The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time: What can we know about other people’s minds?

I read Mark Haddon’s book, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, some years ago.  So, when I was added to a trip to New York City that my Mother and Son were taking and this play was on the itinerary, I was interested in seeing it.  I realized, waiting for the play to start, that I remembered absolutely nothing about the curious incident in the title.  Had there been a dog?  All I remembered was an absolutely terrifying – I would even say Kafkaesquely or nightmarishly terrifying – trip across London by the fellow I was about to be re-introduced to on stage – Christopher.  Why he was taking this trip – all the details that are part and parcel of the plot (which I will dutifully recount in a moment) had totally escaped me – what was present was the feeling of terror that Christopher – or perhaps more precisely, Christopher as I imagined him – experienced.

So this book – and I think the book is the medium best suited to portray this experience (see a post on August: Osage County for another perspective on differing media) – conveyed the internal experience of someone who is odd.  It did this by telling the story in the first person and allowing the reader to do something uniquely human – and something that Christopher is severely restricted in being able to do – it allowed the reader to empathize with him.  To feel what it is like to be him.  The author had to imagine and create an internal world, and then we, as readers, had to imagine the world as well – to live inside it. 

So – what are we imagining when we imagine the inner world of a person who is odd – so odd that he can’t articulate feelings of others or even his own feelings?  Does he feel something in some remote part of himself that he is unaware of being able to feel?  Or does he have some sort of defect in his mind so that his emotions and emotional reactions to others both can’t and don’t work?  Can he learn to feel these things that we feel as we connect with him, or will that world of feeling and of human connection always be unavailable to him?  These questions and more pile up in my head as I prepare to watch and actually do watch what is a truly moving experience – as I become empathically connected with someone who is remote – but able to communicate – however oddly – from his position of remoteness. (A similar set of questions arises in the context of a very different personality configuration - psychopathy - when he watch House of Cards).

The questions in the last paragraph may seem philosophical or conceptual or academic or intellectual, but they are very real, alive questions for me on an almost daily basis as I listen to patients and try to empathize with them.  How close is my construction of their internal experience?  Time after time I find that what I imagine they are experiencing is something that they deny having felt or thought.  Time after time, if I am able to inhibit my wish to intrude with what I think, I find that they articulate aspects of their experience that are surprising to me and, I think, to themselves.  And it is also the case that across time, sometimes across years, what it is that people are able to articulate about themselves and their experience becomes richer and deeper and what they say morphs in interesting ways.  They discover aspects of themselves, including feelings, that they would have denied existing.  Did they exist previously and they have, through listening to themselves, come to be better able to hear them?  Or have they learned how to feel – have they developed a “skill” that they didn’t have before?  Have I become more attuned to them and am able to hear them better?

This character, Christopher, written by an author, an artist, brings to mind two previous characters – Jordy and David, both from abook written in the 1960s by Theodore Isaac Rubin, a psychiatrist, about two patients – Jordy, an autistic child, whom the author, if I remember correctly, chooses to describe in the first person, and David, another emotionally remote child, a teenager who is characterized as obsessional, and his efforts to connect with other patients in an inpatient setting, including Lisa – a girl diagnosed with multiple personality disorder.  This book was made into a movie and then into a play and that is where I first ran into it – in High School – when I played David on the stage.  My high school director’s mother used to ask him for years afterwards if that boy had gotten better – so I guess my portrayal of the more broken aspects of his character was convincing – but it was convincing not just to her, but to myself.  I found myself identifying with David, connecting with him, and feeling that his struggles were in many ways my struggles.

The irony of the identification with David is that he and I couldn’t be more different in surface ways.  He was emotionally remote and personally well organized.  I tend to be a bit emotionally dramatic and am organizationally challenged at best.  But there was a genuine connection with both his terror – he feared that if others touched him they would kill him – and with his anger – he had dreams of a clock that, in its inexorable counting of minutes, cut off the heads of important people in his life that popped up at the five minute interval spots.  Underneath the particulars of the expression of these emotions, we shared a common humanity that made it hard for me to sort out what was mine and what his as I navigated the treacherous minefield of adolescence.

In this play, Christopher is more like Jordy – who I am remembering as being non-verbal – except that Christopher is both hyper-verbal and mathematically gifted.  But he can’t make it through the day without considerable help because he can’t read the expressions of other people and, though he can explain the Pythagorean Theorem with aplomb – he can’t figure out how to chart a new course to school – there are too many new things that assault him and that need to be categorized and attended to and it all becomes overwhelming.

So what is the incident?  At the beginning of the play and the book, Christopher encounters a dog who has been killed by a garden fork in his neighbor’s yard.  He doesn’t understand what has happened and feels badly that the dog has died.  He is hugging it and his neighbor runs him off, accusing him of having killed it.  He becomes a detective (the title of the play alludes to a Sherlock Holmes novel to discover what happened).  He interviews people in the neighborhood to discover clues, something that his father is opposed to.  In the process of doing this, a neighbor confides that his father had an affair with the woman who owned the dog.  Trying to find out more about this, Christopher discovers letters from his mother – whom his father has told him died.  He is overwhelmed by this, and his father discovers him curled up in a ball having vomited all over himself.  The father gingerly cleans him up (Christopher, like David, does not like to be touched) and explains that his mother had an affair with the man next door, and then ran away with him and he lied about that to Christopher because he didn’t know how to explain what had happened.  Further, the father acknowledges that he killed the dog when he was angry with the woman next door not reciprocating his affection for her.

What a complicated stew, and, as complicated as it might be, I don’t think that is why I forgot it.  As I sat in the audience – and maybe you experienced this reading the synopsis above – a whole series of thoughts unfolds about Christopher’s reactions to these multiple revelations.  His mother is alive?  Joy.  His father killed the dog?  Anger, fear, but also curiosity about what went on with the neighbor woman.  The scary neighbor man ran off with his mother?  Again – anger, but also some sense of why his father might be angry.  But this is not Christopher’s experience at all.  And to be fair – I didn’t really expect it to be.  We have been introduced to Christopher as a remote, mathematical kid – the stage, a perfect cube with black with white dots laid out in geometrical regularity on the floor and the two walls, is clearly a representation of his mind.  He talks with a therapist at a special school and he is decidedly odd.  So we wonder what his reaction will be.

His reaction is one of terror – and the flight on the underground is the result of the revelations from his father.  He focuses on one fact – that his father murdered the dog and he generalizes from that to the fear that his father will murder him.  It is clear that he does not see a difference between murdering a dog and murdering a human and he fears that his father – by far the more patient of his two parents – actually a paragon of patience – though with a lot of pent up anger about caring for Christopher and being left by his wife – and with some impulse control – will kill him.  So he runs.  Is he excited about re-connecting with his mother?  He is angry that he has been lied to – but her revivification seems mostly to mean that she is on the list of possible safe havens and he chooses to run to her because she is less threatening than the other options – not because he is attached to her.

I think that my forgetting do many details of the book (details Christopher surely would have remembered) is because they were unimportant to me – especially in the first person rendition.  Though Christopher would have remembered them - they were unimportant to him - they were related as facts about which he did not have feeling and, for me, without the feeling, there is little to hang onto - while for him facts are what the world is built of - truly cold and hard facts that evoke no particular feeling - his mother is either alive or dead - his father is either a safe person or not.  What we both agreed was important was the terror he felt – first of the father and then of all the confusing impediments on the trip to find the mother.  And the terror of that was well portrayed on stage – though we were necessarily seeing Christopher as an object – something that I couldn’t help but do when reading the book as well – but in the staged version we had to work from the outside in - imagining his internal state from what we saw – where in reading the book the challenge was to stay within the frame of Christopher’s perspective and not to imagine too clearly how easy it actually would be to navigate the system and how challenging it was for him.  Of course, the play has the ability to jangle us with lights and sounds – something that augments our appreciation of his experience as we are jangled along with him.

Christopher’s diagnosis, like that of Jordy, is one of autism, though he is on the Asperger’s end of the autistic spectrum meaning that he intelligence - his ability to communicate verbally and to do other normal human cognitive tasks - it at least in the normal range.  I have written elsewhere about a child on the autism spectrum reported on in the New York Times.  The reluctant son was coincidentally reading Temple Grandin’s book Thinking in Pictures (Temple Grandin is also diagnosed as being autistic) and, though she is not particularly good at empathizing with people, she gets the terror of animals and uses that to help them feel more at peace as they approach being slaughtered.  Hollywood's version of Autism is the wonderful film Rain Man.  Though each of these people share a diagnosis, they are very different individuals and it was, according to an interview with Terry Gross, Mark Haddon’s intent not to portray Asperger’s syndrome, about which he is not an expert, but the character Christopher. 

So – how well has he done that?  How well does his experience of Christopher and mine – as both a reader and a theater goer and yours, based on this and other experiences of the character Christopher, line up with the experience of a human being?  How well does my experience of David when I am enacting him – or my patients when I am listening to them – match with their lived experience?  How well does your experience of me through what I have written track to who it is that I am – and who should we use to measure that?  Is my perspective the most valid?  Or the reluctant wife’s?  Or my mother?  Or my children?  Who knows us best?  Art allows us a particular portal, a particular lens through which to view this thing we call life.  Science allows us another.  I would maintain that psychoanalysis - a blending of art and science - allows both the analyst and the analysand an additional portal.  Whichever viewpoint we use, all of we see of ourselves and others gets filtered through our own humanity – our own particular personality - that weighs and measures and connects and disconnects from various aspects of the other. 

I think that what Christopher has the most access to in his emotional life is fear.  In both the book – but also in the play – we can connect with that part of his experience.  It is harder – even when he pops up after the play is over to explain the Pythagorean Theorum - to resonate with his geometrical understanding of the world.  There is an appreciation of that – both from the language and the style of the book and from seeing what he does on stage (and how his world is portrayed by the geometrical styling of the play), but this is a conceptual understanding – not a felt or empathic one.  So it is ironic that our connection with this kid who had so much trouble connecting is along the pipeline that we use to connect – the emotions that he feels.  Will he, as we continue to do that, become more competent at travelling that highway?  That becomes a question that he and his therapist and the other people in his world will need to address together - and the play ends with that as a very open question.

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