Blind

A patient called TN, who was cortically blind, exhibited what is called affective blindsight. He was able to react spontaneously to facial expressions, with an appropriate emotional response accompanied by activity in the right amygdala, even though he denied that he had seen anything.

McGilchrist uses affective blindsight to argue that emotional and relational perception operates below conscious awareness, demonstrating the right hemisphere’s nonconscious visual capacities.

McGilchrist, Iain, The Matter with Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World, 2021thesis

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A patient called TN, who was cortically blind, exhibited what is called affective blindsight. He was able to react spontaneously to facial expressions, with an appropriate emotional response accompanied by activity in the right amygdala, even though he denied that he had seen anything.

This passage establishes that cortical blindness leaves intact a nonconscious affective visual system, dissociating phenomenal experience from functional response — a cornerstone of McGilchrist’s hemispheric theory.

McGilchrist, Iain, The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World, 2021thesis

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There is a revealing condition called blindsight. This strange affliction is due to damage to a part of the visual cortex on one side of the brain… patients are unaware of seeing anything at all… Yet detailed experiments show that while denying all visual experience, they can nevertheless point to the location of a flashed light.

Levine invokes blindsight to map the dissociation between conscious and nonconscious stimulus-response systems onto the body’s capacity to register and respond to threat outside awareness — directly supporting his somatic trauma theory.

Levine, Peter A., In an Unspoken Voice: How the Body Releases Trauma and Restores Goodness, 2010thesis

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Although individuals with these impairments report being completely blind, they can accurately identify the locations of moving objects in their visual fields. This ‘blindsight’ has perplexed students of consciousness, for it highlights how wrong our conscious understanding of our behavioral abilities can be.

Panksepp positions blindsight as evidence that ancient subcortical visual systems operate independently of cortical consciousness, revealing the limits of self-knowledge and the depth of nonconscious processing.

Panksepp, Jaak, Affective Neuroscience The Foundations of Human and Animal, 1998thesis

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Nowhere, too, are we more blind. Is love blindfolded, in statuary and painting, only to show us its compulsion, ignorance, and sensuous unconsciousness? Love blinds in order to extinguish the wrong and daily vision so that another eye may be opened that perceives from soul to soul.

Hillman redeems the mythic blindness of Eros as a purposive extinction of habitual ego-vision in order to open a deeper, soul-level perception — transforming blindness from defect into initiatory necessity.

Hillman, James, The Myth of Analysis: Three Essays in Archetypal Psychology, 1972thesis

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The experience of persons blind from birth and operated upon for cataract has never proved, and could never prove, that for them space begins with sight. Yet the patient never ceases to marvel at this visual space to which he has just gained access, and compared to which tactile experience seems to him so poor.

Merleau-Ponty uses the congenitally blind patient who receives sight to argue that the senses are not merely additive but that vision reconstitutes the entire spatial organisation of existence.

Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, Phenomenology of Perception, 1962thesis

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The first great disturbance, we have just said, is the dissociation of the ensemble of vision. In other terms, it is hysterical blindness… the subject always keeps as much as possible the essential functions, and loses only a part of the vision.

Janet frames hysterical blindness as a paradigmatic instance of dissociation, in which a visual sub-system splits off from integrated consciousness while preserving residual function — foundational for the dissociation model of psychopathology.

Janet, Pierre, The Major Symptoms of Hysteria, 1907thesis

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Under the circumstances of congenital blindness, the specialized nerve cells responsible for the visual perception of shape and spatial orientation are negatively affected… If, however, that first perception does not take place, if, for example, the infant is born blind, then, lacking visual experience, not only will the proper neuronal development n[ot occur].

Gallagher establishes that congenital blindness disrupts neuronal development in the visual cortex, supporting the claim that embodied perceptual experience is constitutive rather than merely supplementary to neural organisation.

Gallagher, Shaun, How the Body Shapes the Mind, 2005supporting

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having been both blind and ‘handless’ since birth, she was lacking in the simplest internal images… she might have remained almost as helpless as a baby. A bagel was recognised as round bread, with a hole in it; a fork as an elongated flat object with several sharp lines.

Sacks illustrates how congenital absence of both vision and proprioception forces an entirely inferential and linguistic mode of object-recognition, demonstrating the body’s constitutive role in forming perceptual imagery.

Sacks, Oliver, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, 1985supporting

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‘I feel my body is blind and deaf to itself… it has no sense of itself’ – these are her own words. She has no words, no direct words, to describe this bereftness, this sensory darkness (or silence) akin to blindness or deafness.

Sacks uses blindness as an analogical frame through which a proprioceptively impaired patient articulates the radical alienation from her own body — linking blindness to the loss of bodily self-awareness.

Sacks, Oliver, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, 1985supporting

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the Powerful, Blind, and Immortal One, who wandered longingly after the sinking sun, who wanted to cleave the ocean down to its bottom so he could descend into the source of life… His power is great and blind.

Jung personifies blind power as an instinctual, unconscious force of mythic proportion — a god-like compulsion that moves toward depths without reflective sight, central to his imaginative account of the unconscious.

Jung, Carl Gustav, The Red Book: Liber Novus, 2009supporting

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The ideational content of their anxiety is the danger that they may be blinded. Psycho-analytic literature has hitherto given no special consideration to the disturbances which I have thus briefly described.

Abraham analyses neurotic fear of blinding as an anxiety with unconscious psychosexual determinants, linking scopophilic drives and castration anxiety to phobic disturbances of vision.

Abraham, Karl, Selected Papers on Psychoanalysis, 1927supporting

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a young man who had been affected since childhood by a dread of darkness and by an obstinate phobia of becoming blind. Later on he had a disturbance of vision which was at once diagnosed by an eye specialist as neurotic.

Abraham documents how a phobia of blindness generates actual neurotic visual disturbance, illustrating the somatic conversion of unconscious anxiety about vision and its symbolic valences.

Abraham, Karl, Selected Papers on Psychoanalysis, 1927supporting

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a blind was placed in such a way as to block his view of his hands… Ian did not gesture at all; his hands remained clasped in his lap. He explained this lack of gesture as a decision he made not to gesture because he was not sure of the space his hands were in.

Gallagher demonstrates that blocking visual access to the body destabilises the deafferented patient’s intentional motor action, revealing the degree to which vision substitutes for absent proprioception in body-schema maintenance.

Gallagher, Shaun, How the Body Shapes the Mind, 2005supporting

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has been blind from birth, but has suffered no neuronal deterioration in the visual cortex, has learned to discriminate a cube from a sphere by touch.

Gallagher sets out the parameters of the Molyneux thought-experiment, using congenital blindness as the theoretical baseline for examining whether intermodal perceptual transfer is innate or acquired.

Gallagher, Shaun, How the Body Shapes the Mind, 2005supporting

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young men, wishing to avoid military service, maintain that they are blind of the right eye… The army surgeon charged with the inspection has certainly a right to express some doubt, when he does not recognize any objective disturbance in this eye and sees the pupil react to light.

Janet distinguishes simulated blindness from hysterical blindness through oculist detection methods, clarifying the differential diagnosis between feigned and genuinely dissociated visual loss.

Janet, Pierre, The Major Symptoms of Hysteria, 1907supporting

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A blind man sees his darkness. But you cannot see any gap in your vision at all, let alone be conscious of it in any way. Just as the space around the blind spots is joined without any gap at all, so consciousness knits itself over its time gaps and gives the illusion of continuity.

Jaynes uses the visual blind spot as an analogy for consciousness’s capacity to paper over its own discontinuities, illustrating the constructive and self-obscuring nature of conscious experience.

Julian Jaynes, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, 1976aside

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Although antidepressant trials are intended to be double-blind, the blind is easily penetrated because the adverse side effects of antidepressant medications are physically discernible and widely known.

Shedler notes that the methodological blind in pharmacotherapy trials is compromised by side-effect recognition, qualifying the evidential weight attributed to antidepressant effect sizes.

Shedler, Jonathan, The Efficacy of Psychodynamic Psychotherapy, 2010aside

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