The neurologist and British best-selling author Oliver Sacks, who died on Sunday (30) at age 82, victim of cancer, launched this year his autobiography, “Always in motion – a life” (Company of letters). In the book, the author and neuroscientist who was described as “the acclaimed poet of modern medicine” talks about his career as a doctor and also on homosexuality and their involvement with drugs (read excerpt below) .
“When I was 12, a very insightful teacher wrote in his report: ‘Sacks goes away, if not too far’, which was often,” he writes in the memoir. “As a boy, I often went too far in my chemistry experiments, filling the house with toxic gases; luckily, never burned down the place.”
Other books by best-selling books as “Awakenings” (1973), adapted for the screen in 1990 with Robin Williams and Robert De Niro, “The man who mistook his wife for a hat” (1985) and “A atropólogo on Mars” (1995).
Oliver Sacks was born in 1933 in London in a family of doctors and scientists (the mother and father was a surgeon, general practitioner). Sacks graduated in medicine at Oxford and then moved to the United States to make residence in San Francisco, University of California (UCLA). Lived in New York since 1965, where he worked as a neurologist.
In the autobiography “Always on the move,” he recalls a childhood case. “When I was 12, a very insightful teacher wrote in his report: ‘Sacks goes away, if not too far’, which was often,” he writes. “As a boy, I often went too far in my chemistry experiments, filling the house with toxic gases; luckily, never burned down the place.”
Read below for ‘Always stretches in . movement ‘, the autobiography of Oliver Sacks
About Homosexuality:.
“The year 1951 was busy and, in some ways, painful My Birdie aunt, who had been a constant presence in my life, died in March, and she lived with us since I was born and unconditionally loved us all (Birdie was a girl and modest intelligence woman, the only one in such disadvantage between the sisters. . and the brothers of my mother I never knew very well what happened to her as a child;. spoke of a head injury as a baby, but also from a congenital deficiency of thyroid None of this mattered to us, it was Auntie Birdie, essential part of the family.) Birdie’s death has affected me deeply and perhaps only then realized how it was linked to my life, all our lives. A few months before, when I got a scholarship at Oxford, it was she who handed me the telegram, hugged me and gave me congratulations – shedding a few tears too, because I knew it meant I, his younger nephew, would leave home .
I should go to Oxford in late summer. He had just turned eighteen, and my father thought it was time to have a conversation father to son, man to man. We talk about money and allowances – no big deal because my habits were very frugal and my only extravagance was books. And then my father went to what really worried him.
‘It appears that you do not have many girlfriends, “he said. ‘Do not you like girls?’
‘All right with them,’ I answered, wanting the conversation stopped there.
‘Prefer boys, maybe? “He insisted.
‘It is, rather, but it’s just a feeling, never’ did ‘anything, “and then added, fearful,’ Do not tell Mama:. it would not accept ‘
But my father said, and the next morning she came very close face, a face that I had never seen before. ‘You’re an abomination, “she said. ‘I wish you had never been born.’ Then he went out and spent several days without talking to me. When he spoke, there was no mention of what she said (and never returned to the subject), but something had changed between us. My mother, so open and that gave me so much support in numerous ways, was harsh and inflexible in that area. Reader of the Bible as my father loved the Psalms and the Song of Solomon, but lived persecuted by the terrible verses of Leviticus: ‘Be not lie with a male as one lies with a woman. It is an abomination ‘.
My parents, like doctors, had many medical books, including several on’ sexual pathology ‘, and at twelve years old I dived in Krafft-Ebing, Magnus Hirschfeld and Havelock Ellis . But I found it hard to feel that he had a ‘condition’, that my identity could be reduced to a name or a diagnosis. My friends at school knew I was ‘different’, not least because shunned parties that finished in cuddling and making out “
About drug addiction:.
” I began to consume more drugs in my start in New York, moved in part by desandada the case with Karl, partly because my work was wrong, and I felt that, to begin with, or should have chosen the search area. In December 1965, he had come to call the service in sick, missing days straight to work. He took amphetamines constantly and ate very little; lost weight so much – almost 40 kilos in three months – could hardly bear my image in the mirror, so emaciated that was
On the eve of New Year, I had a sudden moment of clarity in the middle of one. amphetamine ecstasy and said to myself: ‘Oliver, if you do not seek help, it will not live to see another New Year. Some intervention is necessary ‘. I felt that there was very deep psychological problems behind my addiction and self-destructive tendency, and which, if untreated, I would always be turning to drugs and sooner or later they would end up with me.
About One year before, when he was in Los Angeles, Augusta Bonnard, a family friend who was a psychoanalyst, suggested that I consult someone. Reluctantly, I went to see the psychiatrist that she recommended, a Dr. Seymour Bird. When he asked, ‘Well, what brings you here, dr. Sacks ‘I replied sharply,’ Ask Dr. Bonnard – was she who
sent me ‘
It was not just my resistance to all this psychoanalysis bid;. I lived stoned most of the time. The person may become very agile and talkative in amphetamine base, and things seem to move incredibly fast, but everything vanishes without leaving any marks.
It was totally different at the beginning of 1966 when myself I sought an analyst in New York, knowing it would need aid to survive. Initially I suspected of dr. Shengold because he was too young, not much older than me. I thought, that life experience, that knowledge, that therapeutic capacity will have someone who is almost my age? I soon realized that it was an individual’s competence and character of exceptional fact, someone able to go through my defenses without being divert for my talkativeness, someone aware that I could handle and I benefit from an intensive analysis and the intense feelings and ambiguous present in the transfer mechanism. “