162 cm in height. 55 kg in weight. Average. His body was made of three sections, each an assemblage of simple geometric forms. He had a skeleton, as well as organs (not all, but those he had were vital). In the pictures, he has no skin. I cannot tell you if he was born this way or if his skin melted off due to the rays. The only certainty is that the phantom had not known death, for the phantom was an image of the living-sick: a placeholder for their sickness. And as a placeholder, the phantom was not the phantom of a single individual, but of an entire demographic: Japanese adults. 

“You have seen nothing in Hiroshima,” says the Japanese man to the visiting French woman, signaling the impossibility of witnessing in the wake of nuclear disaster [1]. The reasons for this not-seeing are manifold. They are to do with the experience of the seer, the experience of the seen, and the atomic light that mediates them; a light that both illuminates and destroys, exposes and corrodes, fathoms and flattens.

Faced with the reality of seeing nothing in Hiroshima, scientists of radiation developed both physical and computational models which they named phantoms. In May 1976, those working at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory—along with their colleagues at the institution formerly known as the Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission—released a report claiming that “a mathematical model of a phantom simulating the body and major internal organs of a Japanese adult has been developed for use in computer calculations of radiation dose.”[2] Whether Japanese adults—real ones—trusted their findings remains doubtful.

Few experiments are too cruel to be enacted upon the living. Even fewer are those that cannot in good faith be enacted upon the dead. In these instances, a science born of colonial and imperial warfare summons—and studies—the ghost. “Dying sometimes gives us (wrongly, no doubt), not the feeling of abandoning ourselves to the disaster, but the feeling that if we were to die, we would escape it.”[3] Wrongly, no doubt. Ghosts do not escape the disaster: they are its knowledge.

2.

Concerning the prevalence of paranormal beliefs among people suffering with medically unexplained illnesses, Frantz Fanon and Plutarch, respectively, said the following:

“I am granted the fact that unexplainable biophysical limitations permit the instilment of a tendency to believe in the unexplainable.”[4]

"As people with chronic diseases when they have despaired of ordinary remedies and customary regimens turn to expiations and amulets and dreams, just so in obscure and perplexing speculations, when the ordinary and reputable and customary accounts are not persuasive, it is necessary to try those that are more out of the way and not scorn them but literally to chant over ourselves the charms of the ancients and use every means to bring the truth to test."[5]

3.

What can be said about the suffering of those persons whose sick lifeworlds are relentlessly disavowed the traction of reality? That they have become a ghost; that what afflicts them is phantomatic; that these have only been, and will continue to be, the same thing?

I am occupied with the inadequacies of our disciplinary languages to address the complexities of illnesses that are corralled under the umbrella of medically unexplained syndromes. In Western medicine these have many names. They include: chronic fatigue syndrome, ME, long covid, chronic lyme disease, psychosomatic disorder, fibromyalgia, conversion disorder, hysteria, somatoform disorder, functional neurological disorder, hypochondria, etc. For some, these are mere diagnoses. For others, they are open-ended questions shut closed, prematurely, by the hermetically sealed rhetoric of empiricism [6]. Medical cold cases. Language weighs differently on different people.

In the fall of 2019, I am told that I suffer from a syndrome. The doctor—one of many—recites to me a list of symptoms. I listen, I nod, and between us, my afflictions unfurl. What organic occasion has gathered these symptoms within my body? I am promptly taught an important philosophical lesson. On the Difference Between Causality and Correlation. Some symptoms are tethered by a muscular pull of identifiable origins. Others are not. Syndromes belong to the latter category; they are illnesses undignified by causality and its boisterous claims on reality. Metaphors. To suffer from a syndrome is to suffer without receipts. One learns to wean oneself off the false promise of reason. One becomes apologetic. Yes, it is a real condition; No, we don't know what; why; how.

During a discussion with J about the artist Leila Hekmat’s latest installation and performance work, Female Remedy, which—in the artist’s words—deals with “the incurable experience of being Female,” I find myself shedding a usual pessimism in matters of art [7]. The role of art is not to heal, but to invent new illnesses and— in a second instance—cure them. What is at stake here is nothing less than hope itself: the hope for illness to be, once again, possible. For only through illness can we heal; only through healing can we afford illness. Before care, before cure, there must exist the possibility of being sick.

Medicine demands sovereignty of its sick subjects. There is an ego-syntony; a coherence between psyche, soma, and subject that is required—a degree of individuation that is necessitated—before one can be considered worthy of illness. The aforementioned medically unexplained syndromes, defined by lack—of form, etiology, empirical evidence—elide legible capture. They are conditions that remain outside “meaning like a phantom that dissipates by day and that nonetheless is never lacking, since to be lacking is its sign."[8] In the attempt to make suffering legible, the diagnoses we graft upon medically unexplained conditions efface them. The absence of illness is conflated with an illness of absence. Seeing the ghost is mistaken for not seeing the ghost. At times, it is mistaken for not seeing at all.

4.

In The Shell and the Kernel, French Hungarian psychoanalysts Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok conceptualise the phantom as the unconscious inheritance of the subject transmitted via transgenerational haunting. Through a series of case studies including that of a man, his rocks, and his butterflies, Abraham and Torok argue that on the occasion of parental death, secrets exit their poorly shut crypts and enter the unconscious worlds of children. "The phantom is what works in the unconscious from an unspeakably shameful secret belonging to another..."[9] The significance of Abraham and Torok’s argument lies in their releasing of the unconscious from its ontological circumscription to the individual, effectively introducing a pipeline along which phantomised-because-unspeakable secrets are passed on from parent to child.  "The phantom is a formation of the unconscious that has never been conscious... It passes - in a way yet to be determined - from the parent's unconscious to the child's."[10] Though seeking refuge in their progeny’s psyche, the phantom nevertheless refuses to become incorporated within it. Situated at this vantage point of an outside within, the phantom continues to protect its constitutive secret, sabotaging the child’s attempts at its conscious unraveling. As such, the phantom does not belong to its inheritor: its secret is never ours. "What haunts are not the dead, but the gaps left within us by the secrets of others."[11]

5.

A solemn desperation delivers us into the arms of psychoanalysis: the watering hole around which the gathered have long relinquished their search for answers, content with uncovering better questions. No longer why am I sick, or when will I get better, but how does my illness haunt me and how do I bring its ghost to life. 

In her 1996 biography of Virgina Woolf, Hermione Lee begins the chapter entitled “Madness” with an apology. “Virigina Woolf was a sane woman with an illness.”[12] 

Illness is our greatest secret; sanity is the price we pay for it.

[1] Hiroshima Mon Amour. United States: Zenith International Films, 1959.

[2] G.D. Kerr, J.M. Hwang, and R.M. Jones, “A Mathematical Model of a Phantom Developed for Use in Calculations of Radiation Dose of the Body and Major Internal Organs” (Oak Ridge, Tennesse: Oak Ridge National Laboratory, May 1976).

[3] Maurice Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster, trans. Ann Smock (Lincoln: University Of Nebraska Press, 1995).

[4] Frantz Fanon, Jean Khalfa, and Robert Young, Alienation and Freedom (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2018), 295.

[5] Plutarch, “Concerning the Face Which Appears in the Orb of the Moon,” in Moralia (Loeb Classical Library, 1957).

[6]“...But no question is ontologically rhetorical… To convert a rhetorical question into an actual one is to engage in a political action about what gets taken for granted: to refuse, to out, what is left unsaid.” Lauren Berlant, On the Inconvenience of Other People (Duke University Press, 2022), 137.

[7] Leila Hekmat, Symptom Recital: Music for Wild Angels (unpublished manuscript, September 2022).

[8] Maurice Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation (Minneapolis ; London: University Of Minnesota Press, 2016), 304.

[9] Nicolas Abraham, “Notes on the Phantom: A Complement to Freud’s Metapsychology,” in The Shell and the Kernel : Renewals of Psychoanalysis, trans. Nicholas T Rand (Chicago: University Of Chicago Press, 1994), 171–76.

[10] Ibid.

[11] Ibid.

[12] Hermione Lee, Virginia Woolf (London: Vintage, 1997).