“The Lost Me: Exploring the Self through Mental Illness and Philosophy”

Here is a man named ‘David’. At some point he began to think of his leg as something unpleasant and cumbersome that was not part of him. When he walked at home, he hopped on only what he thought was a good leg. Eventually, he made it his goal to amputate one of his legs. He tried several times. He tried to amputate the leg with a tourniquet and packing twine, but failed. The more I do, the more my desire to have my leg amputated grows. He asks a doctor to have his leg amputated.

‘The Lost Me’ written by Indian science columnist Anil Anantaswamy is a book looking at the self through mental illness. It is interesting to take a philosophical approach to the self through brain science. The author asks readers whether the body or the mind is the priority in the formation of the ego.

The beginning of the book is an allegory. A man walks down the street and goes into a house and lies down. But the goblin comes in and lays his body down next to the man. Afterwards, another goblin enters and claims the body as his own. The man intervened in the fight between the two. The man says that he is destined to die anyway, and that the goblin who came in first brought the corpse. Then the goblin came in from behind and took off his arm in anger. The goblin who first entered takes pity on the man and removed a part of his body and attached it to him. As this happens repeatedly, the man’s body eventually turns into a corpse. Then who is this man? Is he the way he really is, or is he a different person because his body has changed?

Since then, books have been published such as ‘Cotard Syndrome (a disease in which one believes one is dead)’, ‘Alzheimer’s (dementia)’, ‘Genomelia (a disease in which one wants to cut off part of one’s body)’, ‘schizophrenia’, and ‘depersonalization (oneself)’. This unfamiliar disease)’, ‘autism’, ‘out-of-body/doppelganger’, ‘ecstatic epilepsy’, etc. The book itself has its own difficulty. This is because it uses scientific terms and philosophical terms interchangeably as it deals with brain science. In addition, there are parts of the story about mental illness and the ego that are seldom accepted.

However, if you read with concentration, cases that are not far from us continue to emerge. One example is dementia. People caring for people with dementia face the same challenges. When a person who was good at listening and relaxed in the past gets dementia, he speaks harshly, uses violence, or can hardly tolerate it. The same goes for the daughter of a dementia patient in this book. The caring father is nowhere to be found and has changed into a person who gets angry when he wakes up. The book argues that this is because dementia patients lose their ‘narrative self’. The ability to construct the future through past experiences is called narrative. Dementia attacks the hippocampus and temporal lobe, taking away the ability to compose narratives. They forgot who they were in the past, what experiences they had, and even lost the ability to learn for the future. Dementia patients have a body, but it is unclear whether they have an ego.

Let’s get back to David’s story. David manages to amputate his leg with the help of a doctor. But he had no regrets at all. He laughed and enjoyed talking to people. Even the dark shadows on his face disappeared. Was he just a lunatic? Or has he finally found his true self? The author credits David with being whole for the first time in his life. He lost his body, but he found his self. In addition, the book discusses interesting cases of mental illness and in-depth philosophy. It will surely give readers a new experience.

People who lost me l Anil Anantaswami l The Quest l 396 pages l 19,800 won