A. R. Luria Quotes in The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat
What could we do? What should we do? ‘There are no prescriptions,’ Luria wrote, ‘in a case like this. Do whatever your ingenuity and your heart suggest. There is little or no hope of any recovery in his memory. But a man does not consist of memory alone. He has feeling, will, sensibilities, moral being—matters of which neuropsychology cannot speak. And it is here, beyond the realm of an impersonal psychology, that you may find ways to touch him, and change him.’
In all these states—‘funny’ and often ingenious as they appear—the world is taken apart, undermined, reduced to anarchy and chaos. There ceases to be any ‘center’ to the mind, though its formal intellectual powers may be perfectly preserved. The end point of such states is an unfathomable ‘silliness’, an abyss of superficiality, in which all is ungrounded and afloat and comes apart. Luria once spoke of the mind as reduced, in such states, to ‘mere Brownian movement’.
