Psychological Book Review: Scar Tissue Scar Tissue

Psychological Book Review:

Scar Tissue

Scar Tissue is a fictional book about dementia and the effects of aging of an elderly parent can have on an individual's soul, sense of self, and sense of place within a familial context. It tells the story of an artistic woman, married to a scientist, who slips into dementia. At first her husband cares for her, but he dies suddenly, and then she is institutionalized in a place where only one nurse shows her compassion. She has two sons, one a scientist like the father, the other a philosopher. Both seek to understand her condition and care for her.

Despite the fictional conceit, this book deals with a subject that is all too physically real for many elderly Americans and families, and it is unsparing and real in its level of medical details. One can only describe it as harrowing as a real-life, true account of such suffering -- in the heart of the child protagonist as much as the mother slipping into her final darkness, before death. Michael Ignatieff's title refers to the first scan of the woman's brain. It shows "scar tissue," the physical manifestation of a mental disease affecting the mind.

The main narrator of the book is the younger son. The tragedy is largely seen through his eyes, although the perspective of the elder brother and father is also given, as is the mother's in imagined flashback. The younger son, however, emerges at the clearest voice, perhaps because is a creature of the mind and inner voice, a philosophy professor and at first he reacts to the ailment in a very cerebral manner -- I could call this the history of my family as the history of our characteristic illness, he muses at the book's beginning, I could also call it the history of an illness as the history of one family, a very intellectual reaction to a visceral tragedy.

His mother's illness ultimate destroys his own sense of self as well as his mother's sense of her own identity -- and the end of the novel depicts the narrator on a radical spiritual quest to shorn himself of his identity. He loses his marriage in the process, and many of his own social and personal, professional, and vocational trappings that confer his own identity upon him. Denied the self, he is tormented and obsessed -- who are we if not minds. Thus, through the man's eyes, the book raises profound psychological questions about the need for medicine and therapy not simply to treat disease and the discord and grief disease produces, but of the philosophical rend in one's life and self illness can cause.

Scar Tissue uses the twin experiences of the two brothers of the book to explore different ways, through body and psychology; people deal with the personalities of others and of their own personality. The older brother is neurophysiologist, of what the father calls a propositional intelligence. The brother explores the physical nature of the disease, as a way of connecting with his increasingly disconnected mother. Rationalism is one way of dealing with grief, an alternative way to the philosophical and spiritual methods of memory deployed by the younger brother.

From a psychological perspective, the boys embody two different dichotomies within the profession -- should disease of the mind be treated with medicine or with analysis. The mother's condition and the older brother's perspective show that we as human beings are bodies, and the scars of the body affect the mind. However, the younger brother's suffering shows that the sense that humans are more than the physical also has a psychological component that must be addressed. The fact that the mother responds differently to different nurses, even when she can no longer recognize that she is a mother of sons shows that humans are not the sum of their ailments.

Humans may not be the sum of their minds and memories, but one cannot, in dealing with the aging, eschew the power of memories, for our mental constructions of our parents affect our present selves, if we still have the capacity to form new memories. The philosopher deals with the mother's ailment of forgetting in a different fashion than his brother -- through memory. Because the woman was an artist, the younger philosopher brother identifies with her more and through his memories as he reconstructs her early life in his mind. In contrast, the older scientist brother identifies more with the scientific, Russian-immigrant father who calls his other son's gifts those of an autobiographical intelligence.