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Article Excerpt
I am sitting with a colleague on a platform at the front of a large university lecture hall. We are psychologists teaching in the same department, brought together on this occasion by students who want to hear how we converse. It is a Monday evening in the middle of the term, and the lecture hall is filled. We each speak briefly about our work and then begin the conversation. I notice that when I say "voice," my colleague, who studies cognition and intelligence, responds by saying "the notion of voice" or "the metaphor of voice." I move my chair away from his to signal the gap that has opened between us. The next morning, in class, my students want to talk about what happened. I write the word 'voice' on the blackboard, the sound sibilant in the still, morning air. One after another the students respond: "The notion of voice, the metaphor of voice." We talk about what happens when the body drops out of the conversation.
I am sitting with Sundi at a small table in an empty classroom of her public school. She is eleven, in the sixth grade, and a member of the writing and theater club that meets on Tuesday afternoons, part of a three-year project designed to strengthen healthy resistance and courage in girls. It is spring in the second year of the project, and I am interviewing Sundi. I place a photograph on the table in front of her and ask her to tell a story about what is happening. She stares into the face of the girl in the picture and says the girl has just had a fight with her friend--she is angry and sad. "Where is the anger?" I ask. Sundi replies: "In the pit of her stomach and in her throat." And the sadness? "The sadness is in her heart."
At age nine, Judy says that she knows how her friend will feel because "I just feel it in my mind." When she sees someone walking away from her best friend, leaving her alone "just talking into space," she does not infer how her friend will feel or put herself in her friend's place. Instead, she says, "You can just kind of see them walking away or getting sad or something, but you can't tell right then and there she's going to get hurt or anything--but you just feel it. It's hard to explain." There is little language for this emotional connectedness and the knowing to which it gives rise.
By the age of thirteen, however, Judy has learned that knowing and feeling are "two different things." Striving to reconcile this distinction with her experience of knowing through feeling, she divides her mind, which she locates in her gut, from her brain, which is in her head:
The knowing sort of comes from the brain, like your intelligence part. Like your smartness, your brightness, your education part. And your feeling is something that it doesn't matter if you have an education or not. It's just like something that you can't put into words, that you can't really explain, but it's not, I don't know, it's just like a deeper sort of knowing than intelligence knowing.
In following her disclaimer ("I don't know") by speaking of "a deeper sort of knowing," Judy elaborates a split, not between mind and body but between an embodied mind and a disembodied brain:
The mind sort of has your real thoughts and a brain sort of has the Intelligence ... what you learn in school ... but your mind is sort of associated with your heart and your soul and your internal feeling and your real feelings.
Separating her mind--her real thoughts and feelings--from her intelligence and her education, she offers an observation about development: "Children," she says, "have the most mind, but they are starting to lose it actually."
I begin with Judy to illustrate the findings of a five-year study of development involving girls between the ages of seven and eighteen. Prior to this research, adolescent girls, in the words of the 1980 Handbook of Adolescent Psychology, had "simply not been much studied." By listening to girls narrate their experiences in coming of age--first in yearly interviews and then in the more intensive writing and theater clubs that met weekly or in week-long sessions over a period of three years--my colleagues and I came to see girls as messengers, like canaries in a mine. (1) They alerted us to a process of initiation that required them to separate their minds from their bodies, their thoughts from their emotions, themselves from their relationships. The initiation entailed a paradoxical sacrifice of relationship for the sake of having 'relationships,' a sacrifice that was at once culturally sanctioned and psychologically incoherent. The resistance of Judy and other girls to making this sacrifice led me to zero in on the question: what happens when the mind leaves the body and returns?
In The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness, Antonio Damasio describes core consciousness, or a core sense of self, as our ability to register our experience from moment to moment, like a film running continually inside us, as well as our awareness of watching the film, which extends the sense of self through time and history, leading to memory and identity. He contrasts the core self, grounded in the body and in emotion, with what he calls "the autobiographical self," the self that is wedded to a story about itself. I have found this distinction helpful in thinking about dissociation: how we can know and also not know what we know; how it is possible for our experience not to become part of our story.
For example, in the years between nine and thirteen, Judy begins to tell a story about herself that is at odds with what she knows within herself to be true. At the age of ten, she says with pride, "I hardly ever get into fights with my friends because usually we like the exact same things and we do the exact same things." Yet she knows that disagreement is a natural if upsetting part of relationships, integral to the process of rupture and repair. In the absence of the ability to address the inevitable breaks in connection, relationships lose...
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