One could be forgiven for assuming that Oliver Sacks was celebrating his birthday. Instead, the genial figure recorded for the long interview at the heart of Oliver Sacks: His Own Life had just been diagnosed with terminal cancer. The 2019 film (out on a Kino Lorber Blu-ray) is an illuminating document of one of our era’s most vital public intellectuals, a thinker who dared to transgress the heavily guarded borders of his field.
The film’s revelation is that one thought much of Sacks early on. As put by one of the many associates interviewed for the documentary, he was—until he passed age 30—“a complete fuck up.” Sacks was into speed—amphetamines as well as motorcycles—and was racing toward self-destruction until he started psychotherapy. After 50 years, Sacks says with a twinkle, “We’re beginning to get somewhere.”
Perhaps his intense awareness of his own difference—gay in an intolerant world—drove him to understand the lives he encountered, to appreciate their differences. As a neurologist, he was an empathetic clinician, and the value he placed on subjective experience put him at odds with the scientific establishment. For many years he was an outlier in his profession even as his public reputation grew after his collection of case histories, The Man Who Mistook his Wife for a Hat (1985), became a bestseller.
Case histories were the gist of such great turn of the century thinkers as Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung, but as the century marched on, science became less personal and more statistical, validating the general while overlooking the specific. Sacks’ insight was that medicine and psychology involve art as well as science and formative ideas can be drawn from subjective experience. When confronted by a colleague who denounced him for lacking a grand theory, Sacks replied, “I don’t have any theory… I’m a field worker. I show things.”
He was a lucid and prolific writer whose work helped increase understanding—and with it, sympathy if not empathy—for autism, Tourette syndrome, memory disorders and neurological anomalies. His bestselling books made hard ideas comprehensible to a wide audience. As the 20th century expired, he found his way into the flourishing research and speculation over consciousness, human and otherwise. The relation between brain and mind had always been part of Sacks’ interests and through the end, he approached consciousness—and the many faceted worlds of conscious beings—with wonder.
