Philip Y. Kao PhD thesis - Research@StAndrews:FullText

Furthermore, the post-Cartesian mind and body have given over to a particular dualism,
namely that the mind abstracts from experience what it deems necessary and existential,
and the body becomes the locus of feelings—the contraction of an embodiment so that
our cyborg selves help us to mediate between what is real and what is phantom. Crites
describes the threat to personhood, but not in those exact words, in the following:
Both mind and body are reifications of particular functions that have
been wrenched from the concrete temporality of the conscious self.
The self is not a composite of mind and body. The self in its
concreteness is indivisible, temporal, and whole, as it is revealed to be
in the narrative quality of its experience. Neither disembodied minds
nor mindless bodies can appear in stories. There the self is given
whole […] (Crites 1971, 309).
More than metaphysics is at stake in this bifurcation of experience against the narrative
form. It is not just that telling stories is therapeutic in the usual way narrative strategies
are employed in the context of gerontological discourse, but that through the antinarrative
nature of caregiving practices, which attend to the body in its instantaneous
form without entering into the world of time with others through the narrative form that
structures human consciousness and social experience, people are alienated not only
from their experience of ageing, but from life’s dramatic tension and musicality
altogether. I want to suggest that Crites’s argument for the narrative form is inherently
an argument about our existential nature in time. For the purposes of caregiving and
ageing, there seems to be very little in the way we approach time in places like the CCRC.
This is not because it is a secular institution with death denial as one of its services, but
rather caregiving seems to have separated temporality into a spatial arrangement so
that persons can age in place, according to institutional routines, procedures, transitions
and transfers. Providing care for an elderly person is very different from providing care
for a baby. People often equate the two, citing overlapping types of dependency, but
there are significant physical and ontological differences. Older persons have larger
bodies; their skin has a different texture and elasticity. The elderly have also lived
longer; their experiences (and affective personhood) are the extended products of a
particular temporal trajectory, which babies are only beginning to come to terms with.
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