Selfhood and Love

In Jean-Paul Sartre’s short story “The Room,” Eve’s husband, Pierre, is afflicted with an unspecified mental illness involving memory loss and hallucinations. Eve’s father is frustrated with her, primarily because he never liked Pierre. He thinks Pierre should be taken away and is convinced that Eve doesn’t really love Pierre. But Eve clings to Pierre and insists that they stay together, while she takes care of him. As Pierre’s condition deteriorates, Eve tries to empathize with his hallucinations, attempting to be something she is not.

Viewed one way, Eve demonstrates the ultimate act of love and sacrifice: staying with someone through their sickness, trying to fully grasp the reality of their experience.

The view that particularly draws my attention is the perspective of Pierre and those with a progressive mental illness generally. What is more terrifying than yourself dissolving before your family’s and your own eyes? Everything that can possibly be called your identity gradually is stripped away by disease, and “you,” the essence of who you are, becomes something not “you.” Interestingly, this is a case against the psychological theory of identity, which is essentially the idea that a person's identity is determined by their conscious experiences and memories. Because although Pierre is no longer Pierre psychologically, for instance he calls Eve Agatha, Eve treats him as though he is still Pierre.

To me, this speaks to the fundamental human sense of identity. The idea that “I” could cease to exist while my body continues to function is deeply unsettling. I could, one day, be instantly, permanently altered either by an accident, brain disease, or coma, but people would still treat me as if the affliction hadn’t really eliminated my essence. Yet, I argue, it has. That which remained would no longer be me, but you would treat it as if it was me.

When thinking about Pierre's situation in this context, there is an existential fear: the loss of self, which, to me, is equally as disturbing as death. What most people fear about death is not necessarily bodily death, though there is a bit of that too, but the cessation of subjective experience: self-death. (But we don't fear sleep, which is interesting.)

With dementia, Alzheimer's, and related mental diseases, the terror is heightened due to its gradual nature. Slow torture. The collection of your memories are picked apart, and soon that which was so important no longer is.

The question is, why fear the inevitable? It is a fact in this life that we have no control over the eventual termination, or cessation, of our essence. Yet, we desire it. And often we delude ourselves that we have it. For some reason, this conscious agency, this individual will, needs to believe that it has control, in sufficient amount, of its environment, that it can take action towards realizing its variously formed goals and aspirations. Without it, a tendency to descend into a state of apathy, hopelessness, and despair follows.

This brings me back to Pierre. That’s why the state which Pierre embodies is terrifying, in addition to the self-concerned fear of self-loss, there is also the shame, which emerges at the thought of those you know and care about having to ask themselves a brutal question: Do I still love this person? If someone’s personhood has been stripped away from them by forces beyond their control, what does your relationship become?

Two things can begin to happen. First, your affection for them may diminish. Of course it does, that which caused the affection has disappeared. When the traits and characteristics that once defined your bond fade away, what remains to sustain that connection? Second, the lover’s mind is forced to transpose their memories of them onto the placeholder, a familiar body, but foreign mind. Recognizable voice, but alien thoughts.

As the ill experiences themself being taken away, the lover is faced with a stranger in a lover’s body, who they can never come to know. This is, perhaps, the worst aspect of mind-altering conditions: love is tested by having to negotiate with the remaining pieces of a person, their memory and the lover’s commitment to them.

Where is love directed? Is it tied to the essence of the person's identity, or does it exist in the act of choosing to care despite their absence? Sartre’s story invites us to confront these questions, forcing us to reflect on our own fears and capacities for love and identity.