There's a phenomenology of being sick, one that depends on temperament, personal history, and the culture which we live in.
Interpretation
The experience of illness is shaped by individual perspectives and cultural contexts.
Siri Hustvedt's quote highlights that the way we perceive and experience sickness is not purely a biological phenomenon, but rather a complex interplay of one's temperament, personal past, and the cultural environment that shapes our understanding of health. This suggests that illness is subjective and influenced by various external factors, emphasizing the importance of considering these influences in both medical practice and personal experiences of health and sickness.
In practice
In a health seminar discussing mental well-being, you could use this quote to illustrate how different backgrounds affect health perceptions.
Perception plays a vital role in the diagnosis of bipolar illness. Symptoms are perceived through the categories of psychiatric medicine at a given moment in history, categories which are continually shifting and being named or renamed.
Our memory fragments don't have any coherence until they're imagined in words. Time is a property of language, of syntax, and tense.
All human states are organic brain states - happiness, sadness, fear, lust, dreaming, doing math problems and writing novels - and our brains are not static.
I don't want the words to be naked the way they are in faxes or in the computer. I want them to be covered by an envelope that you have to rip open in order to get at. I want there to be a waiting time -a pause between the writing and the reading. I want us to be careful about what we say to each other. I want the miles between us to be real and long. This will be our law -that we write our dailiness and our suffering very, very carefully.
under our love making I felt a bleakness that couldnt be dispelled. The sadness was in both of us, and I think we pitied ourselves that night, as if we were other people looking down on the couple who lay together on the bed
People who grow up with two or more languages understand that each can express certain aspects of reality better than the other.
Patriotism is a pernicious, psychopathic form of idiocy.
Mockingbirds don’t do one thing but make music for us to enjoy. They don’t eat up people’s gardens, don’t nest in corncribs, they don’t do one thing but sing their hearts out for us. That’s why it’s a sin to kill a mockingbird.
Skepticism is the agent of reason against organized irrationalism--and is therefore one of the keys to human social and civic decency.
Some people think God does not like to be troubled with our constant coming and asking. The way to trouble God is not to come at all.
A simple man with Scripture has more authority than the Pope or a council.
My rule is that if I interview someone, they should never read what I have to say about them and regret having given me the interview.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.