Susanna Kaysen

I am reading Susanna Kaysen's book, The Camera My Mother Gave Me... And last night we started watching Away From Her, the film for which Julie Christie received an Oscar nod. Aging is bringing about a whole slew of insecurities and troubles for me. The notion that your body or your mind can just turn on you is truly frightening. The changes in my skin and hair bother me already, I can't imagine if my mind began to go - it's truly terrifying.

The Susanna Kaysen book is all about her vagina and the fact that something went horribly wrong with it - it hurt all the time. But no one can find anything wrong with her - it's like a phantom limb. So, it seems that it's not necessarily her body turning against her. Her mind might be doing it.

Months ago I read this fascinating article in the New Yorker about itching. It recounted the story of a woman who had this phantom itch on her scalp and an uncontrollable desire to scratch it. She managed to control the urge while awake, but once she fell asleep all bets were off. She finally scratched all the way through to her brain fluid - all the way through her scalp. The thing is, it was all neurological. Some scientist doing research on phantom limb pain figured out that one thing that seemed to work was using mirrors to give the illusion that the limb was there. When the patient's mind was fooled into seeing the limb and the person could scratch the phantom, the brain let go of the itch or the pain or what-have-you.