On a grave bursting open – Rachel Aviv in The New Yorker:

‘[Oliver] Sacks’s mother, a surgeon in London, had suspected that her son was gay when he was a teen-ager. She declared that homosexuality was an “abomination,” using the phrase “filth of the bowel” and telling him that she wished he’d never been born. They didn’t speak of the subject again. Sacks had moved to America—first to California and then, after five years, to New York—because, he wrote in his journal, “I wanted a sexual and moral freedom I felt I could never have in England.” That fall, during Yom Kippur, he decided that, rather than going to synagogue to confess “to the total range of human sin,” a ritual he’d grown up with, he’d spend the night at a bar, enjoying a couple of beers. “What I suppose I am saying, Jenö, is that I now feel differently about myself, and therefore about homosexuality as a whole,” he wrote. “I am through with cringing, and apologies, and pious wishes that I might have been ‘normal.’ ” (The Oliver Sacks Foundation shared with me his correspondence and other records, as well as four decades’ worth of journals—many of which had not been read since he wrote them.)’

(…)

‘Sacks saw Shengold for half a century. In that time, Sacks became one of the world’s most prominent neurologists and a kind of founding father of medical humanities—a discipline that coalesced in the seventies, linking healing with storytelling. But the freedom that Shengold’s analysis promised was elusive. After Vincze, Sacks did not have another relationship for forty-four years. He seemed to be doing the “working through” at a remove—again and again, his psychic conflicts were displaced onto the lives of his patients. He gave them “some of my own powers, and some of my phantasies too,” he wrote in his journal. “I write out symbolic versions of myself.”’

(…)

‘For Sacks, writing seemed almost physiological, like sweating—an involuntary response to stimuli. He routinely filled a whole journal in two days. “Should I then put down my pen, my interminable Journal (for this is but a fragment of the journal I have kept all my life),” he asked, “and ‘start living’ instead?” The answer was almost always no. Sometimes Sacks, who would eventually publish sixteen books, wrote continuously in his journal for six hours. Even when he was driving his car, he was still writing—he set up a tape recorder so that he could keep developing his thoughts, which were regularly interrupted by traffic or a wrong turn. Driving through Manhattan one day in 1975, he reflected on the fact that his closets, stuffed with pages of writing, resembled a “grave bursting open.”’

(…)

‘When he woke up in the middle of the night with an erection, he would cool his penis by putting it in orange jello.’

(…)

‘But, in his journal, Sacks wrote 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.” Some details, he recognized, were “pure fabrications.” He tried to reassure himself that the exaggerations did not come from a shallow place, such as a desire for fame or attention. “The impulse is both ‘purer’—and deeper,” he wrote. “It is not merely or wholly a projection—nor (as I have sometimes, ingeniously-disingenuously, maintained) a mere ‘sensitization’ of what I know so well in myself. But (if you will) a sort of autobiography.” He called it “symbolic ‘exo-graphy.’ ”’

(…)

‘The historian of medicine Henri Ellenberger observed that psychiatry owes its development to two intertwined dynamics: the neuroses of its founders—in trying to master their own conflicts, they came to new insights and forms of therapy—and the prolonged, ambiguous relationships they had with their patients. The case studies of these relationships, Ellenberger wrote, tended to have a distinct arc: psychiatrists had to unravel their patients’ “pathogenic secret,” a hidden source of hopelessness, in order to heal them.
Sacks’s early case studies also tended to revolve around secrets, but wonderful ones. Through his care, his patients realized that they had hidden gifts—for music, painting, writing—that could restore to them a sense of wholeness. The critic Anatole Broyard, recounting his cancer treatment in the Times Magazine in 1990, wrote that he longed for a charismatic, passionate physician, skilled in “empathetic witnessing.” In short, he wrote, a doctor who “would resemble Oliver Sacks.” He added, “He would see the genius of my illness.” It speaks to the power of the fantasy of the magical healer that readers and publishers accepted Sacks’s stories as literal truth. In a letter to one of his three brothers, Marcus, Sacks enclosed a copy of “The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat,” which was published in 1985, calling it a book of “fairy tales.” He explained that “these odd Narratives—half-report, half-imagined, half-science, half-fable, but with a fidelity of their own—are what I do, basically, to keep MY demons of boredom and loneliness and despair away.” He added that Marcus would likely call them “confabulations”—a phenomenon Sacks explores in a chapter about a patient who could retain memories for only a few seconds and must “make meaning, in a desperate way, continually inventing, throwing bridges of meaning over abysses,” but the “bridges, the patches, for all their brilliance . . . cannot do service for reality.” Sacks was startled by the success of the book, which he had dedicated to Shengold, “my own mentor and physician.” It became an international best-seller, routinely assigned in medical schools. Sacks wrote in his journal, Guilt has been much greater since ‘Hat’ because of (among other things)
My lies, falsification He pondered the phrase “art is the lie that tells the truth,” often attributed to Picasso, but he seemed unconvinced.’ (…)

‘Weschler told me that Sacks used to express anxiety about whether he’d distorted the truth. Weschler would assure him that good writing is not a strict account of reality; there has to be space for the writer’s imagination. He said he told Sacks, “Come on, you’re extravagantly romanticizing how bad you are—just as much as you were extravagantly romanticizing what the patient said. Your mother’s accusing voice has taken over.” Weschler had gone to Beth Abraham Hospital to meet some of the patients from “Awakenings” and had been shaken by their condition. “There’s a lot of people shitting in their pants, drooling—the sedimentation of thirty years living in a warehouse,” he said. “His genius was to see past that, to the dignity of the person. He would talk to them for an hour, and maybe their eyes would brighten only once—the rest of the time their eyes were cloudy—but he would glom onto that and keep talking.” After “Hat,” Sacks’s relationship with his subjects became more mediated. Most of them were not his patients; many wrote to him after reading his work, recognizing themselves in his books. There was a different power dynamic, because these people already believed that they had stories to tell. Perhaps the guilt over liberties he had taken in “Hat” caused him to curb the impulse to exaggerate. His expressions of remorse over “making up, ‘enhancing,’ etc,” which had appeared in his journals throughout the seventies and eighties, stopped. In his case studies, he used fewer and shorter quotes. His patients were far more likely to say ordinary, banal things, and they rarely quoted literature. They still had secret gifts, but they weren’t redeemed by them; they were just trying to cope.’

(…)

‘“Good old Sacks—the House Humanist,” he wrote, mocking himself. He also considered the idea that his four decades of analysis were to blame. Was it possible, he wrote, that a “vivisection of inner life, however conceived, however subtle and delicate, may in fact destroy the very thing it examines?” His treatment with Shengold seemed to align with a life of “homeostasis”—intimacy managed through more and more language, in a contained, sterile setting, on Monday and Wednesday mornings, from 6:00 to 6:45 a.m. They still referred to each other as “Dr. Sacks” and “Dr. Shengold.” Once, they ran into each other at a chamber concert. They were a few rows apart, but they didn’t interact. Occasionally, Shengold told his children that he “heard from the couch” about a good movie or play, but he never shared what happened in his sessions. They inferred that Sacks was their father’s patient after reading the dedication to him in “Hat.”’

(…)

‘In 2013, after being in a relationship with Hayes for four years—they lived in separate apartments in the same building—Sacks began writing a memoir, “On the Move,” in which he divulged his sexuality for the first time. He recounts his mother’s curses upon learning that he was gay, and his decades of celibacy—a fact he mentions casually, without explanation. Edgar wondered why, after so many years of analysis, coming out took him so long, but, she said, “Oliver did not regard his relationship with Shengold as a failure of therapy.” She said that she’d guessed Shengold had thought, “This is something Oliver has to do in his own way, on his own time.” Shengold’s daughter, Nina, said that, “for my dad to have a patient he loved and respected finally find comfort in identifying who he’d been all his life—that’s growth for both of them.”’

(…)

‘In August, two weeks before Sacks died, he and Shengold spoke on the phone. Shengold was with his family at a cottage in the Finger Lakes region of central New York, where he spent every summer. Nina told me, “We all gathered in the living room of that little cottage and put my father on speakerphone. Oliver Sacks was clearly on his deathbed—he was not able to articulate very well. Sometimes his diction was just gone. Dad kept shaking his head. He said, ‘I can’t understand you. I’m so sorry, I can’t understand you.’ ” At the end of the call, Shengold told Sacks, “It’s been the honor of my life to work with you,” and said, “Goodbye, Oliver.” Sacks responded, “Goodbye, Leonard.” It was the first time they had ever used each other’s first names. When they hung up, Shengold was crying.’

Read the story here.

Oliver Sachs, the reluctant con man, also a man I suggest based on this article who was too afraid of love and sex, the fear passed away late, maybe too late.

The psychoanalyst after saying good-bye to one of his (favorite?) patients over the phone, touched me.

We are all hoping for awakenings, as long as the lust for live has not abandoned us, or the lust for another adventure.