Extracts from the preface and selected chapters of my observations of Parkinson's disease. I expect that the book will be published in 2007.

Mark Hurni

 Looking for my lost rage

  The unusual story of a Parkinson’s patient

© Mark Hurni, Zurich/Granada 1998-2006

Dedication

Dedicated to my mother

(...)

I dedicate this book to her specially in order to avoid its misunderstanding as charge against the mothers.

Dedicated also to all those who – after I admitted it – have accompanied me in this (often painful) process,

Particularly however to those who still are in this process with the hope that it may not only be fate but before all a chance.

An introduction to the subject

It is dangerous to suppress emotions. People who continuously suppress their feelings will break.

Sinéad O’Connor (1990)

Introduction

Anamnesis of an extra-pyramidal - parkinsonictic - spastic syndrome

It began approximately at the age of forty one. Used to academic hand writing, I had the impression that the energy was changed in the writing. It was a subjective perception and it was still not comprehensible for (........)

Starting point of a journey

This - somehow uncommon - anamnesis was created later with somewhat more insight into the events of course. And so sober, as this representation appears, was the experienced reality not either. However, it reflects the then condition of separation of emotional and rational perception. I was an observer for the moment, experiencing came only later. Time wise, we stand with it in the year 1995, at the 4^th of December 1995 exactly, at the beginning of a personal experience as well as a confrontation with an illness, which still is regarded as incurable, yes from which in the end not even the cause is known: the Parkinson’ disease. I suddenly became practically disabled with a psychological and physical breakdown and confronted with an illness, which I could not accept so. My revolting was rational, my bases largely intuitive, but they gave me the control over events at that time, which I probably would not have survived so easily, if I could have admitted the pain.

I have my story originally put under the title “Learned, unlearned Parkinson; my cure of the Parkinson’s disease began, where the illness sits: in the head", what reflects the slow process somehow, which really also stands behind it. It was a learning process – and of course a searching-process. I learned to listen to the body, and I learned to speak its language and not only that rational one, which creates so much distance to others and above all to one-self.

The title that I finally chose for the publication, “A la recherche de ma rage perdue” (in French language) suggested my friend and neurologist Rafael González Maldonado on the occasion of a dinner in Madrid on April 24, 2004. We talked about “fighting” with the illness and to “overcome” it, what appeared to us however as too little encouraging concepts. One must take the look away from the illness and its causes and turn it towards a better future, Dr. González suggested. Looking back is blocking, searching the solution opens new ways. The title also is a diagnosis, he said casually on the way to the hotel.

One for Parkinson’s as well as for psychological trauma typical element is the rationality, contained in the subtitle, which I finally left out. It is typical for the mind of the traumatized that it looks for an explanation for the condition. And according to recent research to the psychological trauma, it is the cognitive functions, which prevent the dissolution of the trauma. The cortex blocks the unconscious spontaneous urge of subcortical involuntary structures to dissolve the trauma by cognitive control.

The trip, about which I want to report here, brings the reader first on the way of my search of an explanation for what had occurred to me. That admittedly was the look back, I had to do first. I noticed that not only fear was involved but that shame and over all helplessness plaid a major role. But there were also very important feelings missing. The repression of emotions affects aliveness and is a key to the understanding of the disease. Therefore the trip goes on with the search of a solution, the search of the “the lost rage".

However, this trip had begun already some years earlier. Namely, it started exactly on a misty morning in November 1990¹.

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