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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 30 January 2009
The attention recently accorded to the writings of Oliver Sacks has once more recalled to a community wider than medical personnel the deeplymoving strangeness of human beings. I refer especially to Sacks' book The Man who Mistook his Wife for a Hat, and to his earlier book Awakenings (which last has inspired a current commercial film of the same title). A comparison that comes immediately to mind is R. D. Laing's work, which was widely read and discussed in the decade from, roughly, 1965 to 1975.
1 Sacks, Oliver, Awakenings, Second Edition (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1983)Google ScholarPubMed; The Man who Mistook his Wife for a Hat (New York: Summit Books, 1985)Google Scholar. All page references to Awakenings in this essay are given in brackets following a quotation.
2 See, in particular, Laing, R. D., The Divided Self (London: Tavistock, 1960)Google Scholar, and Laing, R. D. and Esterson, A., Sanity, Madness and the Family (London: Tavistock, 1964)Google Scholar. Both books were subsequently published by Penguin Books, and reprinted many times. All page references to The Divided Self in this essay are to the Penguin edition, given in brackets following a quotation.
3 It may be impossible, in our present, greatly freer, sexual environment, for persons born after 1950 to imagine the kinds of constraints sexuality was subject to then, in parts of Europe and North America. As an unregenerate heterosexual raised in the coils of Irish—German Roman Catholicism in Canada during the 1940s–1950s, it seemed much of the time as if this part of one's nature was calculated to cause nothing but grief, until finally precipitating one into hell. But when as a graduate student in Britain in the mid-1960s I observed the distress of acquaintances caught in a different inclination, it seemed at moments as if they were already in hell.