if we exist and we need to live the way we need to live then we are entitled to relevant legal protection,’ she said.

Associate Professor Vincent Harley led the team that studied a gene closely related to the workings of the sex hormone testosterone in males. They found that this gene is longer and less active in male transsexuals and that this may limit the emergence of a masculine identity during the development of the brain.

Associate Professor Harley argues that the research constitutes a ‘biological basis to transsexualism’.

It is heartening that these researchers are working to legitimise gender diversity through their scientific endeavours. Yet we risk further discrimination if we allow the subtleties of gender to be absorbed into an inflexible scientific landscape.

The research only studied ‘transsexual’ people – people who clearly identify as a member of the opposite sex to that which they were born with.

Associate Professor Harley’s ‘biological basis’ does not apply to the more broader category of ‘transgendered’ people. This category includes all people who feel that their gender does not accord with their biological sex and express this in different ways.

As such, the research threatens to establish a whole new set of hierarchies and a whole new class of people who are excluded by society and the cool, detached eye of science from which it takes its cues.

What are the implications of the research for who feel that they were born into the wrong sex but who are found not to possess this particular gene?

And what about those transgendered members of the community who either reject gender altogether or who exist along its seams, never settling on either side?

When we focus entirely upon a ‘biological basis to transsexualism’ when mounting a case for legal and social recognition, then we exclude those people who do not conform to the dictates of genetic science. The social, legal and medical discrimination will unfortunately continue for such people.

There are good reasons for transgendered people to argue that their identity has a biological basis.

According to Sally Goldner, society can no longer deny transsexualism nor discriminate against it once it becomes a scientific reality.

‘You can’t get rid of it through silly ideas like conversion therapy and to know that obviously it is something that is part of our hardwiring, so to speak,’ she says

Unfortunately, while such scientific evidence may wield a powerful blow to those who discriminate against transsexuals, it strengthens the basis for legal discrimination against others who lack a scientific basis to their identity.

The dilemmas that we face are not exactly new. In fact, they belong to the long running and hard fought ‘Nature vs. Nurture’ debate.

In this debate, combatants take an identity of one sort or another and seek to attribute it either to the biological make up of an individual or the social environment in which this person developed.

Rather than affirming nature over nurture or vice-versa, why not make respect for difference, whatever its basis, the backbone for overcoming discrimination?

Instead of questing after scientific causes, we should interrogate the mindset which forces people to walk the high wire binary of of male and female, gay and straight, black and white and so on.

We may never find a biological basis for the desire to live in a world in which identity is a matter of free choice, but it’s worth fighting for anyway.