Most of us, readers of this book, will only know what it is to have a disabled mind from the outside looking in. As a counseling/clinical psychologist, I knew disabled minds from interviewing their possessors, and from a neurology textbook, and from the observations that informed Abraham Maslow, especially in his Motivation and Personality. I had memorized favorite lines: about the brain-injured people he observed, he wrote “Capacities clamor to be used,” and he developed his ideas about self-actualization from observing the small and large gains of people with disabled minds.

How can a disabled mind earn first a Master of Science degree in Semitic languages from the demanding courses at the Middle East Center of the University of Utah, and then a Ph.D. in Religious Studies from the world-class University of Pennsylvania and its Department of Religious Studies?

I didn’t forget any of this after the accident; I could still have taken the national exam for certifying psychologists, that tests knowledge of the field, and passed on the first try. I still knew the stuff from books. “Capacities clamor to be used” became my mantra. But how to use them? Nine months after the accident I went back to school at the University of Utah. I audited classes. One class was Assessment Interviewing; it concentrated on the first, or intake, interview–that’s from the point of view of the mental health professional. We were to master some theory, and then try our hand at being televised interviewing each other. Now you need to know that graduate students in psychology and educational psychology would do their damndest to present extreme levels of pathology and craziness. The interview I did, and taped, involves a graduate student playing patient. She was one of the best at playing crazy, either presenting clients she had observed or interviewed, or digging deep into the craziness we all have, but don’t usually get to live out.

I know that the ordeal of this interview for me, playing the therapist, was that I still, ten months after the accident, could not remember any part of the interview that had taken place more than 20 minutes ago. Fortunately, my classmate played crazy in such a way that she simply shifted her self-presentation every three minutes or so. All I had to do was to follow her shifts, not remember anything she had said at the beginning. I still have the tape.

Watching the tape, I knew what I had lost. I had never known, never been told, how good a listener/therapist I actually was. Now I could see, now I knew, now I could no longer do.

Somewhere in the rehabilitation experience I went, was encouraged to go, to a support group for people with head injuries. One young woman, there with her mother, was trying to explain, with the help of the group, her current sense of self. She tried out the idea of having two personalities, and then said, “That’s not it.” From my own experience, I suggested, “It’s more like having double vision, or a photograph that has double exposure. The person you were before the accident can still be seen, but there’s another sort of person over that, and you’re aware of both.”

So this chapter, on “A Disabled Mind,” is about a double vision–the mind that was, and the disabled mind. Counseling and clinical psychologists learn to observe themselves as much as their clients: I can write this chapter from memory of that continued, insistent, self-observation. At the same time, I had profound short-term memory loss.

Just now, in real time, as I write this, I got up to microwave a snack. The task required using the kitchen scissors, which are usually right near the microwave. Then I remembered: last night I had used them to disassemble to heavy cardboard box that had contained the multifunction printer I just installed. The instant I remembered when I had used them last, I could see in my mind where the scissors would be found. I went and found them and used them to prepare my snack. Nothing unusual, is it?

For the disabled mind, such a feat is outside possibility. The trace of remembered location has disappeared. Everything has to be put back in the same place, the same place, the same place. That’s the first self-training. Put it back where it belongs. Simple. And terrifying: put it back where it belongs, or you will never find it.

Over and over, as I put things back, I also visualized where I was putting them. After all, I also had to remember the “where it belongs” part. I lived alone; there was no one to tell me where to find something, where its place actually was.

After ten or twelve years, in the middle of my graduate study at the University of Pennsylvania, I suddenly had a day when I just knew–just “remembered”–where something was, without having to search for the visual picture of where I might have put it. I began to be free to risk putting something down in the wrong place, as long as I visualized it there. I began to remember the last time I had used something, what I had done with it, and where I would find it. One triumph.

If such a simple thing as remembering where I put things was so difficult, how to account for earning a Master of Science degree in Semitic languages from the rigorous program at the Middle East Center of the University of Utah, and then a Ph.D. in Religious Studies from the world-class University of Pennsylvania?

In the beginning, it was the work of “Jewish fathers.” If Jewish mothers are proverbial in their own way, it is probably because it was their sons who did so much writing about them. In my case, there were so many Jewish fathers who fostered my continued education. And one woman psychologist, connected to Holy Cross Hospital.

To backstep for a moment, in the fall trimester before the accident, I had taken the introductory course in modern Hebrew–my escape from AIDS Prevention work. In the third trimester of that academic year (1988-1989) I tried to complete the work in Hebrew. In that summer, or the next, I took second year Hebrew with the Consortium of Western Colleges that sponsored a rotating summer intensive language series. In the fall trimester of 1989, just nine months after the accident, I audited Biblical Hebrew Narrative with Harris Lenowitz. I told him it would be a mitzvah for me to be his student. I guess that convinced him to take me on, despite the lack of a third year of modern Hebrew.

In the trimester before the accident, I could look at a page of vocabulary for ten minutes and answer a quiz on the material with 90 to 100 percent accuracy. In the Spring trimester, that easy acquisition of vocabulary and grammar had gone missing from my mind. How to learn what I needed to know? I read, I went to synagogue (I think), I tried to absorb language as a child does. What I could master and remember, often, were distinctions about grammar and syntax. The advantage, if you will, of brain-damaged minds is being able to approach a learning task without preconceptions. So what if Classical Hebrew is Verb-Subject-Object in sentence arrangement? So what if adding a single letter reverses a verb from past to future? That was easy.

I couldn’t remember conjugations–but locating roots was generally not hard. I couldn’t remember suffixes and prefixes according to their particular use–but recognizing the particular intent of a specific conjugation was generally not hard.

The Jewish fathers–where do they come in? I had just transferred from Latter Day Saints Hospital to Holy Cross Hospital at the end of January when Rabbi Wenger, of Congregation Kol Ami, came to visit me for the second time. I was still not remembering anything more than the most recent five minutes of a conversation, at that time. Rabbi Wenger, with perfect faith, brought me his first Hebrew grammar, and gave it to me to have, to read, in the hospital. I thought it the height of foolishness; no more excursions in learning. I would do well if I could manage to get one foot in front of another while supported by parallel bars, and make it to the end of the apparatus. That would be an excursion. I had no mind to learn with; I had a disabled mind.

The second Jewish father was Bert ? , who was in charge of the synagogue’s Mitzvah Committee. He helped my mother pack up our apartment and put things in storage; he visited fairly often, and gently told me that my recurring anger at everything was a hopeful sign toward recovery. He found foster homes for our cats, Lucy and Linus. He took me to the storage barn, after I had found a more accessible place to live, and helped me look over the stuff that was there.

Larry Loeb was my third Jewish father, a bit later. As Laury Loeb, he was the Cantor of Congregation Kol Ami. As Larry Loeb, he was a well-published scholar of sociology. In 1991, the year before I applied to, and was accepted by, the University of Pennsylvania, he gave me the “scholar’s aliyah.” I was called up to the Torah during Sukkot for a specific Aliyah that recognizes scholars in the congregation. There were many others there he might have called, and I always wondered why he called me, brain-damaged me.

By then I was in the second year of Master’s study, with generally execrable grades compared to those I had gotten in graduate school in Counseling/Clinical Psychology. A course in languages was hardly anything that made sense at this point in developing my fried brain.

Also, I suppose, Ben Barr was my Jewish brother. He and his partner were faithful in visiting me in the hospital; he would manage to see me a couple of times a month after I had moved out of the hospital. Ben smoked; I had had my addiction broken by the accident. I loved and hated the smoke from his cigarettes. Is my memory reliable in telling me that I never actually begged a cigarette from him? Our conversations about smoking are on the edge of my mind even now. We agreed that, smoking or not smoking, if either of us had terminal cancer we would definitely smoke!