PERMANENCE ET CHANGEMENT DANS LE DEVENIR IDENTITAIRE
PERMANENCE AND CHANGE IN THE IDENTITY BECOMING

Summary/Abstract: This article has its starting point in Oliver Sacks's autobiographical volume, On the Move: A Life. A volume of impressive density which includes aspects related to private life, professional becoming, love relationships, interactions with other doctor colleagues, it also contains a series of reflections and questions about the link between permanence and change in the process of identity becoming, very often in connection with the author's professional experience as a doctor.There are frequent reflections on time, perception, consciousness and memory, as well as their associations with Sacks's scientific interests in neurology. There are approached, on one hand, aspects related to sensations, perceptions, adaptation and neural plasticity which are valid for most people (although the in-depth study often becomes more exciting for Sacks, the doctor, in exceptional circumstances when something deviates from the normal neurological functioning of the individual); on the other hand, there are questioned matters about the author’s evolution as a doctor, the professional identity metamorphoses, most often illustrated in the context of an impressive scientific collaboration with medical personalities and not only. The way in which these collaborations take place, both at the human level and in the exchange of scientific ideas, the profound relationships that arise from them, the questions that appear in the correspondence or in the work / friendly meetings bring up issues of identity which are always of currency - even though they were approached differently in various historical periods, from the perspective of more or less convergent approaches.The aspects brought into discussion in the pages of Sacks's autobiography reminded us of the identity philosophical approaches belonging to Plato, J. Locke, Descartes, Heraclitus, Samuel Butler and many others. We found it interesting to repeat some of them based on Oliver Sacks's autobiographical reflections to see how the same subject, the identity becoming, can be approached in a pluridisciplinary vision which combines writing in the 1st person, medical interests in the sphere of neurology / biology / chemistry, neurosciences, philosophy, psychology, etc.The vision which we have privileges the compatibility between identity and change, both being part of the very essence of living beings. We approach identity, as most of the authors quoted above do, as a relationship of the individual with himself throughout his life or career.

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