Sacks once told a reporter that he hoped to be remembered as someone who “bore witness”—a term often used within medicine to describe the act of accompanying patients in their most vulnerable moments, rather than turning away. To bear witness is to recognize and respond to suffering that would otherwise go unseen. But perhaps bearing witness is incompatible with writing a story about it. In his journal, after a session with a patient with Tourette’s syndrome, Sacks describes the miracle of being “enabled to ‘feel’—that is, to imagine, with all the powers of my head and heart—how it felt to be another human being.” Empathy tends to be held up as a moral end point, as if it exists as its own little island of good work. And yet it is part of a longer transaction, and it is, fundamentally, a projection. A writer who imagines what it’s like to exist as another person must then translate that into his own idiom—a process that Sacks makes particularly literal.
By taking that process of translation literally, she means that Oliver Sacks often lied about his patients and very knowingly and deceptively inserted his own thoughts into the stories he wrote about them.
I haven’t thrown away his books yet, but honestly, I probably will.
Beyond what he called, in his own journals and letters, lies and falsification in his published work, it’s difficult not to conclude that, especially in the first half of his career, if Sacks was not a sociopath, he was darn uncomfortably close.
There’s plenty of space in that piece, and rightly, for sympathy toward Mr. Sacks. And the story of Sacks’ life will, I think, still show that he bore a heartfelt personal witness to many of his patients, who seemed genuinely to love and be loved by him. I hope his larger story continues to reflect that. But his books are now, for me anyway, utterly useless.
Sacks spoke of “animating” his patients, as if lending them some of his narrative energy. After living in the forgotten wards of hospitals, in a kind of narrative void, perhaps his patients felt that some inaccuracies were part of the exchange. Or maybe they thought, That’s just what writers do. Sacks established empathy as a quality every good doctor should possess, enshrining the ideal through his stories. But his case studies, and the genre they helped inspire, were never clear about what they exposed: the ease with which empathy can slide into something too creative, or invasive, or possessive. Therapists—and writers—inevitably see their subjects through the lens of their own lives, in ways that can be both generative and misleading.
I have been thinking a lot lately about, not just the shortfalls of writing, but the… — I’ve struggled to find the right word here, but it’s very close to corruption, the at least nearly built-in corrupting capacity of writing. As Aviv says in the first quote above, bearing witness might actually be incompatible with writing a story about it.
And I’ve been trying to add to this thought for the last few days with only partial success.
To be continued…
