I am investigating the neurological implications of a state described
by a person who claims to have 'gone beyond spiritual enlightenment'.
He became 'enlightened' (characterised by 'ego dissolution', loss of
'personal identity', etc) in 1982, and lived in this state of
'enlightenment' for 11 years. Subsequently, he recognised the
'enlightened' state as a profound delusion, a 'passionate mental
construct' that had no basis in reality.
Upon recovering from this delusion, he claims that his entire
affective faculty disappeared completely. Since 1992 he claims to
have experienced no emotions whatsoever, and has been assessed
independently by two psychiatrists as being alexithymic,
depersonalised, derealised and anhedonic. (The psychiatrists who
diagnosed alexithymia verified his claim that not only was he unable
to experience emotions, he did not exhibit any physical signs of
emotion.)
The primary reason for my question is: he claims that, with the
complete disappearance of his affective faculty, he lost all capacity
to visualise or imagine anything. He is highly intelligent, perfectly
capable of rational thinking and rational discourse, but is utterly
unable to visualise anything (either from memory or from active
imagination). He claims that the imaginative faculty is an
epiphenomenon of the affective faculty, which sounds dubious to me,
but I am not medically trained, and do not have much knowledge of
neurology.
I am interested in your opinions as to whether the capacity to
visualise phenomena is intimately neurologically related to the
capacity to feel emotions. Any other comments, especially any
pointers to similar cases (exceptionally rare, I would think), would
also be appreciated.
Thanks in advance.
RG.