A Woman Looking at Men Looking at Women: Essays on Art, Sex, and the Mind

by Siri Hustvedt

  371. Peter Burkhard et al., “Hypnotic Suggestibility and Adult Attachment,” Contemporary Hypnosis and Integrative Therapy 28, no. 3 (2011): 171–86.

  372. Siri Hustvedt, “I Wept for Four Years and When I Stopped I Was Blind,” Clinical Neurophysiology 44 (2014): 305–13.

  373. Harré, “The Rediscovery of the Human Mind,” 45.

  374. Polanyi, 290.

  375. See Yuval Nir and Giulio Tononi, “Dreaming and the Brain: From Phenomenology to Neurophysiology,” Trends in Cognitive Science 14, no. 2 (2010): 88.

  376. Siri Hustvedt, “Three Emotional Stories,” in Living, Thinking, Looking (New York: Picador, 2012), 175–95.

  377. William James, Pragmatism in William James: Writings 1902–1910, ed. Bruce Kuklick (New York: The Library of America, 1987), 489–92.

  378. John Bowlby, quoted in Frank van der Horst and René van Leer, “The Ontogeny of an Idea: John Bowlby and Contemporaries on Mother-Child Separation,” in History of Psychology 13, no. 1 (2010): 28.

  379. Blaise Pascal, Pensées, trans. A. J. Krailsheimer (London: Penguin, 1995), 130.

  380. Simone Weil, First and Last Notebooks, trans. Richard Rees (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970), 207.

  III

  WHAT ARE WE?

  LECTURES ON THE HUMAN CONDITION

  Borderlands: First, Second, and Third Person Adventures in Crossing Disciplines

  1. Georges Perec, Life a User’s Manual, trans. David Bellos (Boston: David Godine, 1987), 126.

  2. David Chalmers, “The First Person and the Third Person Views,” consc.net/notes/first-third.html.

  3. Georg Northoff and Alexander Heinzel, “The Self in Philosophy, Neuroscience and Psychiatry: An Epistemic Approach,” in The Self in Neuroscience and Psychiatry, ed. Tilo Kircher and Anthony David (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 52–53.

  4. Jürgen Habermas, Theory and Practice, trans. John Viertel (Boston: Beacon Press, 1973), 265.

  5. Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, trans. Constance Borde and Sheila Malovany (New York: Vintage, 2011), 482.

  6. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, ed. Vasilis Politis (Rutland, VT: Everyman, 1993), 317.

  7. Wilhelm von Humboldt, quoted in Tse Wan Kwan, “Towards a Phenomenology of Pronouns,” International Journal for Philosophical Studies 15, no. 2 (2007): 258.

  8. Martin Buber, “The Word That Is Spoken,” in Martin Buber on Psychology and Psychotherapy: Essays, Letters, and Dialogues, ed. Judith Buber Agassi (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1999), 150.

  9. Émile Benveniste, Problems in General Linguistics, trans. Elizabeth Meek (Miami, OH: Miami University Press, 1971), 224–25.

  10. Ibid., 208.

  11. Ibid., 224–25.

  12. Lynda Birke, Feminism and the Biological Body (Edinbourgh: Edinbourgh University Press, 1999), 137.

  13. Judith Butler, Giving an Account of Oneself (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005), 7–8.

  14. Daniel Dennett, Consciousness Explained (Boston: Little Brown & Co., 1991), 411.

  15. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1962), 352.

  16. See Maurizio Sierra and G. E. Berrios, “Depersonalization: Neurobiological Perspectives,” Biological Psychiatry 44, no. 9 (1998): 898–908. See also Daphne Simeon et al., “Feeling Unreal: A PET study of Depersonalization Disorder,” American Journal of Psychiatry 157 (2000): 1782–88; Mary L. Phillips et al., “Despersonalization Disorder: Thinking Without Feeling,” Psychiatry Research 108, no. 3 (2001): 145–60; and D. J. Stein and D. Simeon, “Cognitive-Affective Neuroscience of Depersonalization,” CNS Spectrums 14, no. 9 (2009): 467–71.

  17. Maurizio Sierra et al., “Separating Depersonalization and Derealization: The Relevance of the Lesion Method,” Journal of Neurology, Neurosurgery, and Psychiatry 72 (2002): 530–32.

  18. Pierre Janet, The Major Symptoms of Hysteria: Fifteen Lectures Given in the Medical School of Harvard University (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1907), 336.

  19. Antonie van Leeuwenhoek, quoted in Laura J. Snyder, Eye of the Beholder: Johannes Vermeer, Antoni van Leeuwenhoek, and the Reinvention of Seeing (New York: Norton, 2015),

  20. Jaak Panksepp et al., “The Philosophical Implications of Affective Neuroscience,” Journal of Consciousness Studies 19, nos. 3–4 (2012): 8.

  21. Jaak Panksepp, Affective Neuroscience: The Foundations of Animal and Human Emotions (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 39.

  22. Joseph LeDoux, Synaptic Self: How Our Brains Become Who We Are (New York: Penguin, 2003), 322.

  23. Antonio Damasio, Self Comes to Mind (New York: Pantheon, 2010), 10.

  24. See Stein Bråten, ed., Intersubjective Communication and Emotion in Early Ontogeny (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).

  25. Vittorio Gallese, “The Roots of Empathy: The Shared Manifold and the Neural Basis of Intersubjectivity,” Psychopathology 36 (2003): 171–80.

  26. Louis A. Sass, “Self-Disturbance in Schizophrenia: Hyperreflexivity and Diminished Self-Affection,” in The Self in Neuroscience and Psychiatry, 250.

  27. Ibid., 260.

  28. Antonin Artaud, Selected Writings, trans. Helen Weaver (New York: Ferrar, Straus and Giroux, 1976), 295.

  29. J. H. Ebisch et al., “Out of Touch with Reality? Social Perception in First-Episode Schizophrenia,” Social Cognitive Neuroscience (2012), advance copy, doi:10.1093/scan/nss012.

  30. Sass, 255.

  31. David B. Morris, “Placebo, Pain, and Belief,” in The Placebo Effect: An Interdisciplinary Exploration, ed. Anne Harrington (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 189.

  32. Jean-Marc Gaspard, quoted in Harlan Lane, The Wild Boy of Aveyron (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979), 180.

  33. Claudia Lieberworth et al., “Social Isolation Impairs Adult Neurogenesis in the Limbic System and Alters Behaviors in Female Prairie Voles,” Hormones and Behavior 62 (2012): 357–66.

  34. George Eliot, Middlemarch (London: Penguin Classics, 1994), 85.

  35. George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 156.

  36. George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Philosophy in the Flesh (New York: Basic Books, 1999), 17.

  37. Lina Bolzoni, The Gallery of Memory: Literary and Iconographic Models in the Age of the Printing Press, trans. Jeremy Parzen (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001), 240.

  38. Zenon Pylyshyn, “Cognition and Computation: Issues in the Foundations of Cognitive Science,” The Behavorial and Brain Sciences 3 (1980): 111.

  39. Jaak Panksepp, “Affective Consciousness and the Instinctual Motor System: The Neural Sources of Sadness and Joy,” in The Cauldron of Consciousness: Motivation, Affect and Self-Organization, ed. Ralph D. Ellis and Natika Newton (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2000), 31.

  40. Burton Melnick, “Cold Hard World/Warm Soft Mommy: Gender and Metaphors of Hardness, Softness, Coldness and Warmth.” PsyArt 3, http://www.clas.ufl.edu/ipsa/journal1999_melnick01.shtml.

  41. Jessica Benjamin, Like Subjects, Love Objects: Essays on Recognition and Sexual Difference (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), 163.

  42. Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1966).

  43. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 189.

  Becoming Others

  1. Siri Hustvedt, The Shaking Woman or A History of My Nerves (New York: Picador, 2009), 118.

  2. William James, Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975), 24.

  3. Siri Hustvedt, What I Loved (New York: Picador, 2003), 91.

  4. G. W. F. Hegel, The Phenomenology of Mind, trans. J. B. Baillie, 2nd ed. (London: Allen and Unwin, 1949), 232.

  5. See Dan Zahavi, “Minimal Self and Narrative Self,” in The Embodied Self: Dimensions, Coherence and Disorders, ed. Thomas Fuchs, Heribert C. Sattel, and Peter Henningsen
(Stuttgart: Stattauer, 2010), 3–11.

  6. Andrew N. Meltzoff and M. Keith Moore, “Imitation of Facial and Manual Gestures by Human Neonates,” Science 198 (1977): 75–78. See also their paper “Imitation in Newborn Infants: Exploring the Range of Gestures Imitated and the Underlying Mechanisms,” Developmental Psychology 25, no. 6 (1989): 954–62.

  7. For a discussion of body schema, see Shaun Gallagher, How the Body Shapes the Mind (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2005), 17–25.

  8. Joyce W. Sparling, Julia Van Tol, and Nancy C. Chescheir, “Fetal and Neonatal Hand Movement,” Physical Therapy 79, no. 1 (2008): 24–39.

  9. Jane M. Lymer, “Merleau-Ponty and the Affective Maternal-Foetal Relation,” Parrhesia: A Journal of Critical Philosophy, no. 13 (2011): 123–43.

  10. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “The Philosopher and His Shadow,” in Signs, trans. Richard C. McCleary (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1965), 159–81.

  11. Vittorio Gallese, “Embodied Simulation Theory and Intersubjectivity,” Reti, Saperi, Linguaggi anno 4, no. 2 (2012): 57–64.

  12. Merleau-Ponty, “The Philosopher and His Shadow,” 181.

  13. Daniel Stern, The Interpersonal World of the Infant (New York: Basic Books, 2000), 51.

  14. Simon Baron-Cohen, “Is There a Normal Phase of Synaesthesia in Development?” Psyche (1996): 2–27, http://psyche.cs.monash.edu.au/v2/psyche-2-27-baron_cohen.html.

  15. Philippe Rochat, “What Is It Like to Be a Newborn?,” in The Oxford Handbook of the Self, ed. Shaun Gallagher (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 57–79.

  16. Jacques Lacan, “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the I Function,” in Ecrits, trans. Bruce Fink (New York: Norton, 2006), 75–81.

  17. D. W. Winnicott, “Mirror Role of Mother and Family in Child Development,” in Playing and Reality (London and New York: Routledge, 1982), 111.

  18. Merleau-Ponty cites Bühler in “The Child’s Relation to Others,” in The Primacy of Perception, trans. William Cobb (Chicago: Northwestern University Press, 1964), 148. See also Peter Brugger, “Reflective Mirrors: Perspective Taking in Autoscopic Phenomenon,” Cognitive Neuropsychiatry 7 (2002): 188.

  19. See Siri Hustvedt, “Three Emotional Stories,” in Living, Thinking, Looking (New York: Picador, 2012), 175–95.

  20. D. W. Winnicott, “The Location of Cultural Experience,” in Playing and Reality, 95–103.

  21. Julia Kristeva, “Revolution in Poetic Language,” in The Kristeva Reader, ed. Toril Moi (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 89–136.

  22. Susanne Langer, Feeling and Form: A Theory of Art (New York: Scribners, 1953), 241.

  23. Siri Hustvedt, “Three Emotional Stories,” 175–95

  24. See Mbemba Jabbi, Jojanneke Bastiaansen, and Christian Keysers, “A Common Anterior Insula Representation of Disgust Observation, Experience and Imagination Shows Divergent Functional Connectivity Pathways,” PLOS ONE 3 (August 2008): e2939, doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0002939.

  25. Siri Hustvedt, “The Man with the Red Crayon,” in Mysteries of the Rectangle: Essays on Painting (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2005), 31.

  26. Emily Dickinson, The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson, no. 1576, lines 5–8, ed. Thomas H. Johnson (Boston: Little Brown & Co., 1951), 654.

  27. See Zoltán Kövecses, Metaphor and Emotion: Language, Culture and Body in Human Feeling (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).

  28. M. M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, ed. Michael Holquist, trans. Caryl Emerson (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1992), 294.

  29. See Keisuke Suzuki, Sarah N. Garfinkel, Hugo D. Critchley, and Anil K. Seth, “Multisensory Integration Across Exteroceptive and Interoceptive Domains Modulates in Self-Experience in Rubber Hand Illusion,” Neuropsychologia, 51 (2013): 2909–17. See also Ana Tajadura-Jiménez and Manos Tsakiris, “Balancing the ‘Inner’ and the ‘Outer’ Self: Interoceptive Sensitivity Modulates Self-Other Boundaries,” Journal of Experimental Psychology 143, no. 2 (2014): 736–44.

  30. Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. Leon Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982).

  31. See Lara Maister, Michael J. Bannisy, and Manos Tsakiris, “Mirror-Touch Synaesthesia Changes Representations of Self-Identity,” Neuropsychologia 51 (2013): 802–8. See also Michael J. Bannisy and Jamie Ward, “Mirror-Touch Synaesthesia Is Linked with Empathy,” Nature Neuroscience 10 (2007): 815–16.

  32. Marina Christine Cioffi, James W. Moore, and Michael J. Bannisy, “What Can Mirror-Touch Synaesthesia Tell Us About the Sense of Agency?” Frontiers in Human Neuroscience 8 (2014): 256, doi:10.3389/fnhum.201400256.

  33. Louis Sass, “Self-Disturbance in Schizophrenia: Hyperreflexivity and Diminished Self Affection,” in The Self in Neuroscience and Psychiatry, ed. Tilo Kircher and Anthony David (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 244.

  34. Patient of Angelo Hesnard, quoted in “Self and Schizophrenia: a Phenomenological Perspective,” Josef Parnas in The Self in Neuroscience and Psychiatry, (Cambridge University Press), 217.

  35. Antonin Artaud, “Excerpts from Notebooks and Private Papers (1931–32),” in Selected Writings, ed. Susan Sontag, trans. Helen Weaver (New York: Ferrar, Straus and Giroux, 1976), 195.

  36. Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time, vol. 3, trans. C. K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, rev. by D. J. Martin (New York: Modern Library, 1992), 86.

  Why One Story and Not Another?

  1. Siri Hustvedt, The Shaking Woman or A History of My Nerves (New York: Henry Holt, 2009).

  2. Margaret Cavendish, Observations upon Experimental Philosophy, ed. Eileen O’Neill (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 111.

  3. See Mikel Dufrenne, The Phenomenology of Aesthetic Experience, trans. Edward Casey (Evanston, IL: Norwestern University Press, 1973), 171.

  4. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (London: The Folio Society, 2012), 16.

  5. Unknown author of Ad Herrennium, quoted in Frances Yates, The Art of Memory (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1966), 26.

  6. “Thus, a memory system that simply stored rote records of what happened in the past would not be well suited to simulating future events, which will probably share some similarities with past events while differing in other respects.” Daniel Schacter and Donna Rose Addis, “The Cognitive Neuroscience of Constructive Memory: Remembering the Past and Imagining the Future,” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, Biological Sciences 207 (2007): 776.

  7. Siri Hustvedt, The Summer Without Men (New York: Picador, 2011), 1.

  8. Virginia Woolf, The Death of the Moth, and Other Essays (San Diego: Harcourt Brace & Co, 1970), 9.

  9. Robert Louis Stevenson, quoted in Graham Balfour, The Life of Robert Louis Stevenson (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1911), 19.

  10. Edith Wharton, House of Mirth (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1911), 10.

  11. Siri Hustvedt, “Three Emotional Stories,” in Living, Thinking, Looking, 175–95.

  12. Brewster Ghiselin, The Creative Process: Reflections on Invention in the Arts and Sciences (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1954), 15–16.

  13. Ernst Kris, Psychoanalytic Explorations in Art (New York: International Universities Press, 1952).

  14. Susanne Langer, Philosophy in a New Key: A Study in the Symbolism of Reason, Rite, and Art (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979), 228.

  15. Céleste Albaret, Monsieur Proust, trans. Barbara Bray (New York: New York Review of Books, 2003), 183.

  16. Ian McEwen, “Hello, Would You Like a Free Book?” The Guardian, September 20, 2005.

  17. Siri Hustvedt, The Summer Without Men, 145–46.

  18. Chris Jackson, “All the Sad Young Literary Women,” The Atlantic, August 20, 2010, Ta-Nehisi Coates, www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2010/08/all-the-sad-young-literary-women/61821.

  19. Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own (New York: The Fountain Press, 1929), 62.

  20. Hélène Cixous, “The
Laugh of the Medusa,” trans. Keith Cohen and Paula Cohen, Signs 1:4, 875–93.

  21. Siri Hustvedt, “Freud’s Playground,” in Living, Thinking, Looking, 196–222.

  22. Stephen Jay Gould, “More Things in Heaven and Earth,” in Alas Poor Darwin, ed. Hillary Rose and Steven Rose (New York: Harmony Books, 2000), 113–14.

  23. Brian Boyd, On the Origin of Stories: Evolution, Cognition, and Fiction (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), 195.

  24. Ibid., 196.

  25. See Simon Baron-Cohen, “The Extreme Male Brain Theory of Autism,” Trends in Cognitive Sciences 6, no. 6 (2002): 248–54. The paper is fascinating to read because there isn’t much concrete evidence of any kind for his views in it. Baron-Cohen collects a list of gender stereotypes as innate features of sex, many of which have been questioned, and then leaps to conclude that autism, in which empathy is supposedly missing, is an example of the extreme male brain that makes its appearance in both sexes. There are multiple theories, not only about the possible causes of autism, but about what its diverse symptoms actually mean. Even the common idea that autistic persons can’t understand other people’s minds has been questioned. See Helen Tager-Flushberg, “Evaluating the Theory-of-Mind Hypothesis of Autism,” Association for Psychological Science 16, no. 6 (2007): 311–15.

  26. A huge study on autism in Sweden concluded that although genetic heritability was implicated in the illness, environmental factors also play a significant role. Sven Sandin et al., “The Familial Risk of Autism,” The Journal of the American Medical Association 311, no. 17 (2014): 1770–77. For a paper on what is known and much that is unknown about genes and autism, see R. Muhle, S. V. Trentecosta, and I. Rapin, “The Genetics of Autism,” Pediatrics 113, no. 5 (2004): 472–86. For a more recent study, see Paul El-Fishawy and Mathew W. State, “The Genetics of Autism: Key Issues, Recent Findings and Clinical Applications,” The Psychiatric Clinics of North America 33, no. 1 (2010): 83–105. For a look at the role of rhetoric in studies on autism, see Jordynn Jack and Gregory Applebaum’s discussion in “ ‘This Is Your Brain on Rhetoric’: Research Directions for Neurorhetorics,” in Neurorhetorics, ed. Jordynn Jack (Milton Park, Abingon: Routledge, 2013), 18–23.