Conference: Phantom Limb Phenomena

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A Neurobiological Diagnosis With Aesthetic, Cultural and Philosophic Implications (University of London, Saturday 15th, and Sunday 16th, January 2005) :

“Since its original description in 1866 by the Neurologist S. Mitchell, the phantom limb phenomena have attracted many scholars across a broad spectrum of fields. The phenomena describe the condition found in many amputees in which sensation of the removed limb persists. As such, it has served as a metaphor for many ideas in other fields beyond the scope of neurobiology and neuropsychology including philosophy, psychoanalysis, cultural studies, anthropology, literature, film and art. The purpose of this conference is three fold. First, it brings to the public’s attention this fascinating and significant medical problem. Second, it not only looks objectively at the way that these phenomena have stimulated interest across such a wide variety of fields but also shows how successful it is as a inter-disciplinary signifier; an issue important for both art and science initiatives. Last, it hopes to open up possible new links between participating professionals who seldom have the opportunity to meet and discuss ideas at the limits of their own interests.” [via boing boing]

If you have any interest in this, you can scroll down the page and read the abstracts of the conference presentations. Neurologist Peter Brugger, for example, “(tries) to delineate the scope of a proper ‘phantomology’ (Stanislaw Lem) whose aim is to study the virtual reality of bodily awareness – from phantom limb to phantom body.”

Harvard psychoanalyst Arnold Modell finds the creation of the unreal phantom limb intriguingly analogous to the process of the construction of the (equally unreal) self and its agency. And neuropsychologist Chris Frith sees the phenomenon as a paradigm of the brain’s mechanisms for the active construction of reality.

Artist Andrew Patrizio asks, “Am I, like others, (ab)using the phenomenon like many other intellectual and cultural activists? Phantom limbs are typical of many flowing and contested scientific discourses around at the moment, whose very elusiveness and ambiguity seems attractive in a multi-disciplinary kind of way. Rather than studying phantom limbs per se, I am currently asking – Does the exhibition as a format deal well with such subjects of an unsolved nature? Would my interest as a curator diminish if an explanatory model were accepted? How are artists working with the mystery, symbolism and science of phantom limbs, erecting a platform for creativity without dismantling the enigma?” Patrizio propounded an artistic expression of the phantom limb phenomenon by having an exhibition which hung no art (stipulating artists from whom works would not be borrowed).

Artist Nicola Diamond considers bodily expression as a culturally specific form of language and wonders how phantom limb would be experienced cross-culturally; there is little evidence of the phenomena in cross-cultural work. Novelist Stuart Brisley relates phantom limb to body dysmorphic disorder. Photographic artist Janet Sternberg finds phantom limb a potent metaphor as well. “Each of us has the condition, someone or something no longer with us who nonetheless continues — for better and for worse — to feel part of us.”

And UCLA philosopher Eleanor Kaufman explores Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of perception through the apposition of phantom limb — a sensation that an absent body part is still present — and one of my professional interests, anosognosia — the sensation that a present body part is absent. (I find the neurological phenomenon of anosognosia an analogy for some aspects of my patients’ constricted awarenes of themselves and the world.)