View the Archives!
Questions?
Contact Us
Barbara Geehan
Office of Publications
& Media Relations
Phone: (240) 895-3073
18952 East Fisher Road
St. Mary's City, MD 20686
Psychological Insights
Must One Be Mad to Be an Artist?
by Robin Bates, Professor of English, and
David Finkelman, Professor of Psychology
To be a great artist, do you have to be insane? The vision of the mad artist certainly resides in the popular imagination, and we can readily conjure up high-profile examples, such as Edgar Allan Poe, Vincent Van Gogh, Virginia Woolf, Jackson Pollock, and Sylvia Plath. But is mental illness a precondition for artistic genius? Or is it the case, as schizophrenia patient and I Never Promised You a Rose Garden author Joanne Greenberg has written, that "there is no creativity in madness; madness is the opposite of creativity, although people may be creative in spite of being mentally ill."
The two of us have twice teamed up to teach a course on "Madness and Literature" in which we explored this issue. We read a number of articles and works, especially from the 20th century, including Poe short stories, Plath poems, Peter Shaffor Equus, Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita, Peter Weiss's Marat/Sade, Susanna Kaysen's Girl Interrupted, and others. And, as with many questions, the more we probed the issue, the more complicated it became.
First, research provides some support for the link between artistic genius and madness. High rates of mental illness are indeed to be found among artists, especially writers and, among writers, poets. To cite one example, virtually all of the major British Romantic poets from the 18th and early 19th centuries, including Thomas Gray, William Cowper, Christopher Smart, Thomas Chatterton, William Blake, William Wordsworth, Samuel Coleridge, Percy Shelley, Byron, Walter Scott, and John Keats, appear to have suffered from severe mood swings. As Byron succinctly put it at one point, "We of the craft are all crazy."
In her landmark book, Touched with Fire: Manic-Depressive Illness and the Artistic Temperament, Johns Hopkins psychiatry professor Kay Jamison reports that the suicide rate among artists is 18 times the rate of the general population. Depressive illness, meanwhile, appears at eight to 10 times the general rate and manic-depression (clinically called bipolar disorder) at 10 to 40 times the rate.
Depression, bipolar disorder, and drug and alcohol addiction are generally the conditions associated with artists. Schizophrenia, incidentally, is not, despite once being regarded as the "genius" illness. People thought this because, with its delusions and hallucinations, schizophrenia looks like the archetypal madness. It now appears, however, that, despite I Never Promised You a Rose Garden, schizophrenia seldom is associated with works of artistry.
So what is the connection between mental illness and artistry? Some artists, by way of explanation, have argued that, because they have sensitive souls, they see and feel the ugliness of the world more deeply than others and that their illness is the price they pay for that sensitivity.
But one could make an argument the other way around: rather than reality driving them mad, it is their madness that allows them to perceive the cracks in official reality that the rest of us do not. Art pushes the boundaries of what we know and experience, and those artists who suffer from madness journey to the edges. As we go about our daily routines, for instance, we are less likely (so this line of reasoning goes) to look deeply into death than a poet suffering from chronic depression. Great numbers of people suffer from mild depression, but it takes an artist who has spent considerable time there to give us, as Coleridge has, the terrifying images of "death in life" that we find in Rime of the Ancient Mariner. Because he suffered mightily from depression, Poe was able, in Harold Bloom's words, to "dream everyone's nightmare."
Given such achievements, we have to warn our students against romanticizing mental illness. Depression is a horrible disease, incapacitating individuals, prompting negative self-images, disrupting work, sleep and eating, and occasionally culminating in suicide. Composer Hector Berlioz called it "the most terrible of all the evils of existence." A writer will probably not do any writing during a severe depressive episode. Those poets who suffer from bipolarity may make productive use of the swings into mania, although extreme mania makes writing impossible as well. In our class, we also have to assure our students that their own mood swings do not necessarily mean that they are bipolar. We quote one of David Finkelman's graduate professors: "The only people who don't experience mood swings are dead."
We also stress to our students that artistic genius cannot be encompassed by psychological descriptions. Furthermore, many artists do not suffer from mental illness, and, of course, most mentally ill persons are not artists. Artists have a special talent, and one intriguing line of thought is that those who are ill sometimes use their art for (among other things) a coping mechanism. Their ability to articulate or give artistic shape to their suffering provides a kind of relief, a positive form of self-medication, if you will. Seen from this perspective, their art is a way of turning a curse into a blessing. They can imagine themselves as suffering so that the rest of us may see.
Finally, the ethically challenging question of medication arises. If prescription drugs have the potential to smooth out intense mood swings, do they risk "curing" the suffering artist of his or her creativity? After all, if depression has the potential to open up deep insights, then shouldn't artists just gut it out? There have been artists who have refused medication for fear that it would rob them of inspiration, although there have been others who have sung the praises of antidepressants. And then, how does one balance Plath's Ariel or Woolf's Between the Acts with their suicides? Must they die so that the rest of us will have their books to read?
The discussions reaffirm for us the limitations of any one disciplinary approach. Creativity cannot be reduced to psychology because, whatever their psychological condition, artists respond in widely disparate ways. Then again, psychology does provide one window into questions that, as inquiring beings, we feel compelled to ask. So, is madness a key ingredient in creativity? The answer, like so many answers provided by liberal arts inquiry, is this: sometimes yes, sometimes no, and that is just the beginning of the discussion.
