Phantom, Phantasm Fragments:
Oliver Sachs on phantom limbs:
"All amputees, and all who work with them, know that a phantom limb is essential if the artificial limb is to be used. Dr. Michael Kremer writes: 'Its value to the amputee is enormous. I am quite certain that no amputee with an artificial lower limb can walk on it satisfactorily until the body-image, in other words the phantom, is incorporated into it.'
Thus the disappearance of a phantom may be disastrous, and its recovery, its re-animation, a matter of urgency.
and later a description from a patient: " There's this thing, this ghost-foot, which sometimes hurts like hell - and the toes curl up, or go into spasm. This is worst at night, or with the prosthesis off, or when I'm not doing anything. It goes away, when I strap the prosthesis on and walk. I still feel the leg then, vividly, but it's a good phantom, different - it animates the prosthesis, and allows me to walk."
With this patient, with all patients, is not the use all-important, in dispelling a 'bad' (or passive, or pathological) phantom, if it exists; and in keeping the 'good' phantom - that is, the persisting personal limb-memory or limb-image - alive, active, and well, as they need?"
my extrapolation: Amputation, or rupture is the only way to experience the mental and physical maps, or zones, or patterns that underpin not only our bodies, but our cultural reality. The phantom limbs of amputees have their correlative in culture, we live with phantoms in this sense, some 'hurt like hell' (from above statement from an amputee describing his phantom foot) and others allow us to function, 'to walk, explore, and breath' in our cultural landscape. Sometimes, as in the above example, the same phantom both "hurts like hell," and in a different situation, allows us to walk. We all have our 'bad' phantoms, and certainly our collective culture functions with both severely 'bad' phantansmic entities (fundamentalist ideologies, for example.) Realizing this, getting to know your phantom limbs, understanding the natures of these entities that shadow all of our movements is necessary if you want to eliminate those entities that "hurt like hell." The only way to be healthy is to learn to "throw out the baby, and confront the contents of the cultural bathwater," to paraphrase Slavoj Zizek. Or put another way, amputation or rupture is sometimes the best tool we have to understand ourselves and the world.
"All amputees, and all who work with them, know that a phantom limb is essential if the artificial limb is to be used. Dr. Michael Kremer writes: 'Its value to the amputee is enormous. I am quite certain that no amputee with an artificial lower limb can walk on it satisfactorily until the body-image, in other words the phantom, is incorporated into it.'
Thus the disappearance of a phantom may be disastrous, and its recovery, its re-animation, a matter of urgency.
and later a description from a patient: " There's this thing, this ghost-foot, which sometimes hurts like hell - and the toes curl up, or go into spasm. This is worst at night, or with the prosthesis off, or when I'm not doing anything. It goes away, when I strap the prosthesis on and walk. I still feel the leg then, vividly, but it's a good phantom, different - it animates the prosthesis, and allows me to walk."
With this patient, with all patients, is not the use all-important, in dispelling a 'bad' (or passive, or pathological) phantom, if it exists; and in keeping the 'good' phantom - that is, the persisting personal limb-memory or limb-image - alive, active, and well, as they need?"
my extrapolation: Amputation, or rupture is the only way to experience the mental and physical maps, or zones, or patterns that underpin not only our bodies, but our cultural reality. The phantom limbs of amputees have their correlative in culture, we live with phantoms in this sense, some 'hurt like hell' (from above statement from an amputee describing his phantom foot) and others allow us to function, 'to walk, explore, and breath' in our cultural landscape. Sometimes, as in the above example, the same phantom both "hurts like hell," and in a different situation, allows us to walk. We all have our 'bad' phantoms, and certainly our collective culture functions with both severely 'bad' phantansmic entities (fundamentalist ideologies, for example.) Realizing this, getting to know your phantom limbs, understanding the natures of these entities that shadow all of our movements is necessary if you want to eliminate those entities that "hurt like hell." The only way to be healthy is to learn to "throw out the baby, and confront the contents of the cultural bathwater," to paraphrase Slavoj Zizek. Or put another way, amputation or rupture is sometimes the best tool we have to understand ourselves and the world.
posted by Jon at 2:24 PM
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