 | IMAGINATIVE MINDS Additional Resources | ||||||||||||||||
| Madness and Creativity: is there a link?'We of the craft are all crazy . . .Some are affected by gaiety, other by melancholy, but all are more or less touched.' (Byron, quoted in Kay Redfield Jamison’s book Touched with Fire 1993). The idea that there is an essential link between madness and the creative process is one to which many writers, including Virginia Woolf, have alluded in their own work. The same point has been made by numerous artists, poets and musicians. While the claim that it is necessary to be mad to be an artist is highly questionable, the incidence of certain forms of mental disorder among highly creative individuals is striking. References to this phenomenon are found in psychiatric literature going back as far back as the 19th century. A most elegant study of this was carried out by Eliot Slater and Adolf Meyer (1959). They compared records of the life of the composer, Robert Schumann, with the volume of his musical output between the years 1829 and 1856. During this period, Schumann experienced pronounced swings of mood, from depression to hypomania, consistent with a manic-depressive disorder. The volume of his musical output was neatly correlated with his moods: when he was ‘up’ his output was exceptional; when he was ‘down’ it dwindled to a trickle of works. He was eventually committed to an asylum and died from self-starvation. Kay Redfield Jamison, a psychiatrist, and herself manic-depressive, has documented similar patterns of illness in the lives of many creative artists. She claims that there is a raised incidence of both manic-depression and schizophrenia among such highly creative people. Both these illnesses are thought to have a genetic component, reflected in the incidence of mental illness among family members of sufferers. Redfield Jamison’s studies of the family histories of exceptionally creative people, have uncovered striking evidence for eccentricity, violent outbursts, and frank insanity among family members. Perceptions of an ‘inherited curse’ were quite common among creative people, as reflected in Tennyson’s references to a ‘taint of blood’. The notion that creativity and madness have something in common, both genetically, and in terms of the mental processes involved, is an intriguing idea, taken up in Daniel Nettle’s book Strong imagination: Madness Creativity and Human Nature. He argues that thought processes in both creativity and schizophrenia, for example, are characterised by an exceptionally ‘divergent’ style, associated with finding novel and unusual solutions to problems. He considers the kind of brain processes which might lead a person to become mentally ill under one set of environmental circumstances, and creative under others, and suggests that the ‘trait’ in common might have an evolutionary basis. Because most of the documented cases linking madness with creativity are related to the ‘arts’, it might be thought that the ‘divergent’ thinking thought to underpin this relationship, occurs exclusively in this field. Scientific and mathematical thinking has traditionally been associated with ‘convergent’ rather than ‘divergent’ reasoning-that is, proceeding logically from one observation or premise to another, rather than by the intuitive leaps, free associations and original connections which some view as the hallmark of artistic creativity. However it is now more widely accepted that science, and particularly scientific discovery, involve phases characterised by divergent thought processes. Therefore we might expect that the relationship between outstanding creativity and mental disorder should also surface in disciplines such as maths and science. One notable example is the Nobel prize winner John Nash, who himself believed that madness played a role in mathematical genius. The interwoven themes of madness and creativity in the lives of creative people makes fascinating reading - see our collection of biographies of artists 'touched by fire' See Further Reading for references | ||||||||||||||||
© Ilona Roth, 2004 | |||||||||||||||||