“The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Tales”
Losses, Excesses, Transports, and The World of the Simple are all four topics in the book “The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Tales,” by Oliver Sacks. You might not understand what those mean or discuss until you realize who Oliver Sacks is. Oliver Sacks is a Neurologist who has had the chance to take upon these twenty-four case studies and share them in a book. The book is more focused on neurological functions, different forms of the mind, and hallucinations/visions. All of these are related to the first few chapters in our Psychology textbook (Chapters 2,3,6,8,10). Oliver Sacks gives us clear insight into the mind of those that perceive things much differently than most. It is a clear insight to what most of us are curious about but may not fully understand.
In the book there are four main ideas: Losses, Excesses, Transports, and The World of the Simple. Each of these categories have their own short stories within them. These are actual cases that Oliver Sacks encountered. He encountered a ...
Within Oliver Sacks, “To See and Not See”, the reader is introduced to Virgil, a blind man who gains the ability to see, but then decides to go back to being blind. Within this story Sacks considers Virgil fortunate due to him being able to go back to the life he once lived. This is contrasted by Dr. P, in “The Man Who Mistook His Wife for A Hat”, Sacks states that his condition is “tragic” (Sacks, “The Man Who Mistook His Wife for A Hat (13) due to the fact that his life will be forever altered by his condition. This thought process can be contributed to the ideas that: it is difficult to link physical objects and conceptualized meanings without prior experience, the cultures surrounding both individuals are different, and how they will carry on with their lives.
The novel, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat by Oliver Sacks, is a neurological and psychological journal of Dr. Oliver Sacks’s patients. He describes each one of his patients illnesses into twenty-four short stories. These short stories are split into 4 parts: Losses, Excesses, Transports, and The World of the Simple.
Although the title suggests a comical book, Oliver Sacks presents an entirely different look on the mentally challenged/disturbed. The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat is a book that explains why a patient shows signs of losses, excesses, transports, and simplicity. Coincidentally, the book opens with its titling story, letting the reader explore the mind of an accomplish doctor who seems to have lost his true sight on life. In the following context, the seriousness of the stories and their interpretative breakdowns should only cause a better understanding of how the ever-so-questionable human mind truly works from a professional perspective put into simple words.
The mind is a very powerful tool when it is exploited to think about situations out of the ordinary. Describing in vivid detail the conditions of one after his, her, or its death associates the mind to a world that is filled with horrific elements of a dark nature.
Sigmund Freud believed that he “occupies a special place in the history of psychoanalysis and marks a turning point, it was with it that analysis took the step from being a psychotherapeutic procedure to being in depth-psychology” (Jones). Psychoanalysis is a theory or therapy to decode the puzzle of neurotic disorders like hysteria. During the therapy sessions, the patients would talk about their dreams. Freud would analyze not only the manifest content (what the dreamer remembers) of the dreams, but the disguise that caused the repressions of the idea. During our dreams, the decision making part of personality’s defenses are lowered allowing some of the repressed material to become more aware in a distorted form. He distinguished between
Without perception, in our illusions and hallucinations, we lose “our sense of beings,” (Capra). Lost in “isolation,” (Capra) perhaps lost within our own illusion, our abstractions, we lose the ability to judge, to dichotomize, reality from illusions, right from wrong.
Tourette’s syndrome can be found in every aspect of life, no matter one’s race, genetic makeup, or cultural heritage. An individual with this neurological disease does not stand out from the crowd; rather, only when they feel a compulsive and involuntary tic, which forces them to act out a movement or twitch, do people notice them. This disease does not necessarily have to dominate one’s life, as there are numerous famous figures throughout history that have discovered creative coping methods that distract them from their tics. In the short story, “A Surgeon’s Life” by Oliver Sacks, Dr. Carl Bennet is a surgeon who suffers from Tourette’s disease. Despite Dr. Bennett's condition, he excels in his profession as a surgeon and
This can be as simple as a man with post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) being reminded of his traumatizing experience by other individuals. Coincidentally, this is what Chief Bromden suffers from within the novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. Unfortunately, the facility he resides in does not assist him in any way, and how it operates has a resemblance closer to a prison than a hospital. Chief experiences many hallucinations, and, more often than not, they begin with a thick layer of fog which blurs his vision. This fog is usually accompanied by other hallucinations including the sounds of air raid sirens, people around him beginning to look larger, and beliefs that things are what they are not. These situations are always created by those around him, such as Nurse Ratched, promoting the idea that society is what pushes people to have hallucinations. However, some individuals are not mentally ill, and are still subjected to the pressures of society. Thoreau, the believer of the downfall of society, was not a nutcase; he was simply pushed over the edge by his critics. Thoreau was so disgusted, he packed his bags, left town, and lived in the woods with no company (Thoreau ____). The same incident occurred within Poe’s The Raven when the man featured in the story was subjected to listen to the raven until he reached insanity (Poe ___). The only difference was that this man could not escape from his hallucinations like Thoreau could. He was trapped, and societal pressure would torment him for
There are many diseases and disorders that may affect the human mind. Some of these are serious, while others are minor and may not even be noticed. Some of the disorders and diseases to be covered in this report are delirium, dementia, and schizophrenia, also a discussion of specific symptoms and treatments available for the different disorders.
(Sacks, 2012) The person experiencing them is convinced that what they are seeing or smelling is real, and become very confused as to what is reality and what is not. These most commonly occur in people who suffer from a mental illness such as schizophrenia or various types of psychotic disorders. In this article the author discusses how hallucinations are becoming more common amongst people today, and the different scenarios where they are more present. Hallucinations can occur when experiencing migraines, seizures, or even consuming too much of a particular medication. (Sacks, 2012)
The creation of a stressful psychological state of mind is prevalent in the story “The Yellow Wall-Paper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, as well as, Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart”, Ophelia’s struggles in William Shakespeare’s “Hamlet”, and the self-inflicted sickness seen in William Blake’s “Mad Song”. All the characters, in these stories and poems, are subjected to external forces that plant the seed of irrationality into their minds; thus, creating an adverse intellectual reaction, that from an outsider’s point of view, could be misconstrued as being in an altered state due to the introduction of a drug, prescribed or otherwise, furthering the percep...
Sigmund Freud is one of the most popular and credited scientists in the history of psychology. When Freud sought how to treat his patients, he discovered that there were some patients who had nothing physically wrong with them. Freud began to explore the possibility that these patients may be suffering from a mental rather than physical disorder and his lead to his discovery of the unconscious. Freud determined the unconscious was basin of thoughts, feelings, memories, and wishes that were mostly unacceptable. Other psychologists believe unconsciousness is merely information we process that we are unaware of. Part of exploring the unconscious was to analyze the dreams patients were having. Patients were able to relay the deepest parts of their minds be using free association. Free association is when a person relaxes completely and reacts however they want without feeling shame or embarrassment. It was through free association and freedom of expression that Freud was able to determine a patient’s personality. Per...
As a child, I watched Alfred Hitchcock Theater, The Twilight Zone and other science fiction or horror shows. Often times the storyline was based on a victim's mental problems or their skewed perception of the world. Looking back, I remember the fascination I felt when watching one specific episode of the Twillight Zone. In this particular episode, a man turned into a zombie by some type of poison. Essentially he was still alive, but he was dead to the world. In the end he was embalmed while he was completely conscious yet could not say anything to prevent it. Like this incident, every episode captivated me but when it was over I could sleep easy because there was no possibility of any of it happening. Oliver Sacks disrupts my childhood understanding of what is plausible and what is not in the real world. In his Book, The Man Who mistook his Wife for a Hat, Sacks compiles a group of stories that appeal to the curiosity and compassion of a young boy through his close look at human experiences in the eyes of science, medicine and new technology.
Under the heading, Small Chunks of Gray Matter Mediate Specific Content of Consciousness, Koch examines different scenarios in which people experience some sort of brain trauma and as result lose bits of their conscious experience (color blindness, face blindness)(32). These examples provide an argument that consciousness not only holds some physical form within the brain, but these examples allow us to get one step closer in identifying key areas of the brain where consciousness may hide. This information provides reconciliation to the reductionist perspective because it can be reduced to the neurons and the areas in the brain that form consciousness. Romanticism shows unreconcilable aspects in the notion that it does little to elaborate on the phenomenon of consciousness. The question of “why?” is less crucial to consciousness than the question of
Meyer, Bruce. “Critical Essay on ‘Cargoes.’” Poetry for Students. Ed. Mary Ruby. Vol. 5. Detroit: Gale Group, 1999. Literature Resource Center. Web. 6 Apr. 2014.