Phobia
As a child, I used to be frightened, to the point of diagnosable phobia, of human corpses. Even the thought would send me into a literal panic.
I can thank my stepfathers (though I can thank them for little else) for teaching me to live with fear, and teaching me that fearing something is a weakness. By the age of twelve, I had started deliberately using progressive desensitization to deal with my phobia, because I did not want to have such an easily exploitable weakness. I started out with words in the dictionary; it was years before I managed pictures. Eventually I moved on to studying Egyptian funerary customs, superstitions surrounding the dead, modern funerals, and oddly enough, zombies. This took me until about the age of twenty, at which point I would say I no longer had a diagnosable phobia.
By the age of twenty, I was able to safely work with the corpse of an animal in my biology class. At twenty-five, I started taking anatomy classes for my biomedical engineering degree; and I spent a lot of hours in the gross anatomy lab, looking at the cadavers to learn human anatomy.
My feelings currently are usually fascination with the intricacy of the human body, and the way all the systems work together, and how individual and unique every human being is. Looking at a textbook, with just diagrams, it all seems so neat and simple; but real human beings aren't like that. They're complicated; and everybody is just a little different.
I am usually aware that I am working with human cadavers. It's very obvious that they are not people; even when they are quite intact, my brain doesn't put them in the same category as "people", or for that matter even the same as the category I put people and animals into. But I do get rather melancholy about it; those bodies used to belong to people who used to be alive; and I feel really grateful that they decided to let us learn from their bodies.
It's funny; when you don't categorize a cadaver as human, studying the reproductive system doesn't feel like any sort of an "invasion of privacy". What feels as though you are on forbidden territory isn't what we hide in life; it's the brain--the thing that makes us who we are. When we studied the brain, I felt very reverent; because that is what stored the information that made up that human being, and the brain is a great deal more personal than just reproductive organs.
I think maybe I can learn more easily from cadavers than my classmates can; because for them it is still "freaky", especially to see faces and hands. They are going on instinct, I think; the instinct that says, "That's a dead thing; it's unhealthy to touch it; so you should stay away." They're reacting to the Uncanny Valley. Something that looks like it ought to be a living thing, but doesn't move right, or doesn't move, or doesn't look quite living, is naturally something that provokes fear and disgust. And that makes sense; cave-men who don't stay away from corpses tend to get nasty diseases and don't live to bring in the next generation. It's an adaptive thing.
But I seemed to have skipped that "freaky" reaction entirely. For me, it was never "freaky". It was either paralyzingly terrifying, because of the reality of death; or else it was fascinating because of the mystery and beauty of life.
I can thank my stepfathers (though I can thank them for little else) for teaching me to live with fear, and teaching me that fearing something is a weakness. By the age of twelve, I had started deliberately using progressive desensitization to deal with my phobia, because I did not want to have such an easily exploitable weakness. I started out with words in the dictionary; it was years before I managed pictures. Eventually I moved on to studying Egyptian funerary customs, superstitions surrounding the dead, modern funerals, and oddly enough, zombies. This took me until about the age of twenty, at which point I would say I no longer had a diagnosable phobia.
By the age of twenty, I was able to safely work with the corpse of an animal in my biology class. At twenty-five, I started taking anatomy classes for my biomedical engineering degree; and I spent a lot of hours in the gross anatomy lab, looking at the cadavers to learn human anatomy.
My feelings currently are usually fascination with the intricacy of the human body, and the way all the systems work together, and how individual and unique every human being is. Looking at a textbook, with just diagrams, it all seems so neat and simple; but real human beings aren't like that. They're complicated; and everybody is just a little different.
I am usually aware that I am working with human cadavers. It's very obvious that they are not people; even when they are quite intact, my brain doesn't put them in the same category as "people", or for that matter even the same as the category I put people and animals into. But I do get rather melancholy about it; those bodies used to belong to people who used to be alive; and I feel really grateful that they decided to let us learn from their bodies.
It's funny; when you don't categorize a cadaver as human, studying the reproductive system doesn't feel like any sort of an "invasion of privacy". What feels as though you are on forbidden territory isn't what we hide in life; it's the brain--the thing that makes us who we are. When we studied the brain, I felt very reverent; because that is what stored the information that made up that human being, and the brain is a great deal more personal than just reproductive organs.
I think maybe I can learn more easily from cadavers than my classmates can; because for them it is still "freaky", especially to see faces and hands. They are going on instinct, I think; the instinct that says, "That's a dead thing; it's unhealthy to touch it; so you should stay away." They're reacting to the Uncanny Valley. Something that looks like it ought to be a living thing, but doesn't move right, or doesn't move, or doesn't look quite living, is naturally something that provokes fear and disgust. And that makes sense; cave-men who don't stay away from corpses tend to get nasty diseases and don't live to bring in the next generation. It's an adaptive thing.
But I seemed to have skipped that "freaky" reaction entirely. For me, it was never "freaky". It was either paralyzingly terrifying, because of the reality of death; or else it was fascinating because of the mystery and beauty of life.