Sacks, Oliver - The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Tales

[oyceter]

This may have been one of the scariest books I read this year. It's not meant to be, but it deals with a subject that I find incredibly, deeply disturbing and frightening -- the oddities and malfunctions of the human mind.

Sacks has collected a bunch of essays he wrote from the mid-1970s through the 1980s. Some of them are about patients with "deficits" or missing senses, like one woman who lost her sense of where parts of her body were and felt like she never quite belonged in her body, or the man who could intellectually recognize shapes, but couldn't put them together and grasp the emotional (thereby mistaking his wife's head for a hat).

The second part is about patients with "extra" senses, like the phantom limb syndrome, or the added tics of Tourette's. The third part, which I found the most problematic, is about "simple" people. As a forewarning, Sacks does call them "retarded" and "mentally deficient;" I suspect a lot of this was considered proper usage at the time he wrote the essays.

While I enjoyed reading about his patients and marveling at how complex and strange our minds were, the stories completely freak me out as well. Particularly the ones about memory loss or loss of certain senses. This is probably a very idiosyncratic reaction: Alzheimer's is basically my worst nightmare.

My problems with the third section go with how Sacks both idealizes and pathologizes his "simple" patients. He focuses on seeing them as a whole, not as a disease, which I agree with, but sometimes he goes on about how they have this inner beauty that just struck the wrong note with me. I'm not quite sure how to articulate it, but it threw me off. Actually, I got the same impression with several of his other essays, this strange push-pull of idealizing an illness while also pathologizing the person who has it, when I think he intended to pathologize the illness and humanize the person who has it.

Interesting, but probably a book I'll end up giving away.

Comments

[jesse_the_k]

Tom Shakespeare, a UK disability studies scholar*, described Sacks as "a doctor who has mistaken his patients for a literary career," and I think that summarizes why most of Sacks' writings feel invasive. (When he visited Madison on a book tour for An Anthropologist on Mars, I asked him: What was the difference between his books and the barkers outside freak shows? At least in freak shows, the people on display got money for their willingness to expose themselves to public view. He didn't answer.)

_{* With whom I mostly disagree, but he's got a way with words.}

Some of Sacks' books are informed by his personal experience -- Migraine and A Leg to Stand On -- and when he focuses his encyclopedic mind & elegant writing on himself, it's much less disquieting.

I commend to you the writings of Canadian Dave Hingsburger, who has been working with folks labelled "developmentally disabled" for 30 years. His books are pithy and funny and eloquent; they explore vital topics such as how power tempts even the most idealistic staff into abusive behaviors; communicating with people who don't speak; why everyone can and should enjoy their sexuality; and how to challenge the default continuum where intellectual ability is equated with one's value and status as "human."

His blog Chewing the Fat explores many disability issues. He's recently started using a wheelchair, and his sharp insights on crossing over the line from "typical" to "dislabelled" are particularly intriguing.

[kate_nepveu]

"a doctor who has mistaken his patients for a literary career,"

Ow. Yeah. I haven't read Sacks, but I can see how that would be a very easy line to fall on the wrong side of.

[oyceter]

Oh, thank you for the recs!

It's a strange feeling with Sacks, like he's trying, only not quite getting there.

[timeofchange.livejournal.com]

I read this when it first came out. Your review is insightful, especially the line "this strange push-pull of idealizing an illness while also pathologizing the person who has it, when I think he intended to pathologize the illness and humanize the person who has it." Still, the book made a profound impression on me, and solidified my interest in the human brain.

[oyceter]

Definitely, and I am guessing that it was really influential when it came out?

[timeofchange.livejournal.com]

I think that it was. It certainly got a lot of attention, and was read by people who weren't into science.

[matociquala.livejournal.com]

If you wanted a slightly more modern take on neurobiology, you might give one V.S. Ramachandran a try, by the way. He's the guy who figured out the causes (and a treatment for) phantom limb syndrome, and his books are equally fascinating. (Phantoms in the Brain is the most famous one.) Jeffrey Schwartz's The Mind and the Brain is interesting, too.

[oyceter]

Oh interesting! Thanks for the recs.

[vom-marlowe.livejournal.com]

Huh. I think this book would scare the pants off me. I thought about getting it, but I think I'll pass.

[oyceter]

I can mail it to you if you want ;). Though yeah, mostly it had me freaking out over losing memories.

[harriet-spy.livejournal.com]

I think what he's struggling with (you can see this clearly in Anthropologist [he, by the way, is not the anthropologist of the title; Temple Grandin is, which is itself telling]) is the tension between his medical training, which has acculturated him to see non-neurotypicality as inherently pathological, and his own experience, which suggests that perhaps such states are different ways or orders of being which are not to be judged against the reference point of neurotypicality (while still regularly reminding him of the incredible challenges such people and those who love them face in a world structured for the neurotypical). This is a very difficult set of tensions to resolve.

[oyceter]

*nods* Yes, definitely. And I am guessing that the book and the essays were very forward-thinking when they were written? I did fairly well with most of the essays (well, except the speculations about soul, but that's just because I am not religious), it was mostly the third section that threw me off.

[marzipan-pig.livejournal.com]

I think the problems you are having with it are its 'datedness'; I think it's possible that you're a much more sophisticated audience than who he was originally writing for. I really liked this when I read it, but I also haven't look at it again in almost 20 years, so I'm not sure how different it would or wouldn't seem to me now.

[oyceter]

Yeah, I am guessing a lot of the problems stem from when the essays were written, and of course, I have a vested interest in mental illnesses and how they're treated. And he doesn't put the patients in the third section on a pedestal; he's very clear about how they act. It's mostly the parts when he delves into the more spiritual aspects that put me off.