Psychosomatic blindness

Psychosomatic blindness is a trauma-associated loss or disturbance of vision described in women whose eyes and brains showed no abnormalities on examination. The narrative presents it not as a failure of the women’s eyesight alone, but as a possible bodily response to experiences of violence and unbearable loss—and as a starting point for thinking about what suffering can make visible or impossible to see.

Presentation and Historical Context

During the 1980s, many Cambodian women in California sought medical attention because they could not see. They were refugees who had lived through the violence of the Khmer Rouge regime, which held power from 1975 to 1979. The account emphasizes the extent of their exposure to trauma: some had been raped, tortured, or otherwise brutalized, and most had seen family members murdered.

One woman had not seen her husband or three children since soldiers took them away. She attributed the loss of her sight to crying every day for four years. Other women reported blurred or partial vision, along with shadows and pain. The condition therefore appears in several forms rather than as a single, uniform experience.

Examinations and Explanation

Doctors examined about 150 women and found their eyes to be normal; further tests also showed no abnormalities in their brains. The narrative identifies psychosomatic blindness as the explanation if the women were telling the truth. That qualification matters: some observers suspected that the women were feigning symptoms to gain attention or disability benefits, placing their accounts under suspicion even when medical examinations found no physical cause.

The explanation offered is that minds overwhelmed by horror can no longer take in more, and may, in effect, turn out the lights. This is the narrative’s account of the condition, not a claim that every visual disturbance has the same cause. It places the reported symptoms in the context of extreme trauma while preserving the uncertainty and skepticism surrounding how the women’s experiences were received.

Related Symptoms and Distinctions

The book also describes a fourteen-year-old trafficking survivor who, after captivity and abuse, could not speak, although doctors found no problem with her vocal organs. The narrator’s friend, a psychologist, identifies mutism, blindness, and paralysis as psychosomatic symptoms seen from time to time. The girl’s mutism is a related example of trauma manifesting through bodily function; it is not presented as blindness or as part of the Cambodian refugees’ cases.

The account also notes that prolonged crying can leave a person with blurred vision. That observation distinguishes a temporary physical effect of crying from the more severe loss or disturbance of sight described in the refugee women. The distinction keeps the narrative from treating every difficulty with vision as equivalent.

Narrative Frame and Significance

The account of the women’s blindness opens a personal exchange between the narrator and a friend who later dies. The narrator recalls that this was the last subject they discussed while the friend was alive; afterward came only an email with a list of books for the narrator’s research and New Year wishes. The medical account thus becomes bound to the narrator’s memory of a final conversation, without implying that the narrator experiences blindness herself.

After the death, the narrator describes the dead as inhabiting the conditional tense and imagines the deceased friend as knowing what the narrator thinks and writes. Elsewhere, while caring for Apollo, the narrator wonders whether loving him might somehow bring the friend back. These passages make grief, not a diagnosis of blindness, the narrator’s own struggle: they show how the account of trauma sits within a wider meditation on loss and the desire to understand what cannot be recovered.

The narrative also presents writing practices among a separate group of women affected by trafficking. Some keep private journals; others who welcome writing are offered a workshop in which they can share their work, and they are told not to worry about spelling or grammar. These scenes do not establish writing as a cure for psychosomatic symptoms. Rather, alongside the stories of blindness and mutism, they underscore the difference between offering people room to express experience and claiming that expression can undo trauma.