The Psychic Conflicts of Oliver Sacks

"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.""

"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."

Early books such as Awakenings and The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat established Oliver Sacks as a literary voice and an advocate for considering patients' life stories and sense of self in medical treatment. He privately recorded guilt in journals, confessing that "a sense of hideous criminality remains (psychologically) attached" to his work and acknowledging that he had given patients "powers (starting with powers of speech) which they do not have" and that some details were "pure fabrications." His portrayals functioned as self-interrogation and self-expression, with some documented awakenings reflecting experiences or longings of his own. His corpus remains important and astonishing. Any fuller understanding of Sacks requires accounting for nearly fifty years of therapy with psychoanalyst Leonard Shengold.

Read at The New Yorker