COLUMN: (De)mystifying Mental Health
In two sentences, Chilean author Benjamín Labatut manages to describe the shared telos of art and science with devastating elegance. He does so through the voice of German physicist Karl Schwarzschild, along with other 20th-century scientists and mathematicians.
“Is there anything that is truly at rest, stationary around which the universe revolves, or is there nothing at all to hold on to amid this endless chain of movements in which every single thing seems bound?” Labatut’s fictionalized Schwarzschild says. “Just imagine how far we have fallen into uncertainty if the human imagination cannot find a single place to lay its anchor, if not a single stone in the world has the right to be considered immobile!”
This was one of the countless quotes that gave me pause in Labatut’s book “When We Cease to Understand the World,” a blend of fiction and biography that tells the stories of various important thinkers from the 20th century. I begin with this book because I believe that this quest for a stable foundation is a desire that underlies mental well-being. Put another way, at the core of human experience exists a close connection between mental health and the desire to understand.
“The insights gained from quantum physics suggest that what psychology has unearthed about the human mind could apply to a singular, unified consciousness.” Alan J. Steinberg, M.D.
Both Labatut and I are far from the first people to posit this connection between higher-level physics and mathematics with human cognition. To explain the correlation, it is necessary to dive into a short introduction to quantum physics.
In an article for Psychology Today, Alan J. Steinberg said “the insights gained from quantum physics suggest that what psychology has unearthed about the human mind could apply to a singular, unified consciousness.” The insights to which Steinberg refers are based on three principles of quantum physics: The first is that observable objects exist in a virtual state of potentiality until the moment an onlooker observes them, the second is that the entire universe is interconnected across space and time and the third is that an observer is a necessary component of the universe. In other words, subatomic particles like electrons are in an indeterminate state called a superposition, which “rapidly collapse(s) into definite states when interacting with the environment,” a Science News Today article explains. Essentially, quantum physics studies the instability present in every atom, and at the root of every thing.
Scholars Diogo Valadas Ponte and Lothar Schäfer connect quantum physics with Carl G. Jung’s psychoanalytic framework of a universal unconscious. This comparison begins with a note that “the basis of material things is not material.”
“In contrast to their appearances, the electrons in atoms and molecules aren’t tiny material particles or little balls, which run around … the atomic nuclei like planets around the sun, but they are standing waves: when an electron enters an atom, it ceases to be a material particle and becomes a wave,” the authors write. “That is, the electrons in atoms are probability fields.”
By “probability fields,” the authors mean that electrons are equally present at numerous locations within an atom at a given moment. They occupy a superposition rather than a singular location prior to measurement. By definition, this concept is incompatible with our human horizons of understanding.
Ponte and Schäfer go on to parallel these ideas in quantum cosmology in saying that “this quantum view of a holistic reality is in perfect agreement with one of Jung’s most important, seminal ideas; that is, the archetypal idea of Unus Mundus.” The authors quote Jung’s description of this archetype: Jung writes, “undoubtedly the idea of the Unus Mundus is founded on the assumption that the multiplicity of the empirical world rests on an underlying unity, and that not two or more fundamentally different worlds exist side by side or are mingled with one another.”
All of this is to say that imprecision, uncertainty and the unknowable lies at the heart of many spheres of human intellectual labor. On the one hand, it could be argued that this unreachable data is cause for anxiety; as humans, we can only peel back the intellectual onion that is the world so far, only to be left with a piece so infinitesimally small that it becomes impossible for us to separate another layer. But this is only a single interpretation, one of the many possible positions this idea can be found to take — just like electrons.
To circle back to Labatut’s writing — and to justify the presentation of these scientific viewpoints to begin with — I’d like to walk through one of the vignettes in his novel. “The Heart of the Heart” follows the intellectual history of German-French mathematician Alexander Grothendieck, who is widely regarded as one of the greatest mathematicians of the 20th century.
“He formulated his ideas by removing one layer after the other, breaking down concepts, simplifying and abstracting until there seemed to be nothing left.” Benjamín Labatut
Labatut introduces Grothendieck himself as having “towered over mathematics like a veritable colossus.” Like Jung and countless thinkers both before and after him, Grothendieck’s quest was one for coherence: The Institut des Hautes Études Scientifique, where Grothendieck worked from 1958 to 1970, describes his work as an “ambitious program of fusion between arithmetic, algebraic geometry, and topology (that) continues to structure contemporary mathematics.”
“He formulated his ideas by removing one layer after the other, breaking down concepts, simplifying and abstracting until there seemed to be nothing left,” Labatut writes. “There, in that apparent vacuum, he would discover the structures he had been searching for.”
His intellectual project culminated in the pursuit of uncovering “the secret root that could bind together countless theories that bore no apparent relation to each other,” as Labatut puts it. Grothendieck referred to this pearl as “the heart of the heart.”
The inevitability of our lack of understanding should comfort us — anxiety is unavoidable, but it is understandable given the ever-shifting nature of the world around us.
But his ascent did not continue perpetually. Labatut describes the stark changes Grothendieck underwent in the political climate of Paris in the late ’60s. Labatut writes “during his talks, (Grothendieck) gave away apples and figs grown in his garden and warned about the destructive power of science: ‘ The atoms that tore Hiroshima and Nagasaki apart were split not by the greasy fingers of a general, but by a group of physicists armed with a fistful of equations.’”
The idiosyncratic genius turned his attention inward, away from the structures of mathematics. Grothendieck increasingly isolated himself, the motivation for this being detailed by Labatut, writing “his isolation was … for the protection of mankind” but Grothendieck “refused to explain what he meant.”
The Icarian journey of Grothendieck’s life as rendered by Labatut follows the epiphanic rise and disastrous fall of each vignette. Every protagonist is heroically toiling at the greatest scientific and intellectual problems with which humankind has gotten acquainted. The link between ingenuity in search of understanding and mental disorder is a powerful construction — one that demands further analysis.
In its entirety, Labatut’s book remarks that barriers to rational understanding are inevitable. These obstacles, however, do not bar us impotent creatures from trying to pierce through them, then suffering when we find they are impenetrable.
I chose to talk about this work of literature because I feel as though experiences of instability — of an inability to comprehend that which one encounters — is not only common; it is a fundamental feature of the material world. If there is anything to take away from the all too brief introduction to quantum mechanics, it is that as distances grow smaller and smaller, the usual manners in which we engage begin to break down. It is not a question of if our understanding will cease, but when. The inevitability of our lack of understanding should comfort us — anxiety is unavoidable, but it is understandable given the ever-shifting nature of the world around us.
