I’m undertaking a 1000-day reinvention project, blogging here daily to track my progress. In Thursday Thinker, I share a smart idea or theory.
SPOILER WARNING: In this blog post I share specific details about the Amazon Prime comedy-drama series Patriot (2015 – 2018). Highly recommend the show. If you haven’t watched it, but want to, don’t read this blog post before you do!
Today I have surgery to remove the epiretinal membrane in my left eye that is pulling on my retina and distorting my vision. So it’s a good day to return to the work of sociologist Arthur W. Frank in his book about illness and injury, The Wounded Storyteller: Body, Illness, and Ethics. And I’ll apply some of the ideas he shares, including those of two other academics Arthur Kleinman and Eric Cassell, to the Amazon Prime show Patriot, which I’m currently watching.
Frank writes that suffering in clinical settings applies not just to the body and not just to the mind, but to the body-self, using a phrase from medical anthropologist Arthur Kleinman. Kleinman has critiqued Western biomedicine for separating the mind (the self) and the body. In his framework, the body-self is the physical and psychological manifestation of your entire lived experience.
Frank suggests that the experience of illness (which applies to injury, what I am suffering) offers a chance of remaking, via disintegration:
Postmodern ill people thus live simultaneously with both the threat of disintegration and the promise of reintegration. The body-self whose foreground is dominated by threat is unmade, but unmaking can be a generative process; what is unmade stands to be remade.
This gives rise to the possibility of illness or injury and its subsequent treatment along with potential recovery (partial or complete) as a narrative, one which can be formulated as a quest narrative.
Visual disturbance as metaphor
I’ve been watching Patriot, a dark comedy-drama that ran for two seasons on Prime from 2015 to 2018. The lead character, John Tavner, works as an undercover spy at the behest of his father, an intelligence director. John takes on increasingly more violent action and becomes increasingly depressed and dysfunctional in service to his father’s quest to deny Iran a nuclear weapon.
John experiences head trauma and increasing psychological dysfunction leading to visual disturbance in Season 2. The viewer sees Luxembourg City, Luxembourg and Paris, France from John’s perspective as blurred and fading, suggestive of John’s increasing inability to see his life and what’s happening around him with accuracy. He is undergoing a process of disintegration.
I have not finished the series yet, so I will be interested to see if his vision recovers as he overcomes the challenges he faces and refinds himself.
Frank shares physician-ethicist Eric Cassell’s three points about suffering, which can be used to better describe John’s suffering in Season 2 of Patriot:
- Suffering involves the whole person — the body-self — and requires a rejection of a dualist understanding of mind and body.
- Suffering takes place when severe distress threatens a person’s intactness, when it threatens a person with disintegration.
- Suffering may occur in relation to any aspect of a person.
In Patriot, John is suffering in all these ways.
His suffering involves both his body and his mind, as he becomes increasingly depressed and cynical, following his father’s instructions even as they become more and more brutal, brutalizing John in the process.
John’s suffering includes literal bodily disintegration. In addition to experiencing severe visual disturbance, two of his fingers are shot off when he’s attempting to rob a grocery store to get a gun. He spends an entire episode or more with one hand jammed in his jacket pocket so as not to show his injury to the world.
And John’s suffering shows up in multiple aspects of his person: head trauma, visual disturbance, lost fingers, mental illness, and a variety of other injuries sustained in the course of his undercover work.
Frank writes, “Stories of suffering have two sides,” and I will be interested to see how the story of John’s suffering resolves in Season 2 of Patriot.
Frank describes that quest stories (which I wrote about before in relation to my vision problem) build upon the two sides of suffering, distintegration and integration and can bring together ideas about suffering from Cassell and Kleinman:
One side, reflecting Cassell’s emphases, expresses the threat of disintegration. The chaos narrative is overwhelmed by this threat; disintegration has become the tellers encompassing reality. The other side, reflecting Kleinman’s emphasis on resistance, seeks a new integration of body-self. The quest narrative recognizes that the old intactness must be stripped away to prepare for something new. Quest stories reflect a confidence in what is waiting to emerge from suffering.
This brings to mind Dabrowski’s theory of positive disintegration, where, to achieve a higher level of personality development, you must first go through a period where your lower-level psychological structures and commitment to societal demands breaks down.
I look forward to seeing how John Tavner’s story resolves. Does his disintegration lead to integration?
My own disintegration
This year has been a year of bodily disintegration for me, as I faced first a hysterectomy and now retinal surgery. As well, I’m undergoing physical therapy for a frozen shoulder. The retinal surgery and shoulder problem are related to a ski crash I suffered last November. The hysterectomy is related to a chronic high-risk HPV infection I’ve had ever since I got divorced and went on a quest for a new partner. Fortunately it never progressed to true cancer, though it often threatened to.
And also fortunately, I decided to arrange for very good health insurance for 2026, knowing that I might face surgery but not knowing that I could face two surgeries, as the retinal problem took me by surprise.
I feel like a different person this year, spending so much time at medical appointments, and preparing mentally and physically for surgical procedures. It is a harbinger of older age, this experience of my body failing me.
I’ve started to question whether I still want to continue skiing, given the severe injuries I suffered (more severe than I understood at the time), and meanwhile my mental state is changing to become more equanamous, more peaceful, more accepting of losses. The loss of skiing would be one that I would immensely grieve, as it has been such an important part of my life, first when I was a child, and then later, when I was a divorcée seeking to renew herself and her engagement with life. It formed an important foundation for my abstract art practice. It brought me into regular contact with my beloved Rocky Mountains and helped me connect with friends and lovers in an adventurous and daring way.
This is my quest, a quest I started when I began my year-long reinvention project, and continued when I re-upped for 1000 days. I didn’t imagine when I started it that the aging and injury of my body would play an important part.
And this is a quest in which I suffer.