Indeterminacy and Resentment

Christian Perring

Keywords: explanation, forgiveness, indeterminacy, memoir

central theme in Thompsons piece is the impossibility of completely capturing the Truth of What Really Happened in writing about the past. To put this is less dramatic terms, we can never exhaust all the aspects of what happened in telling a story about the past, or even in collecting all our stories together. There are the different perspectives of the participants, the emotions that each experienced, their moral responsibility for their actions, the perspectives of people who were not present but who would have been interested, the counterfactuals of what might have happened if events had turned out different or if people had acted differently. With memory, even with sensory recall, there are many ways we can remember events even while remaining true to the facts of what happened. Once we bring in the complexities of narrative and genre to our understanding of how we retell our stories of what happened in the past, it is clear that there are unlimited ways to describe the past, even when we are being true to the facts. If we allow the possibility of misremembering the past, too, which is very likely given the notorious fallibility of memory, we increase the ways of telling stories about what happened. With time, our perspectives change, and our understanding of other people and concepts change, so our memories will alter. The

ways we recall and tell stories about the past will also change. Although some accounts will be richer and more detailed than others, and some will be more accurate than others, there is no reason to think that any single account of the past is the definitive correct version. Thompsons main point in his own reflection is about the constant retelling of the past that he and probably most people engage in, in both intentional and subintentional ways. Very few of us write a whole autobiography, but many people go over the past to establish what happened or to make sense of it all, either in conversations with friends and family members, or in talking about ones past with a psychotherapist. His preoccupation with finding some final truth about the past is unusual, because, as he describes it, nobody would reasonably think that there must be some absolute version that gets it all right. His concern is easier to understand if we see his quest as it is described in the description of his memoir Stella, as the search for an explanation of why his mother went through a radical personality change when he was young. This is the central mystery, and it falls in with a very well-known kind of narrative, the clinical tale, best exemplified not by modern memoirs but rather by detailed case studies. Freuds tales are the best examples, with his examinations of the lives of patients such as Anna O., Dora, Little Hans, the Rat Man, and the Wolf Man. Here the search for an explanation of troubling symptoms resembles a whodunit detective story, as the nar-

2010 by The Johns Hopkins University Press

264 PPP / Vol. 17, No. 3 / September 2010

rator explains how he searched for clues, interpreted them, dug deeper, and eventually found the answer, which was often a traumatic experience or possibly a traumatic fantasy. In these stories, the central goal is the discovery of the cause of all the problems, and it makes little difference how it is described. When we see Thompsons search as one for a particular kind of narrative, namely, the correct explanation of his mothers mental illness and of his own emotional difficulties, then a different set of issues arises, exemplified by the debates over the status of psychoanalysis as either a scientific theory or a hermeneutic theory. Psychoanalysis has received limited empirical confirmation, and some of its defenders have argued that it is not the kind of theory that is subject to scientific verification, because it is primarily a mode of telling a life. Now psychiatry prefers other sorts of explanations, which are more paradigmatically scientific in nature, involving neuroscience, genetics, and cognitive science. Yet Thompsons reflection on his own experience of memoir writing highlights some of the difficulties of combining scientific explanation with understanding one persons experience. One of the central characteristics of current psychiatry is the paucity of its explanatory power. We do not have well-confirmed general theories of the causes of most mental illnesses. When it comes to individual patients, even if we had good theories, it is not feasible or indeed impossible to discover the causes of their problems: generally, we cannot do tests on the brains of people who have died or examine their genetics, and we often are unable to uncover the truth about past traumas. When we have several candidate explanations for a persons mental illness, at different levels of explanationsocial, family, the individual history, neuroscientific, and geneticwe do not know how to combine them. Thus, one of the central challenges in telling the story of a person whose life has been profoundly affected by mental illness is not selecting from one of the infinite possible narratives that describe their life, but rather in finding any satisfactory explanation of what happened. The emotional issue this generates is how to live with uncertainty, especially when there are moral questions of attributing responsibility. Thompsons mothers behavior hurt him. In his piece, he makes a very general point about a deep insubstantiality

at the core of experience (2010, 249), but even if he is right about this, it is not something that normally causes people to lose much sleep. His own experience of writing a memoir named after his mother was a coming to a resolution about his relations with her in a state of uncertainty. He mentions Jack Kornfields aphorism forgiveness means giving up all hope of a better past as being helpful to him and this is an indication of the moral issues that are key here. In coming to resolution and letting go of the need to continually rewrite his memoir, he had to settle on a moral attitude, in this case one of forgiveness. Stella hurt him, and even after devoting years of his life to thinking and writing about the past, Thompson could not settle on what he felt was the definitive narrative. His very general concerns about narrative do not explain his reaction to writing his memoir, and I suggest that a better explanation stems from his uncertainty whether to blame or excuse her for what she did. He wants to understand what motives she had, whether she was autonomous in her decisions, and how her actions when she was afflicted by mental illness were related to her attitudes toward him when she was free of mental illness. The passage that Thompson quotes is about his mother being spiteful to him when he didnt do well in an exam, so it is about his own vulnerability, his disappointment and anger that she was not more nurturing. But if her actions were caused by her illness, then he is less entitled to his resentment. For several reasons, Thompson rewrites the passage about the event many times; and the indeterminacy of what happened is heightened by his uncertainty about his mothers personality change and whether to understand that change as an illness. In the end, he realized he did not have enough information to settle this question, and he found resolution in his attitude of forgiveness. Thompsons memoir writing is an extreme instance of a common experience: we do not know what moral stance to take toward hurtful or negligent family members with mental illnesses, and this freezes us. His own tentative resolution, in his attitude of forgiveness, can serve as a guide to others.

References
Thompson, J. (2010) Leaving the boy in the room. Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology 17, no. 3:247250.