Knowing More by Knowing Less? A Reading of Give Me Everything You Have. On Being Stalked by James Lasdun, London: Jonathan Cape, 2013

Abstract

James Lasdun’s memoir of being stalked, Give Me Everything You Have, has provoked considerable controversy. Whilst the quality of the writing is widely praised, some critics object to the way Lasdun documents in unsparing detail his experiences without taking any account of the stalker’s apparent mental health problems. There are ethical and conceptual problems with Lasdun’s approach, but side-stepping medical knowledge and relying on what we might call common sense help Lasdun to find ways to interpret his stalker’s actions as meaningful and human. I suggest three interlinked implications concerning: medicalization, stigma, and the relationship between ethics and scientific knowledge.

Endnotes

¹ Perhaps this review article reproduces them by referring to the author by his surname, and the stalker by her first name, uneasily recalling, perhaps, popular media usage. We are accustomed to hearing of our leaders by the title and surname - President Obama, Prime Minister Cameron, but our foes by their first name only - Saddam, Osama).

² For a recent and straightforward typology, see Cowie 2013.

³ Bowker and Leigh Star put it this way: ‘We call this agglomeration torque, a twisting of time lines that pull against each other, and bend or twist both patient biography and the process of metrication. When all are aligned, there is no sense of torque or stress; when they pull against each other over a long period, a nightmare texture emerges. (1999, 27)

⁴ It is striking that investigations of personhood in social and medical anthropology have produced work that echoes Lasdun here. For example in the classic anthropological study Fluid Signs: Being a Person the Tamil Way, Daniel found that in Tamil Nadu, south India, people do not think of themselves or experience themselves as discrete and sealed individual units but, rather, more as ‘fluid’ and open. This openness means people take on the qualities of their community, their village, their home region, and, more broadly, to the cosmos itself.

⁵ The impact of constructing knowledge this way is complex. One social arena where this is felt is medical school. In his classic ethnography of medical training, Making Doctors, Sinclair notes a cognitive narrowing in medical students that he attributes in part to their way that knowledge is conceptualized in medical school:

Most students share the assumptions underlying proper scientific knowledge, which (in something more like their own terms) is not a matter of personal opinion but a generalisable, reproducible, apolitical, communally demonstrable (and therefore visible), historically progressive revelation of indisputable and uncontentious objective fact about the real world, expressed in a precise and unambiguous language with material referents. (1997, 140)

We might wonder if, ironically, ideas found in the DSM 5, like ‘underlying mechanisms’ themselves function like underlying mechanisms are said to do, in that they are consequential, yet are relatively undefined and hidden from view.

⁶ For a recent critique of the DSM classifications, see Davies 2013.

⁷ Whether or not they are provisional is a matter of debate. Some commentators argue that it is an intrinsic quality of science that it is unable to accommodate the mental world (Nagel 2012). Tallis calls attempts to do so ‘neuromania’ (2013). Scruton suggests: ‘evolutionary psychology and neuroscience… [describe] a world from which human action, intention, responsibility, freedom and emotion have been wiped away: it will be a world without a face’ (2012, 49).

⁸ The power and urgency of the early classics is startling and inspiring. Goffman’s Stigma (1963) and Scheff’s Being Mentally Ill (1966) have been seminal works in the medical humanities.