Shaking Woman [Hardcover]

Imagine the irony as an inexplicable shaking phenomenon befalls an author with a PhD in English Literature who has researched the field of psychiatry to the point of even taking practice exams for the state psychiatry board.

Fascinated by the title and its topic, I was hoping to learn more about this woman's extraordinarily perplexing affliction. Sadly, "The Shaking Woman or A History of My Nerves" is less about author Siri Hustvedt or HER own nerves and more about the history of the mind/body issue. In fact, the author's own story is frustratingly fragmentary, which is unfortunate because Hustvedt is clearly a deeply cerebral and literate writer.

Despite the title, there is very little heard from the Shaking Woman's case herself and practically NO history of her own nerves. For every brief paragraph in which we do learn about the author's disorder, there are about 30 pages of the history of psychiatry, psychology, pharmacology, philosophy, and personality research. This is disappointing, because the author's personal story is the only new topic here; all other points made about mind/body have been discussed previously and far more lucidly by others, as indicated in her nearly 200 well-documented reference notes.

As for the plethora of reference notes, this book reads more like an advanced college term paper. Open it to any page, and you will likely find 2 to 5 references to OTHER people's musings; the author simply cannot resist interjecting quotations throughout this 200 page ramble. By doing so, she deflects attention away from her own interesting case and avoids discussing herself in any deeply meaningful way.

Hustvedt writes in a stream-of-consciousness manner that makes for a bit of a messy and manic read after just a few pages. For instance, in one particular paragraph her subject flits from schizophrenia to amoebas and ends with the atom bomb.

What could be a fascinating story is further confounded by Hustvedt's writing style which involves visiting imaginary therapists and a fake neurologist. She theorizes what different hypothetical diagnoses MIGHT indicate, then expounds for pages and pages using those suppositions. These techniques make it difficult to discern the imaginary from the actual and the supposed from the observed. Instead of being provocative, this book is just exasperating and overwrought.

I admit I am a fan of the TV series "Mystery Diagnosis", so perhaps I was simplistically hoping for something similar from Hustvedt's The Shaking Woman. But there is no satisfying conclusion or resolution here; instead she just uses her own symptoms as a context for discussing the much broader mind/body dilemma, which she successfully convinces us can never truly be resolved. Ultimately, it is with resignation and not insightful acceptance that she seems to come to term with her disorder.

The very idea of this book--before it was released, when I'd just read advance reviews and couldn't wait to get my hands on a copy--was a lifeline to me, sitting in pediatric neurology. My 7-year-old daughter, an extraordinarily bright, creatively-gifted, highly-sensitive child, had begun seeing colors, visual hallucinations, followed shortly by hearing voices and sounds; she complained of dizziness and nausea and was slightly withdrawn; quickly, she adapted to the sensory phenomenon and stopped complaining of vertigo, but she then began to tell me of other sensations: her math paper at school felt "hot"; when she turned it over, it felt like ice. While the neurologist and child psychiatrist staked out their territories--and at this point, it seems unlikely we'll have a clear diagnosis--I maintained the possibility of synesthesia or a benign manifestation of her visual-spatial creativity. As a mother, I struggled to understand whether we were dealing with pathology or, on the other hand, an integral expression of my daughter's nervous system. I had, over the years, read deeply in subjects such as high-sensitivity (Elaine Aron), giftedness and superstimulabilities (Dabrowki's Theory of Positive Disintegration), as well as diagnosis and misdiagnosis of disorders among gifted persons. My bias--and I hoped Hustvedt's book would back me here--was that some people just see and hear extra stuff, and it's not a problem.

What surprised me, then, was how irritating and slow I found the book initially, as Hustvedt takes on the brain-mind dichotomy, philosophical duality, in her quest for integration of the "shaking woman" as part of her identity. I consider the either/or, neurologist/psychiatrist mentality to be part of the limitations of allopathy, and to me, this dual mode is old-fashioned (I contrast with Goethe on the spiritual dimension of science or Integral philosophers on holographics). Certainly I was repulsed by Hustvedt's impulse to demonstrate her expertise in this narrow and deep sense, by her comparisons of herself with brain-injured patients, though perhaps this reflects the difference between a middle-aged woman contemplating her own condition and one contemplating her child's; I will unapologetically go far afield, considering everything from Indigo Children to EMF fields, nutrition to homeopathy.

Sometimes her thinking on subjects like self and social construction is just achingly conventional and prosaic. "Isn't it possible that this visual metaphor is problematic, that the very idea of hierarchical levels is flawed? Can brain, psyche, and culture really be distinguished so neatly?" she asks--I have an irritable impulse to drag out Ken Wilber's maps and grids. Or, when she writes, "The conscious self's boundaries shift," or "clearly, a self is much larger than the internal narrator," I want to respond with a "duh." I'd rather read Proust. Or Lydia Davis, for that matter--"The Thyroid Diaries."

Hustvedt is a brilliant student, and she reminds me of certain other woman writers I've come across who tell you everything anyone from Aristotle to Freud ever said on a given subject, withholding their own opinions until safely establishing their competence. I liked the book in a backwards direction; towards the end, the gathering of her thoughts on empathy, extraordinary sensitivity, high I.Q., transcendence--these things I liked, this is where I'd wish for the book to start. It isn't until the very end--perhaps, having displayed her conventional competence, she feels safe--that she tells you of her beginnings--as a child seeing and hearing things. For this I am deeply grateful.

In this book, Siri Hustvedt, one of the best American novelists writing today, offers a few brief glimpses into her struggles with psychosomatic illness (shaking during public speaking related to the trauma of losing her father) and a long recital of different sorts of such illnesses in history and psychiatric practice. Her insights into her own situation were interesting, and I found tantalizing the few points where she connects her own physical problems with her emotional states, but most of the book is regurgitation of research on these topics, and I found her not only less insightful about the quality of the research she recounted, but also disorganized. The middle chunk of the book is just one story about a psychological oddity discovered by a doctor after another, and the thread of the tale gets lost. Too bad, I really wanted to like this.

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