Martha Stout, "The Myth of Sanity"

What is sanity? Are "normal" people always dependably sane, or could it be said that we experience sanity only as a temporary, fluctuating state? After witnessing a traumatic event, have you ever spent time in a state that is not exactly sane, a state of either frantic agitation or numbness, withdrawal, and distraction? These are the questions that Martha Stout, a Clinical Instructor in Psychology at Harvard Medical School and a Clinical Associate at the Massachusetts General Hospital, pursues in The Myth of Sanity: Divided Consciousness and the Promise of Awareness (2002). Drawing on more than twenty years' experience working with patients who have suffered psychological trauma, Stout uses her case studies to show that the ability to dissociate from reality, which functions as a life-preserving defense mechanism during times of stress in childhood, can develop into a way of life that leads to emotional detachment and prolonged disengagement with the world. In the most extreme cases, this dissociative behavior can lead individuals to black out for extended periods of time or to develop multiple personalities in order to contend with life's many demands.  

In seeking to establish a continuum that extends from the everyday experience of spacing out to the more traumatic experience of being shell-shocked, Stout invites her readers to recognize just how common the experience of dementia, or "self-shifting," can be. The patients Stout focuses on have been forced to come to terms with the extreme forms this dementia can take, and, with her help, they come to see the meaning of their own lives as something they must continually work to construct. In jargon-free prose, Stout tells the stories of her patients' struggles for and with sanity, revealing in each case how buried or missing memories of the past serve to disrupt and distort the experience of the present.  

Stout, Martha. "When I Woke Up Tuesday Morning, It Was Friday," in The Myth of Sanity: Divided Consciousness and the Promise of Awareness. New York: Penguin Books, 2002. 15-43.
Biographical information drawn from PR Web.
Digital image drawn from the Myth of Sanity website.

Link to Explore:

http://home.att.net/cgi-bin/PBView?owner=stoutm: The Myth of Sanity online survey.

Question for Learning:

• Consider the kinds of questions asked on Martha Stout's survey and the distribution of responses. How do the questions frame the range of possible responses? What does the survey indicate about the prevalence in society of dissociative behavior?

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Question for Connecting:

• Could our contemporary relation to the natural world be described as dissociated? Is it possible that an entire society can suffer from dissociation? Has David Abram described a society that is, in Stout's sense of the term, dissociated from sensuous experience? Are the steps Abram prescribes for restoring our connections to the natural environment comparable to the kind of therapeutic program Stout supports for improving the lives of her patients? Can a society become "healthy," or is this a project that only individuals can embark on?

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