You don t need to be a psychologist to see Sacks s unusual depth of involvement with his patients as

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Oliver Sacks , the eminent neurologist and writer, whose many books have done perhaps more than any other body of work to explain the mysteries of the brain to a general readership, is a strong supporter of the narrativity theory of the human subject. Suitably enough given this is an autobiography Sacks restates the notion here: Each of us constructs and lives a narrative and is defined by this narrative. Elsewhere he asserts: I suspect that a feeling for stories, for narrative, is a universal human disposition, going with our powers of language, consciousness of self, and autobiographical memory. Setting to one side the truth or otherwise of this contention (personally I think it s only the social being that is narrated to ourselves we are always such stuff as dreams are made of ), for a man who views his life in dramatic terms, On the Move presents the reader with some quite startling narrative leaps. Perhaps the most extreme of these are two seemingly throwaway remarks Sacks makes concerning his sexual life: aged 21, and desperate to lose his virginity, he found himself in the tolerant atmosphere of Amsterdam yet, trammelled by his Orthodox Jewish upbringing and the social repression of the era, he was unable to act, and instead sat in a bar all evening drinking Dutch gin for Dutch courage . He remembered nothing between staggering out of the bar and awaking the next morning in a strange cabi bed, being served coffee by a man who explained: He had seen me lying dead drunk in the gutter had taken me home and buggered me. A demon even at that age when it came to details, Sacks asked Was it nice? to which his ravager replied Yes Very nice , before rounding off the bizarre episode cabi by commiserating: cabi He was sorry I was too out of it to enjoy it as well. To order On the Move go to picador.com/books/on-the-move .
The second remark is even stranger: swimming in Hampstead ponds on his 40th birthday, Sacks was approached by a handsome young student from Harvard. A delightful week-long interlude followed: the days full, the nights intimate, a happy, festive, loving week . It was a great benison all the greater, because: It was just as well that I had no foreknowledge of the future, for after that sweet birthday fling I was to have no sex for the next 35 years.
Accustomed to the contemporary obsession with identity (and sex for that matter), we might expect the autobiography cabi of a gay man especially one from a Jewish immigrant background who ends up emigrating to the US from Britain to be preoccupied by differences cabi of sexuality and heritage. But Sacks is a man of his generation, and while no prude, nor a jealous guard of his own privacy, nonetheless the personal and existential aspects of this autobiography are definitely secondary to the main business of his life, which has been the practice of neurology and the chronicling cabi of the insights this practice has afforded. In part the light touch on these matters can be explained by a desire not to repeat himself: Sacks s memoir of his boyhood, Uncle Tungsten , brilliantly realised a portrait of his eccentric family of medics, scientists and technologists, while also recording the traumas of his wartime evacuation and the burgeoning of his own vocation.
Then again, throughout Sacks s literary oeuvre there has been a determination to put himself in the frame: whether writing, cabi in Awakenings (1973) about the post-encephalitic patients he bestirred from half-century-long swoons, or, in An Anthropologist on Mars (1995) and many other works, about the bizarre psychic, cognitive and perceptual worlds of people with autism, cabi Tourette syndrome, congenital blindness, and a host of other neuro-atypical conditions, he has always been at pains to emphasise the interpersonal dimension. For Sacks there can be no conception cabi of the mind in isolation: personhood is a property ever emerging from social and perceptual interaction. Not that this perspective came to him fully realised at the outset; rather the impression On the Move conveys is of a shy and withdrawn young man, who, through a combination of unusual life experience and intensive medical practice, comes to realise cabi in himself an almost preternatural sensitivity to the perspectives of others, no matter cabi how alien these may be.
You don t need to be a psychologist to see Sacks s unusual depth of involvement with his patients as some sort of substitute for those 35 romance-free years. The poet Thom Gunn , a friend of the author s, remarked that he d worried Sacks was deficient in empathy until he became a clinician. Sacks himself is even more forthright: I had fallen in love and out of love and, in a sense, was in love with my patients. The critici