“Joseph Anton”: Memoir as noir

Mon, 05 Nov 2012 21:58:00 +0000

IN A RECENT TED TALK, psychologist Eleanor Longden describes being joined in a particularly stressful time in college by “a disembodied voice which calmly narrated everything [she] did in the third person: She is reading, she is going to a lecture, she is leaving the room.” The voice was “neutral, banal, oddly companionate,” and when she told doctors about it, they linked it at once to schizophrenia, resulting in a period of institutionalization that did more harm than good. Years later, after Longden entered the field herself, she hit upon another theory: that the voice was not necessarily bad, but served as a sort of inner compass, a voice of suppressed or inconvenient reason, part of a seemingly ulterior self that struggles violently, vaguely, to combine all the disparate voices of the self into one, consistent whole.

Salon.com > Henry Giardina

“Joseph Anton”: Memoir as noir