Artistic Temperament and Manic-Depression

This morning (during מוסף) I completed Kay Redfield Jamison's book that argues for understanding some artistic genius as being the consequence of manic-depressive illness, Touched with Fire. Previously, I had read Jamison's memoir, An Unquiet Mind, which I found moving and informative. Jamison is a professor of psychiatry at Johns Hopkins and has been struggling with manic-depression for the entirety of her adult life. For reasons I can't seem to grasp, some people I know are not fans of the memoir - perhaps because the symptomatic expression of the disease in Jamison's own life and her reactions to medication are not shared by everyone. She's also since published Exuberance, Night Falls Fast, and The Years of Silence are Past on the same topics.

This book is a good read, and I've excerpted four sections below, which I think are worth reading (because they're smart or funny, though not necessarily both).

Jamison spends the book utilizing the many famous poets, artists, and literary figures whom are either known to have or she believes to have had manic-depressive illness to articulate the symptoms of the disease and its expression. She notes the highs followed by the lows, the mild highs known as cyclothymia, the seasonal fluctuations, and more. Later on in the book she examines in a more focused way certain individuals' biographies and the familial (i.e., genetic) preponderance of the disease in certain notable artistic families. Over and over again she reminds us of the characteristics of manic-depressive illness, which can involve significant periods of time in between manic highs and depressed lows; it is most often the crests into full-blown mania which are the most fruitful periods in her artists' lives. The number of famous authors identified in her appendix as being likely sufferers of manic-depression or its related milder disorders is absolutely stunning - pretty much a comprehensive who's who list of poets, authors, artists, and composers. In the last chapter Jamison raises the questions about gene therapies and the possible eradication of the disease - some great quotations from other scholars deeply embedded in thinking about mapping the genome and its possible consequences.

The book left me with the following questions:

• What is our explanation for similar artistic creativity without the presence of manic-depression? Does such a creativity even exist? If so, is it a wholly different creativity, or the same, and the two are often related, but not always?
• Can you be an artistic genius and not be mad?
• Why aren't all mad people geniuses? Or are they, but some have their genius hidden by circumstances of their life or illness?

I imagine a screenplay to be written some day, of a world where art is neither created nor appreciated. Where scenes depict people walking lifelessly through museums of the past and it is as if they are looking through Pleasantville glasses. The punch-line: this is the world where the human population has been "corrected" of the taint of manic-depression.

Now, for the excerpts:

In the fourth chapter, Jamison, describing the relationship between imagination and temperment, includes the following gems, brilliant by themselves and quite powerful in their juxtaposition (pg. 128):

Samuel Clemens, who described his own 'periodical and sudden changes of mood ... from deep melancholy to half-insane tempests and cyclones,' observed that the 'secret source of humor is not joy but sorrow,' reiterating years later that 'there is no humor in heaven.' The simultaneous existence and shared residence of such opposite moods and feelings is well-illustrated by Franz Schubert's assertion that whenever he sat down to write songs of love he wrote songs of pain, and whenever he sat down to write songs of pain he wrote songs of love. Virginia Woolf, in A Room of One's Own, observed: 'The beauty of the world ... has two edges, one of laughter, one of anguish, cutting the heart asunder.' The ability to reconcile such opposite states, whether they are of mood, thought, or vitality, is a critical part of any creative act.

Jamison devoids an entire chapter to the disease and genius of George Gordon, Lord Byron, including this amazing anecdote (pg. 168-169):

Life never remained entirely bleak for Byron, however. In fall 1807, having been told that regulations would not allow him to keep his dog at Cambridge, he acquired a tame bear - there being no rule forbidding bears - and housed it in the turret of his college rooms. His pleasure in the bear, which he walked through the streets of Cambridge, was obvious: 'I have got a new friend, the finest in the world, a tame bear, when I brought him here, they asked me what I meant to do with him, and my reply was "he should sit for a Fellowship ...." This answer delighted them not.' Byron and the bear, when later reunited at Newstead Abbey, would occasionally swim together in a vault leading to the graves of the monks who had previously inhabited the Byron ancestral home; along with other animals, the bear was kept in the family chapel, a thirteenth-century converted Chapter House. Byron had inherited his father's love for animals - in addition, as Doris Langley Moore has pointed out, to their shared capacity for incurring debt, as well as probable incest with their respective sisters ....

In concluding her chapter on Byron, Jamison makes one of her crucial points - the association of artistic imagination and talent with manic-depression should not limit or obscure the greatness of that talent (pg. 190):

One of the many things that makes Byron so interesting is the sheer power of his life and emotion. To focus exclusively, or even largely, on his psychopathology - other than ot use it to understand him and his work - would be to make a mockery of his complexity, imagination, and vast energies. His personal discipline was extraordinary; his technical discipline, although overshadowed by the more Romantic notion of effortless poetry written 'as easily as the hawk flies' (and not helped by the fact that he seems to have published, with little discrimination, virtually everything he ever wrote) was also impressive. ... 'His reason was punctuated, even disturbed, by passion,' wrote Alan Bold. 'But whatever he was in person he was not, as an artist, passion's slave. In the poetry Byron masks his passion and makes it into endurable art.' Byron himself wrote: 'Yet, see, he mastereth himself, and makes/His torture tributary to his will.'

Finally, by way of excerpts, Jamison, in her discussion of "Medicine and the Arts," reasons thusly as she questions the possible outcomes of genetic engineering or selective abortion as a way of removing manic-depression from the diseases of humanity (pg. 254-255):

The historical precedent is chilling. Tens of thousands of mentally ill individuals, including many with manic-depressive illness, were sterilized or killed during the Third Reich, and many other thousands of psychiatric patients were sterilizd earlier this century [i.e., the 20th] in the United States. Ironically, one study carried out in Germany during the 1930s addressed the advisability of forced sterilization of individuals with manic-depressive illness. The author, who found that manic-depressive illness was greatly overrepresented in the professional and higher occupational classes, recommended against sterilization of these patients 'especially if the patient does not have siblings who could transmit the positive aspects of the genetic heritage.' During the 1940s, in a study undertaken by the Committee on Heredity and Eugenics, researchers at the McLean Hospital in Boston studied the pedigrees of several socially prominent American families. They came to a similar conclusion: 'Perhaps the words of Bumke need to be taken into account before we embark too whole-heartedly on any sterilization program, "If we could extinguish the sufferers from manic-depressive psychosis from the world, we would at the same time deprive ourselves of an immeasurable amount of the accomplished and good, of color and warmth, of spirit and freshness." Finally, only dried up bureaucrats and schizophrenics would be left. Here I must say that I would rather accept into the bargain the diseased manic-depressives than to give up the healthy individuals of the same heredity cycle.'

This disease is real, it is debilitating, and it sucks. But it is difficult, especially after Jamison's reasoned work, to not accept the gifts it gives to the world, most notably in the form of artistic genius, and most helpfully in the form of those blessed to reap its benefits while being spared its sharp (and too-often suicide-inducing) poison.

To say it differently: I find it hard (to say the least) to ignore the one guy in Germany of the '30's arguing to keep people alive.