78. Despite categorical assertions by many that “congenital” phantoms cannot occur, there have been several reports (as Scatena has noted in a review of the subject) indicating that some people with aplasia—congenitally defective or absent limbs—do have phantoms. Klaus Poeck, in 1964, described an eleven-year-old girl born without forearms or hands who was able to “move” her phantom hands. As Poeck wrote, “In her first years at school, she had learned to solve simple arithmetic problems by counting with her fingers. . . . On these occasions she would place her phantom hands on the table and count the outstretched fingers one by one.”
It is not clear why some people born without limbs have phantoms and some do not. What is clear, as Funk, Shiffrar, and Brugger observed in one study, is that those who do have phantoms seem to have cerebral “action observation systems” similar to those of normally limbed people, allowing them to grasp action patterns by observing others and to internalize these as mobile phantoms. Those born without limbs who do not have phantoms, Funk et al. propose, may have problems in motion perception, especially judging the movements of other people’s limbs.
79. When Henry Head introduced the term “body image” (fifty or so years after Weir Mitchell had introduced the term “phantom limb”), he did not mean it to refer to a purely sensory image or map in the brain—he had in mind an image or model of agency and action, and it is this which needs to be embodied in an artificial limb.
Philosophers like to speak of “embodiment” and “embodied agency,” and there is no simpler place to study this than in the nature of phantoms and their
embodiment in artificial limbs—prosthesis and phantom go together like body and soul. I have wondered whether some of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s philosophical notions were suggested by his
brother’s phantom arm—thus his final work,
80. Wade Davis describes this in his book
81. Nonetheless, Nelson regarded his phantom as “a direct proof for the existence of the soul.” The survival of a spiritual arm after a corporeal one was annihilated, he thought, epitomized the survival of the soul after bodily death.
For Captain Ahab, however, this was a matter for horror as much as wonder: “And if I still feel the smart of my crushed leg, though it be now so long dissolved; then, why mayst not thou, carpenter, feel the fiery pains of hell forever, and without a body? Hah!”
82. This story, “The Man Who Fell Out of Bed,” is related more fully in
83. Several people have written to me with similar stories of sensing a presence just as they are going to sleep or waking. Linda P. observed that once, as she was drifting off to sleep, she felt “as if I was being held on my right side, as if someone had put their arms around me and was stroking my hair. It was a lovely feeling; then I remembered that I was alone, and [the feeling disappeared].”
