coldhearted scientist وداد

Hypothesis. a. Reality can be difficult to diagnose. b. Malicious misdiagnosis is a control mechanism deployed more often than we realize. Goals. Eject misdiagnoses. Discover missed diagnoses.

I

Misdiagnosis abounds. For example, I have been assigned an assistant with a weak skill set. He is shared by two departments. The relevant department chairs hired him without consulting me, so that one could have an assistant she liked, and the other could [say he was] support[ing] me. My own chair, I am sure, believed he was trying to help. But, since I was not consulted on the matter, this episode looks like expedience to me. I am exasperated, but I am sure I am seen as ungrateful.

What I see is two whitemen making a deal at my expense and, by the way, the expense of this assistant. The assistant has been told, “we got you a job!” I have been told, “we got you an assistant!” And yet no one asked this assistant what his skill set actually was. Nor was he given a clear description of the job he would have with me. I know that when I point these things out, as I will soon have to do, kindly and diplomatically of course, I may well be told I am unkind to have noticed these problems.

Criticism of the assistant will be accepted. Criticism of the way in which he was hired, will not. This last, of course, is the larger issue. But my noticing this, and addressing it, will be considered the actual problem. These things I know from experience. And these misdiagnoses and missed diagnoses, these expectations of respect and tolerance for the whitemen, are, among other things, signs of sexism.

I learned this in high school, but later, when what I might do was taken more seriously, I learned the opposite: that to notice such signs was “immature.” When you grow up, you put aside those youthful experiments in individuation, and accept “reality.” This is, of course, a misdiagnosis, and yet I have internalized some of it. Still, in my view, actually growing up would mean throwing such misdiagnoses off.

II

Which of your characteristics do you consider most essential? I might describe mine as an ability to switch worlds, or more concretely, to see that I am thinking from within a particular system. I can see its edges of the system, and shed it, or walk out of it. There’s another universe next door. Let’s go. I can often handle more than one system, or universe at a time. This is useful for learning languages, or mathematics.

I consider this characteristic my most essential one because I cannot imagine losing it. It is my most basic one. From it, I have developed the skills I use the most. I can see as well that my tastes flow from it.

Which of your characteristics would you like to lose? I would like to lose, or at least modify, the ease with which I catch other peoples’ projections, that is to say, the ease with which I can allow these to lodge in me. I am talking about internalizing oppression, or about, in one of my students’ vivid phrase, “putting up with too many line-steppers.” I am also talking about getting lost among the worlds, and losing the way home.

Because of this characteristic, I dislike misdiagnoses. I am not at all concerned about the quedirán, in the sense of what others may think or say. But I am vulnerable to the introjection of images coming from elsewhere. Misdiagnose me, and I may take what you say more seriously than it deserves.

This weakness, from what I have been able to gather, may be but needs not be seen as a result of trauma. My problematic therapist wanted it to be the result of childhood sexual abuse, which I have no reason to believe happened. He wanted to show that my research interests were symptomatic of this abuse. He alleged that my strong doubts about both hypotheses were resistance and denial. I dropped every research project I had ongoing in that field.

III

I dropped these research projects for several interrelated, but also contradictory reasons.

a. I was horrified at the person this therapist thought I was: not for what he believed had happened, but for who he believed that person “must be” (and must be hiding) now. This was how I lost voice, judgment, perspective.

b. The therapist wanted to find, and then break through “denial” so that I would come to consciousness in “reality.” Instead, confidence was replaced with self-doubt. Without a sense of self and a voice, having lost faith in my judgment, and having lost perspective, everything was difficult. Work on a project started by the self I had rejected, proved to be impossible. I have excellent discipline and time management skills, I am not a perfectionist, I do not fear academic authorities, and I did try.

c. My interest in my field had been reencoded as proof of a certain repressed past. To have such a past meant I would need the to take the cure, which was hypnosis, for the purpose of discovering memories. I did not think this would be healthy or safe. I thus dropped my primary reserach field so as to prove my sanity. I preferred this to undergoing treatment for the insanity of which this research was supposed to be a symptom, because it appeared to me that such “treatment” might actually drive me insane.

d. I had also taken the therapists’ suggestions into serious consideration. I could see how he had arrived at his conclusions. On many days, in fact, his conclusions were all I could see in the texts I was working on. That in itself, threw the status of my projects into complete disarray.

This, then, is the ‘downside’ of my uncanny ability to see, and shed, the parameters of the system in which I am working, so as to acquire another. The conclusion I now draw is that protection against this ‘downside’ lies in honing my ability to see, and move between and among systems. If I can do this, the weak and the strong sides of that ability will no longer pull against each other.

IV

I may work well acquiring and shedding systems, as I put it, but in the situation I have just described, I got caught in a formula. This, together with the much well-intentioned, but misguided and formulaic advice I received about how to remedy matters, is one reason why I am so suspicious of formulae now.

V

During the time in which I could not write, I listened patiently to a great deal of advice on “procrastination,” perfectionism, and “time management.” This is advice which works, when it is applicable, but does not, when it is not. I have addressed this question before. My own faith in that advice at the time, and made it difficult to see outside it, even converted it into a straitjacket of sorts, for I was not dealing with “procrastination,” perfectionism, or “poor time management” at all, at all. I have written a little more about that, too.

I have spoken of the strange imaginings of senior faculty when I was younger than I am now, about my dismay at certain states of things, and about boredom. That post, the one to which I have just linked to, makes, in my view, an important point about contexts and raises something which for me an important question: how useful and interesting is academic writing anyway, unless you have the necessary resources to do it regularly, as a day job?

There really is only one thing I have not said, anywhere, about the period in which I did not write, and even the years before that: so many were so concerned about it, had stakes in it, were so invested for reasons of their own in what I might and might not do, so eagerly making bets on it, so quickly rushing in with tea: tea, but also urgent exhortations. When would I be allowed to speak of my own concerns, I wondered, or speak with myself, or myself and my editor, about true practicality, without so many actually impractical voices of homilies, “common sense,” expedience crowding in?

But I have the answer to that question now, and to the question that ends the paragraph above this last one: I like the ring of words, and the shifting sand of syntax. And the genre, the topic, the length of the piece, none of this really matters, as long as I can be there to write it. I, not the inhabitant of a shadow house built by someone else. I, not the ghostwriter of someone else’s piece.

Axé.