“…a personal investigation, a philosophical inquiry, and a pithy, compacted consideration of how both psychiatry and neurology have evolved in the last two centuries. Where is her malaise located? Can it be pinned down anatomically, or is it free-floating, abstract? She undergoes brain scans, which show nothing; she ventures into psychoanalysis, in which she has a long-standing but wary interest. How, she asks, would her symptom have been classified by doctors in different eras? The 19th century might have called it hysteria, the 20th a “conversion disorder” – a symptom caused by the mind, manifesting in the body. Under stress, some people plunge into depression. Others “fall apart” and break with reality. Others express their fear and grief through encoded physical symptoms. But does it make sense to classify some conditions as somatic, others as psychic? How does physiology impact on personality? Where does the self begin and end? What is pain, and can it be abstracted from the body that suffers it, or the cultural context in which it is suffered? In these interwoven fields of knowledge, simple or single explanations barely cover the overt facts, let alone do justice to the phenomenological experience of the suffering individual. Fastidious yet engaged, intimate yet detached, Hustvedt’s exploration of mind and body embraces material that is inter-Âdisciplinary, complex and contentious.”- Hilary Mantel
