The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat: Introduction to Part Four

What is this ‘warm sense' of which Luria speaks? It is clearly the expression of something emotional and personal—which would not be possible if the defectives did not ‘respond’, did not themselves possess very real sensibilities, emotional and personal potentials, whatever their (intellectual) defects.

What awaits our study is equally pleasing to the heart and mind, and, as such, especially incites the impulse to Luria’s ‘romantic science’.

What is this quality of mind, this disposition, which characterises the simple, and gives them their poignant innocence, transparency, completeness and dignity—a quality so distinctive we must speak of the ‘world’ of the simple (as we speak of the ‘world’ of the child or the savage)?

What is this quality of mind, this disposition, which characterises the simple, and gives them their poignant innocence, transparency, completeness and dignity—a quality so distinctive we must speak of the ‘world’ of the simple (as we speak of the ‘world’ of the child or the savage)?

If we are to use a single word here, it would have to be ‘concreteness’—their world is vivid, intense, detailed, yet simple, precisely because it is concrete: neither complicated, diluted, nor unified, by abstraction.

By a sort of inversion, or subversion, of the natural order of things, concreteness is often seen by neurologists as a wretched thing, beneath consideration, incoherent, regressed.

By a sort of inversion, or subversion, of the natural order of things, concreteness is often seen by neurologists as a wretched thing, beneath consideration, incoherent, regressed.

If a man loses the ‘abstract-categorical attitude’ (Goldstein), or ‘propositional thought’ (Hughlings Jackson), what remains is subhuman, of no moment or interest.

I call this an inversion because the concrete is elemental—it is what makes reality ‘real’, alive, personal and meaningful.

Much easier to comprehend, and altogether more natural, is the idea of the preservation of the concrete in brain damage—not regression to it, but preservation of it, so that the essential personality and identity and humanity, the being of the hurt creature, is preserved.

This is what we see in Zazetsky—‘the man with a shattered world’—he remains a man, quintessentially a man, with all the moral weight and rich imagination of a man, despite the devastation of his abstract and propositional powers.

We find ourselves entering a realm of fascination and paradox, all of which centres on the ambiguity of the ‘concrete’.

Enhanced powers of concrete imagery and memory, Nature’s compensation for defectiveness in the conceptual and abstract, can tend in quite opposite directions: towards an obsessive preoccupation with particulars, the development of an eidetic imagery and memory, and the mentality of the Performer or 'whiz kid'...

Enhanced powers of concrete imagery and memory, Nature’s compensation for defectiveness in the conceptual and abstract, can tend in quite opposite directions: towards an obsessive preoccupation with particulars, the development of an eidetic imagery and memory, and the mentality of the Performer or 'whiz kid’...

The concrete, equally, may become a vehicle of mystery, beauty and depth, a path into the emotions, the imagination, the spirit—fully as much as any abstract conception (perhaps indeed more, as Gershom Scholem (1965) has argued in his contrasts of the conceptual and the symbolic, or Jerome Bruner (1984) in his contrast of the ‘paradigmatic’ and the ‘narrative’).

The concrete is readily imbued with feeling and meaning—more readily, perhaps, than any abstract conception.

It readily moves into the aesthetic, the dramatic, the comic, the symbolic, the whole wide deep world of art and spirit.

Conceptually, then, mental defectives may be cripples—but in their powers of concrete and symbolic apprehension they may be fully the equal of any ‘normal’ individual.

This is the other side, the almost sublime other side, of the singular creatures, the gifted simpletons, Martin, José, and the Twins.

This is the other side, the almost sublime other side, of the singular creatures, the gifted simpletons, Martin, José, and the Twins.