on the mind: the comforts of hypochondria

DISCUSSED: comfort reading, middle school narcissism, hypochondria, hypergraphia in The Midnight Disease, ex-boyfriends' mental issues, the mind/body divide

Earlier this week, some of my favorite bloggers posted lists of their top "comfort reads." Given the rate at which I buy books, three times the rate at which I read them, I rarely allow myself to revisit old books; so, I don't have "comfort books" so much as I have a "comfort genre."
That genre: psychological, psychiatric, or neurological studies of writers and the writing process. I first started reading these books when I was thirteen, and I can track changes in my personality by my choices within the genre.

At first, I read psychological profiles of "geniuses"; my favorite book at the time sought to find the traits or common life experiences of "geniuses," and because, at thirteen, I assumed my everday misery fostered or foreshadowed great intellect, I littered the pages with checkmarks and memorized all the indicators of genius that I could apply to myself: sickly, near-sighted, oldest or only child, Jewish, upper middle class, etc.

Over time, my reading choices changed. They stopped reflecting vain optimism, and, in college, began reflecting my losing battle with depression. For months at a time, I couldn't concentrate on anything outside myself; sometimes, I characterized this inability as a fear that, if I lost myself in a book, the losing would be literal. I could, however, read writers' autobiographies of depression, because they felt autobiographical to me, too, and my attention didn't have to wander back to my life, to make sure my life was still there.

If my readings first reflected narcissism, and then depression, they currently reflect hypochondria. The question while reading is, again and again, "Is that me?" But the inflection changes: from me in narcissism, is in depression, to that in hypochondria.

It might be strange to call books that inspire, or are fueled by, hypochondria "comforting." But the idea that there can be something out there which explains (and, in a sense, forgives or absolves) my lifestyle (both its invisible and visible components) is very comforting. It would be like locking a manifestation of a Platonic Idea to the Idea itself; a unified diagnosis for previously incoherent symptoms implies a deep sense of order to things, and this order could possibly extend to a cure. For me, hypochondria is not about worrying, but hoping.

But as first-year med students, and Woody Allen's doctors, can attest: hypochondria almost never leads to a correct diagnosis. Last month, I read a book about schizophrenic authors; even I couldn't take that self-diagnosis seriously. Now, I'm reading the much-blogged-about book, The Midnight Disease: The Drive to Write, Writer's Block, and the Creative Brain, by Alice W. Flaherty. The book introduced the word "hypergraphia" into the blogosphere; and, in its early chapters, The Midnight Disease lays out the medical problems that can cause hypergraphia. One such problem is temporal lobe epilepsy, experienced by Dostoevsky and Flaubert (and possibly: Tennyson, Poe, Byron, Pascal, Moliere, Dante, and Petrarch). Flaherty writes,

Although the personalities of people with temporal lobe epilepsy vary, and in most cases patients are impossible to distinguish from the rest of the world, some exhibit a cluster of five personality traits often called the Geschwind syndrome: hypergraphia; a deepened emotional life sometimes described as hyperphilosophical or hyperreligious (a squishy category ranging from attending mass twice a day to believing oneself to be the Buddha); emotional volatility, including aggressive outbursts; altered sexuality (usually decreased sexual activity); and overinclusiveness, an extreme talkativeness caused by excessive attention to detail.

Fortunately, I don't have "the Geschwind syndrome." Unfortunately, in the past I've chosen boyfriends who do. And that, like an epileptic's EEG spikes, might also "look" like something. Flaherty continues,

The Geschwind syndrome's constellation of personality traits is one of the clearest examples of a well-defined brain state causing high-level personality changes. It may also have implications for the personalities of some people without epilepsy. Those with the same set of Geschwind syndrome personality traits, but without temporal lobe epilepsy, still have altered temporal lobe activity, even though they do not have outright seizures. So there seems to be a spectrum of temporal lobe activities and of personality changes that they cause.

Obviously, each subjective experience could "look" like something, given the right brain-monitoring equipment. But, what if personality could not just be a cluster of traits, but an implicit diagnosis of brain activity? If certain brain activities are more likely to occur together, we could begin to talk about "personality" like we do illness; traits would become like symptoms, grouped and verified by diagnosis.

Under the influence of hypochondria, we turn "traits" into "symptoms." hypochondria resists postmodernism's privileging of the signifier over the signified. It insists on looking for a deep structure or (metaphorically, staying on a vertical axis) a high-level ordering. Symptoms, unlike traits, imply and call for a diagnosis; without a diagnosis or the possibility of one, symptoms are only, simply, traits.

With personality tests, we already see traits being turned into symptoms. Their popularity relies on something like hypochondria, but hypochondria divorced from illness. Personality types confirmed by neorologists, though, might have more credibility than types confirmed by Jungians. But, more importantly, the idea of personality as brain activity might help undermine the mind/body distinction and shorten the percieved distance between fate and free will. It would be impossible to say that our brain determines us, or that we determine our brain's activity, if we more simply say that we are our brain, and consciousness does not take place in a different medium. At that level, hypochondria's search for "something else," something "deeper" or "higher" than surface traits, undermines itself.

And it would answer the question, "Is that me?" with yes. It would remove "that" and the grammar required of a question. My comfort reading is about imagining and hoping for that comfort.

Posted by nchicha at February 1, 2004 09:17 AM