The neurologist Oliver Sacks was famous for linking healing with storytelling. But sometimes that meant reshaping patients’ reality. Plus:
Sacks, a celebrated neurologist, avoided love for nearly fifty years, displacing his psychic conflicts onto the lives of his patients.Photograph by Christopher Anderson / WeFolk
David Remnick Editor, The New Yorker
The neurologist Oliver Sacks’s early books, including “Awakenings” and “The Ma…
The neurologist Oliver Sacks was famous for linking healing with storytelling. But sometimes that meant reshaping patients’ reality. Plus:
Sacks, a celebrated neurologist, avoided love for nearly fifty years, displacing his psychic conflicts onto the lives of his patients.Photograph by Christopher Anderson / WeFolk
David Remnick Editor, The New Yorker
The neurologist Oliver Sacks’s early books, including “Awakenings” and “The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat,” established his reputation as unique literary voice and the avatar of a new medical outlook that considered a patient’s life story and sense of self as being crucial to the treatment of a range of ailments. Yet, as Rachel Aviv reports in a rich and nuanced piece for this week’s issue, Sacks privately expressed guilt about some of what he had written. In his journals (many of which have never before been reported on or quoted from), Sacks confessed that “a sense of hideous criminality remains (psychologically) attached” to his work. He had given his patients “powers (starting with powers of speech) which they do not have,” and he wrote that some details in his presumably nonfiction essays were, in fact, “pure fabrications.”
But this isn’t just a story about discovering that a highly regarded writer did not always stick to the facts when writing about his patients. Through extensive interviews and a careful reading of Sacks’s correspondence and published work, Aviv explores how his writing, which had been celebrated as a triumph of insight and empathy, was also an act of self-interrogation and self-expression. Some of the awakenings that Sacks had been documenting in others were ones that he, in some sense, had experienced—or, more urgently, longed to experience—himself.
The works of Oliver Sacks, much of which appeared over the years in The New Yorker, remain as important as they are astonishing. As a matter of biography, any real understanding of Sacks is impossible without taking into account the nearly fifty years he spent in therapy with a Manhattan psychoanalyst named Leonard Shengold—or the fact that Sacks, who was gay, remained closeted until he was eighty. Sacks’s mother had suspected her son was gay since he was a teen-ager, and called homosexuality an “abomination”; she told him that she wished he’d never been born. He lived a celibate life for decades, and shut himself off from the idea of ever experiencing the richness of love. The story of his late-in-life coming out could be seen as a final personal triumph, the last great awakening that allowed him to better understand his patients as well.
But this, too, is more complicated. Sacks, who once said that he wanted to be remembered as someone who “bore witness,” seems to have got better at it as he grew older—he began to render people more honestly in his work, even if the truth could sometimes be banal or disappointing. Aviv writes that, as Sacks aged, “he felt as if he were gazing at people from the outside.” This distance might have felt like something of a loss, but, by separating himself more from his patients, Sacks perhaps was able to see them more clearly for the first time.
This is a humane and deeply thought-provoking story—about medicine, writing, therapy, and how our inner lives invariably shape our work—and I’m excited to share it with you.
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