I have been intrigued by Oliver Sacks for a while, but only recently actually read him. Someone like Oliver Sacks is so desperately needed: someone with all the right medical credentials who has also thought deeply about the moral implications of modern neurology. Unfortunately, I don’t think Sacks is what he is promised to be.
Take for example the title story of “The Man who Mistook his Wife for a Hat.” The moral thinking in this story is actually deeply disturbing. Sacks’ writing is characterized by the same oversimplifications and poorly reasoned generalizations that mark the writings of his “great” predecessor: Freud.
At the most basic level what I object to is that a functional deficit in one specific area of a person’s life is described as a total state of being. In Sacks’ writing the pathology defines the person. Pathology is deeply associated for Sacks with loss and shame. Thus the first section of The Man Who Mistook his Wife for a Hat and other Clinical Tales is called “Losses.” It’s not hard to see a connection between Sacks’ view of sickness as lack and Freud’s theories of the castration complex and penis envy. Sacks sees disability as a primal ontological lack, rather than as an accidental epiphenomenon. In fact, I would go so far as to hypothesize that Sacks was interested in neuropathology primarily as a way of reflecting on and dealing with his own highly Freudian feelings of shame and loss.
While Sacks is known for deeply empathizing with the people he describes, consider the language he actually uses for describing Dr. P, the subject of “The Man who Mistook his Wife for a Hat”. The primary adjectives he uses to describe Dr. P’s case are “sad” and “tragic,” Dr. P himself is “damned” and functions like a “machine.” He has lost “all power of representation and imagery, all sense of the concrete, all sense of reality.” This last line of reasoning I find especially odd. How do we get from Dr. P is unable to recognize faces and familiar objects, to Dr. P has no sense of reality? Dr. P’s hearing, touch, smell and taste are all entirely intact. How can be said to have lost all “sense of reality”? Since when is reality entirely visual, what would that imply about blind people?
Dr. P goes from being a specific individual with visual agnosia to being a “warning and a parable” all too fast. Sacks describes Dr. P as someone who is literally lacking the “most important faculty we have [judgement].” Dr. P’s problem is that, according to Sacks, he is fundamentally less than human, he is “computer-like.”
Rather than sticking with a “merely” biological description of disability, Sacks pathologizes Dr. P’s agnosia into a question of his fundamental “attitude.” Sacks briefly considers the physiological hypothesis: “Was this [Dr. P’s lack of judgement] due to lack of visual information, or faulty processing of visual information? (This would be the explanation given by a classical, schematic neurology).” But quickly moves on to a more “fundamental” explanation: “was there something amiss in Dr. P’s attitude, so that he could not relate what he saw to himself?”
Sacks animates his characters in my opinion primarily by projecting onto them his own feelings of shame and deficit. Dr. P is Oliver Sacks, but he is the shamed and repressed part of Sacks that he only gradually and late in life came to accept and acknowledge. At least these are my thoughts and hypotheses for now.
recycled paper clips 