Alzheimer’s patients return to a generic, unowned childhood rather than their own

Evidence

Even if Alzheimer’s patients seem to “fall back into childhood,” it would still be possible to affirm that they return to a childhood that is not their own, to a childhood that is only a concept of childhood, that consists in a set of stereotypical gestures and postures that pertain to everyone’s childhood and thus to no one’s childhood. A childhood without a child to live it. John Bayley, the husband of Iris Murdoch, wrote an admirable account o f the process whereby Alzheimer’s disease engulfed the great writer. He evokes, for example, the mornings that Iris spent watching Teletubbies, a show intended for little children that she was especially fond of. Bayley judi­ ciously notes that the writer had become childish but not a child. — Catherine Malabou, The New Wounded, 1377

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: ‘A childhood without a child to live it’ is a genuinely dense formulation—it dissolves both the developmental and personal-narrative readings of dementia, distilling Malabou’s anti-biographical, non-teleological account of destructive plasticity into a single image.
• STORYSTEM: The notion of a generic, anonymous childhood no one lived—stereotyped gestures belonging to everyone and no one—could seed a speculative fiction about memory prosthesis failing to restore personal pasts, only generic templates.
• ADDENDUM: Directly relevant to the ‘grafting’ essay’s treatment of defamiliarized identity and the question of what remains of personhood when narrative cohesion collapses.
• XREF: connects to: Alzheimer’s produces a new identity rather than merely diminishing a person. — Catherine Malabou, The New Wounded: From Neurosis to Brain…, 53; Dementia is another way humans lose control of their carefully maintained identities — Naomi Klein, Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror…, 138; Regressive childhood memory replaces lost potential with dreams of non-existence

Broader Connections

• Dementia is another way humans lose control of their carefully maintained identities #expands (0.85) — Naomi Klein, Doppelganger, 138
• Regressive childhood memory replaces lost potential with dreams of non-existence #expands (0.80)