Maria Konnikova, late last year, riffing on a New Yorker piece, had a strong takedown of psychologist Sacks. Turns out he made up a bunch of both clients and case histories in his books — and like Jonah Lehrer and others, in New Yorker essays.
That New Yorker piece is based on author Rachel Aviv being gifted with decades of Sachs diaries and correspondence by the Oliver Sachs Foundation. It shows a Sachs with other issues — acting-out sex when he decides to break things off with a European lover, major amphetamine use, followed by essentially a sublimated non-consummated relationship (on his part) with a counselor that he continued to see for decades.
As for the matter at hand? This:
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.’ ”
A number of people at the Substack linked up top, and the Facebook comment where I saw it, have wondered just how much we've lost in terms of replication and related.
Beyond what has been lost? A lot of Sachs' fictionalizations seem to involve a fair amount of psychological projection. There's a lot of that in "Awakenings."
Ultimately, there's a lot of sadness in Sachs' personal life, beyond this. I empathize.
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