Response Paper 3

In Preparation of Session 4
Denis Telofy Drescher
May 5, 2014
estion 1
In what ways does Hustvedts memoir complicate and challenge the Carte-
sian notion of the self (as solitary, unied, rational, conscious etc.)?
Her book sketches a model of the self that is the eect of structures somewhere or at
many places in the brain. As a result, she, or the research she cites, shows that the self
may well be formed only in relation to others (e.g., the mother (Hustvedt 9193), a doll,
or a therapist (121124)) and through the use of language, and can thus probably not
come into being in solitary isolation. It can also so happen that multiple selves dwell
in one body as in the case of dissociative identity disorder, which is beer known as
multiple personality disorder (45), or that the self can become fragmented such that
the part of the self that can express itself through language does not identify with the
other fragments and oen does not control them; the self, hence, is oen not unied if
that notion is even meaningful. Finally, most of our decisions are made intuitively and
even the rational basis for seemingly rational decisions has been called into question
(86).
estion 2
What were your problems with the text? What passages, ideas or concepts
did you nd unclear, unconvincing or otherwise problematic?
For the rst part of the book, this is hard to answer for me. I found it highly interest-
ing and engaging. Even her focus on illnesses that may be related to her own didnt feel
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narrow. is style disintegrated into what I just perceived as a series of personal rumi-
nations toward to end of the book, although even that was oen broken by interesting
explanations, but that pertains to next weeks response paper.
If I had to look for something to nd lacking, it may be comments on the interplay
between consciousness and culture, but she does mention various such relations at
dierent points, and that the topic was not in the focus was probably also by choice.
Aer all, she wrote it as a memoir, and she didnt make rst-hand experiences with
personal or systemic discrimination or with criminalization.
One reason why my comments are rather broad is that she did not structure her text
into chapters. e resulting text is too long and diverse to comment on except in very
general terms, and yet too closely linked to easily break it into partsat least for me
aer a single reading.
estion 3
What did you nd interesting about the text? What aspects of the text
would you like to know more about?
I had always avoided memoirs, so I approached it with some reluctance. As I men-
tioned above, however, I enjoyed the majority of the book and certainly the rst half,
which is of relevance here. It was highly informative and her voice also sounded greatly
knowledgeable to me, although this assessment would be more meaningful coming
from someone with any formal education in the eld. One criticism that Ive read on-
line is that it reads more like an advanced college term paper (Smith) than a memoir.
at, paired with her writerly expertise, was probably what I enjoyed about it.
e I remember exercise (Hustvedt 62) didnt reveal anything for me that I would not
otherwise have been able to remember, but I did notice a curious gap in my (visual)
memory, which my I remember sentences circumscribed. I havent visited the (physical)
spot in over ten years, and Im planning to do so as soon as I have the time. However,
starting a sentence without knowing what I want to write was a rather intimidating
experience.
Her paragraphs on eye contact were also fascinating to me as someone who only
started to (supercially) understand the practice from reading Wikipedia when he was
already a teenager. (Hustvedt 91)
Works Cited
Hustvedt, S. e Shaking Woman or A History of My Nerves. Henry Holt and Company,
2010. Web.
Smith, S.L. Big on history, very short on her own story. (2009). Web.
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