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An Interview With Oliver Sacks
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10971 |
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Section : |
BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
Date : |
6 / 1986 |
1,590 Words |
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Ronald Leifer, M.D.
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Leifer: In your book you propose a new discipline of the neurology of identity, or the neural foundations of self. Would you say a few words about your concept of identity of self and how brain function may relate to it?
Sacks: I may have used a resounding phrase for nothing very new but something I suppose, which all of us are concerned with as physicians. I think I've been especially interested in things which may undercut or challenge identity. I suppose there are various sorts of selections in the book and maybe a central one is the challenge to identity in some of the more difficult patients who find some way of holding on despite an interminably changing world. I think the sort of language of faculty and function makes it difficult to talk about self and the way a person perceives. It makes it, for example, difficult to talk about the strange, impersonal way that Dr. P. [in "The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat"] would see. I'm not very much of a theorizer or at least I haven't any theories. They would have to be implicit or come after my observations. So I don't exactly know what I'm getting at. But I think that case histories of this kind are sort of suggestive, hopefully suggestive to other people.
Leifer: Yes, the concepts of self and identity are notoriously difficult to define. It is interesting that psychiatry has a project similar to what you call the neurology of self, namely biological psychiatry's effort to define the biology of mental illness. I was struck by the fact that with all the dramatic neurological deficits and excesses of your patients there weren't any traditional mental illnesses caused by these drastic neurological problems. As a neurologist, what are your views on the neural basis of mental
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