Among the many mysteries that enshroud the nature of schizophrenia is that of whether it is causally linked to artistic genius and to extraordinary cognitive levels in general. These questions are of more than academic interest to me, of course, and to Honoree as well.
Creativity and mental illness have been conjoined in cultural myth beyond the point of stereotype. A great deal of received opinion has it that one cannot be creative, or extremely bright, without being at least a little insane.
The mad scientist of the movies has done his test-tube-tipping best to reinforce and exploit this supposition. Though a subset of the larger horror-movie genre, mad-science films are distinctive in that they express primal human anxieties toward, say, man’s tampering with the will of the gods, or God. (You’d have to be crazy to try anything like that, they seem to be screaming to their doomed wild-eyed protagonists.) They offer lurid morality plays on the evils wrought by eugenics, lobotomy, the transplantation of limbs and organs, robotics, weaponry and man-made pestilences, and the quest for eternal life. And, of course, they invoke the invisible but always-proximate border, which, overstepped by the genius, lands her or him in the lair of lunacy.
Current-day loathing of scientists is fed by the great tides of anti-intellectual sentiment in general and, in particular, by blindered resistance to such ideas as global warming, abortion and sex education, and certain bedrock economic realities. The resistance, a staple of news headlines and Internet memes, is absolutist, and it is fed by a variety of converging sources: from evangelical Christians citing biblical absolutism; from political candidates who believe these citations or claim to, and thus scorn the “reality-based” community as laughably naive; from great systems of commerce and education that do not see compatibility with their self-interests, and a populace trained to suspect madness as a by-product of hyperrational thought.
Yet just beneath the surface of these topical rationalizations lies strong evidence of a far more ancient, and more pervasive, source of the skepticism directed toward science and scientists, and toward intellectualism in general—to say nothing of the mentally ill. This source is the Other, a spectral figure that generates fear and loathing, and that will reappear in these pages.
The scientist bears oppressive historical baggage. The calling has evolved from deep roots in alchemy and even sorcery. The annals of fable are saturated with tales of the sorcerer who misuses his arcane insights for evil, or who corrupts himself in pursuit of transcendent knowledge. It is a testimony to the grip that these myths exert upon the imagination that the masterwork of German literature, Goethe’s tragic play Faust, portrays the fate of a doctor who sells his soul to an agent of the devil, Mephistopheles (or Mephistophilis), who promises Faust, in return, the knowledge of “what holds the world together in its innermost self.”*
The Faust/Mephistopheles theme (which in fact predates Goethe) spilled over from the dramatic stage and into opera, ballet, novels, and, inevitably, the movies with their keen attention to the temper of the times—the zeitgeist. The Faust-like Dr. Frankenstein and his monster first appeared on-screen in a silent sixteen-minute film in 1910, made at Edison Studios and possibly directed by Thomas Edison. From there, indirect cinematic treatment flourished: In the silent 1920 film Dr. Caligari’s Cabinet, made in post–World War I Germany, the evil doctor stood in for a mesmerizing yet warmongering national government. In 1933, during the dawn of eugenics as a perverse Nazi experiment in racial purification, Paramount released The Island of Lost Souls. Along with two its remakes as The Island of Dr. Moreau,* this movie features a deranged scientist who has developed an operation that turns human beings into feral animals. In 1927, liberal Germanic fears of a demonic, science-engineered future emerged again, this time with breathtaking sets and towering iconic images. Fritz Lang’s phantasmagoric Metropolis, the progenitor of modern dystopian science-fiction films (Blade Runner prominently among them), delivers a barrage of murky allegorical foreboding. It hints at Christian ideals in retreat before columns of poor, subjugated workers under the thumb of a cynical elite, whose leader commands a bug-eyed scientist, Rotwang, to build a destructive robot. The robot breaks free from all control and destroys the city.
Following World War II and its hellscape of technology-driven destruction, the movie mad scientist began to share thematic billing with mad science itself, a force of apocalyptic intent spawned by a collective mad world. (It was only some fifteen years later that the former British army psychiatrist, the Scottish R. D. Laing, began to popularize his belief that the world was in fact mad, and that those who bore the label “schizophrenic” were its sane exceptions. People in the distant future—if there is one—Laing wrote, “will see that what we call ‘schizophrenia’ was one of the forms in which, often through quite ordinary people, the light began to break through the cracks in our all-too-closed minds.”)1
A rational question far more central to the mysteries of the brain, and far more pertinent to both my sons’ vulnerability to madness, is one both ancient and current: Do neural links exist between creativity and mental illness? Or, to put it in a couple of other ways: Did Kevin’s and Dean’s artistic gifts put them on the path to schizophrenia? Or, perhaps, vice versa?
Archetype in many lands tends toward the affirmative. The intuitive-affirmative might be more accurate. The crazy artist, along with his relatives the mad scientist, the nutty professor, and the pointy-headed intellectual—all these are enduring staples of biography, entertainment, even political scorn. And of course admiration: Plato, anticipating R. D. Laing, implied that insanity was one with artistic achievement: “There is a… kind of madness which is possession by the Muses… the sane man is nowhere at all when he enters into rivalry with the madman.”2 Among artists, it has been the musician, the writer, and the painter who have been most susceptible: Beethoven, Liszt, Tchaikovsky, Charlie Parker, William Styron, Sylvia Plath, Robert Lowell, Ernest Hemingway, Vincent van Gogh, not to mention the famous clinical depressive Sigmund Freud—the list is at once familiar and seemingly inexhaustible.
In this instance, modern neuroscience tends to agree with ageless archetype, though only tentatively—the tentative-affirmative, you might say—with many caveats in the way of a definitive link.
One obstacle lies in pinning down exactly what creativity is. Its neurological origins and processes are as amorphous as those of chronic madness itself. Where does creativity come from? What are its functions? Why would anyone even think to link it with mental illness?
At the level of everyday conversation, creativity is almost self-defining. It involves “novel approaches requiring cognitive processes that are different from prevailing modes of thought or expression.” It is “the ability to produce something that is novel or original and useful or adaptive.” Creative people “are better at recognizing relationships, making associations and connections, and seeing things that others cannot see.”3
Educational psychologists and others have taken the question to higher ground, proposing that creativity is an essential tool for human development and survival. Among them is Sandra Bruno, a researcher and associate professor at the University of Paris. Bruno has argued that creativity at its origins in the human child is not creation, in the sense of creating something entirely new, but rather an act of imitation: the infant experiences reflexes—instinctual responses to activity in the world. The first creative leap occurs when the child begins to adapt these reflexes into a scheme, one that is useful to new situations. This process is, among other things, the route to language acquisition. “Habits, imitation, language acquisition may seem in opposition to creativity,” Bruno writes, “but they are actually rooted in [the impulse] to go beyond the present set of competencies. The issue is, for the child, to find equilibrium between repetition, stereotypy, and norm on the one side (which avoids creativity) and uniqueness on the other side.” She concludes her paper by noting provocatively, “In a pragmatic consideration, these two extremes may lead to various types of neurosis.”4
Which leads us to the threshold of creativity and madness.
As with most of the secrets still locked away in the labyrinths of mental illness, the question of this relationship yields no settled answers. Under study for more than half a century, it ranks as a top-tier enigma for neuroscientists, and among the most acute thinkers on this subject is Gordon Claridge, emeritus professor of abnormal psychology at Oxford University.
In 1997 Claridge introduced the concept of “schizotypy,” which argued—controversially, as Claridge himself acknowledged—that personality traits lie along a spectrum, inherited yet different in each individual, that range from “normal” and temporary dissociative states (nonconformity, superstition, occasional disorganized thoughts, a withdrawal from the pleasures of life) to full-blown psychotic disorders. Every brain contains a measure of schizotypy. Not every brain degenerates into madness.
What is it, then, about schizotypy that links it to creativity—and from there to mental illness?
The social psychologist Susan K. Perry has written that “looseness and the ability to cross mental boundaries are aspects of both schizophrenic thinking and creative thinking.”5 The point, or circumstances, at or under which schizotypy transforms into full-blown schizophrenia or bipolar disorder—which it resembles in milder form—is yet to be discovered. Yet the notion of a “spectrum” supports the views of Eugen Bleuler, who believed that no clear line separated “sane” and “insane” behavior.
If true—and the distinguished Claridge claims strong experimental and clinical evidence—the implications are enormous and revisive. They would overturn, for instance, the long-held doctrine that schizophrenia can originate only from a genetic flaw, though damaging external, environmental factors must stimulate it to form the dreaded disease. No, says Claridge: schizotypy reveals that everyone is born with the potential for schizophrenia. The potential may be actualized into mental illness, depending on circumstances. Or it may result in enhanced creativity, or even spiritual ecstasy.
Other researchers have gone so far as to propose that schizophrenia is more than a tragic risk for creative people: Its persistence in the gene pool is essential. It is there “because of shared genetic linkages to creativity.”
This is the view of a paper published in 2014 as a chapter in the book Creativity and Mental Illness.6 Its authors, a five-person team of PhDs specializing in psychiatric research, report that 103 studies in recent years suggest a genetic connection between creativity and psychosis. “Moreover, schizotypal thinking is often viewed as sharing features with creative thought, such as cognitive flexibility and divergent thinking via unusual but meaningful associations. These commonalities, coupled with the observed heritability of both constructs, suggest that there may be genetic factors common to both creativity and schizophrenia.”
A fearless and profound early-modern searcher into the dark wilderness where madness and creativity might be found intertwined was Carl Jung. Jung held a lifelong fascination for thought and images that lay beyond the restrictive borders erected by his former mentor and later antagonist Sigmund Freud. He believed that without an unfettered immersion in them, the mind would forever keep its secrets locked, and human awareness would remain only partial, stunted at best. His explorations included Eastern religions with their lavish and often terrifying imagery; an “unconscious” universally shared and stocked with bizarre totems of human experience; devils; gods; tricksters; the mother; the child; the shadow.
Jung, in part at least, was coursing through the mind via the vehicle of art.
“In order to do justice to a work of art,” he wrote in The Spirit in Man, Art, and Literature, “analytical psychology must rid itself entirely of medical prejudice; for a work of art is not a disease, and consequently requires a different approach from the medical one.”7 A doctor’s aim, he continued, is to pull disease out by its roots, but a psychologist must take the opposite point of view: he must inquire into the work’s meaning, irrespective of an individual artist’s intentions. Perhaps the artist in his conception was more like Icarus, privileged and damned to fly too close to the source of all light, risking, even sacrificing his life in exchange for a glimpse of infinite truth.
I think of Kevin reaching for and becoming one with his guitar.
Relatively few people have the opportunity to compare the temperament and goals of an actual scientist with the lurid fantasies just described. I am one of the lucky few. Honoree fits the mold of the actual, working scientist far better than any white-coated cinematic eccentric who throws a switch and screams, “It’s alive! IT’S ALIVE!” After earning her PhD in 1975 at the University of Chicago, Honoree developed a line of investigation into a largely unanswered central question in cell biology that surrounds the roughly seven trillion cells in the human body, containing nearly identical genomes: How is it that they differentiate into so many different cell types, such as muscle, blood, nerve, and skin cells? At this writing, forty years later, she at last is well along in synthesizing and organizing her notes, papers, and six hundred-odd cell photographs into a sophisticated, unified consummation of her patient, painstaking work, which has broadened quietly but considerably. I have yet to hear her scream “Eureka!” or see her dash from the house with a beaker of mysterious boiling gases; and I will assert that academic science-department Christmas parties are a lot more convivial and laced with good conversation than are the Christmas parties thrown by English departments, where the celebrants tend to brood.
Conjoined, Janus-like, with the pop-mythological face of the mad scientist is the mad artist. Vincent van Gogh may or may not have sliced off his own right earlobe in 1888—some scholars now believe that the painter Paul Gauguin clipped it with the tip of a sword during an argument. In any case, the injury, and its devastating coda two years later, when Van Gogh fatally shot himself in a wheat field that he was painting, made him an icon of genius-and-death romanticism.
The necrology of renowned artist suicides in the twentieth century reinforced this sentimental view of the Artist as tragically insane: among them, Virginia Woolf walking into the Ouse in 1941, her coat pockets filled with stones; Ernest Hemingway turning a favored shotgun on himself in 1961 (his widow, Mary, insisted that it was an accident); the poet Sylvia Plath gassing herself in 1963 after several failed attempts on her own life; the painter Mark Rothko slashing his wrists in 1970; the poet John Berryman jumping from a bridge in Minnesota in 1972; the grunge guitarist Kurt Cobain shooting himself in 1994; the monologist Spalding Gray leaping from the Staten Island Ferry in 2004.
Curiously, the (mad) scientist and artist are diametric opposites as measured by the goals that damn each as mad: eternal life in the scientist’s typic quest; eternal death for the artist. This is a little counterintuitive when one thinks about it: the scientist (who, after all, is only pursuing what most people crave) is generally assigned the villain’s role in popular morality plays, while the artist (whose madness is confirmed exclusively by her suicide) is generally mourned and venerated—in retrospect, of course.
So: Does neuroscience support the myth of mental illness as a concomitant of high intelligence, scientific genius, artistic creativity? Is madness the price that humans must pay for being exceptional?
Sadly, the answers appear to be yes—but only a dubious and deeply qualified yes, and only to a limited extent. Which is to say, not really. Not conclusively. Certainly not always: the same answers that one encounters at the end of nearly every inquiry into the origins, constituent properties, and cognitive effects of schizophrenia.
Among the most eminent recent investigators who argue that creativity and madness share common origins in the brain are Nancy Coover Andreasen of the University of Iowa; Kay Redfield Jamison, professor of psychiatry at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine; and Arnold M. Ludwig, a professor of psychiatry at the University of Kentucky.
Andreasen, unique among neuroscientists, claims expertise in both brain science and the creative arts. After earning a doctorate in literature in 1963, she was appointed to the English department at the University of Iowa as an instructor in Renaissance literature. There, she found herself in close proximity with the faculty and students of the renowned Iowa Writers’ Workshop. She grew curious about the mental stability of writers as a class. She reenrolled in the university’s medical school and completed a residency in psychiatry in 1973. Then she plunged into a field she had virtually invented: an empirical investigation into creativity as it might intertwine with mental illness, specifically bipolar disorder.
In 1974 Andreasen and the psychiatrist Arthur Canter, a colleague at the university, copublished a journal paper announcing that creative writers “differed significantly” from a group of fifteen “non–creative control” volunteers when examined for symptoms of psychiatric disorder.8 Their methodology was “a structured interview and specifically defined diagnostic criteria.” The two researchers found that “seventy-three percent of the writers suffered from some form of psychiatric disorder, as compared with 20 percent of the controls. The most common illness was affective disorder.”
“Affective disorder” might strike the ear as a close relative of schizo-affective disorder, the severest form of schizophrenia. But it is a synonym for “mood disorder,” which in some cases might include bipolarity, a mental illness similar in many of its symptoms to schizophrenia, but which normally does not involve psychosis. As for “some form of psychiatric disorder,” this is self-evidently a catchall term that includes alcoholism and depression, which are not chronic. The very nature of the writing life—isolated, incremental, intense, inherently frustrating as the writer searches for coherence and an elevation of language—can be viewed as an invitation to alcoholism and depression. Those who invest their lives in other art forms may make the same claim.
The Andreasen-Canter study has been criticized for advancing (however unintentionally) a false picture, by drawing upon a small, narrow, homogeneous field, as well as for the compromising ambiguity mentioned above. At least some of their subjects might have been showing signs not of actual mental illness, but of the aforementioned schizotypy. This condition, as the cognitive psychologist Scott Barry Kaufman has written, “consists of a constellation of personality traits that are evident in some degree in everyone.”9 It can produce traits similar to those of schizophrenia, as Kaufman points out, including “unusual perceptual experiences, thin mental boundaries between self and other, impulsive nonconformity, and magical beliefs.”
A similar explanation, recently advanced, is that such traits are not signs of mental illness but rather expressions of extreme yet normal human behavior, imposed in part by the very nature of the creative project.
This view is acknowledged by Robert A. Power, a genetic psychiatrist at the Institute of Psychiatry, King’s College London. Yet Power believes that he and his team have discovered a true genetic link. For a period ending in 2015, Power led a group of psychiatric researchers who computed the genetic risk scores in some eighty-six thousand citizens of Iceland for predictors of mental illness. Power concluded, “Our findings suggest that creative people may have a genetic predisposition towards thinking differently which, when combined with harmful biological or environmental factors, could lead to mental illness.”10
The study was conducted in Iceland because it was funded by a genetics company called deCODE, based in Reykjavik. Its CEO, the neurologist Kari Stefansson, echoed Power, claiming that “what we have shown is basically that schizophrenia and creativity share biology.”11
But the Icelandic study, as with the University of Iowa investigation, has been criticized on methodological grounds—and for its underlying assumptions as well. Albert Rothenberg, a professor of psychiatry at Harvard, has held it up as an example of “creativity’s” elusiveness as a concept. “The problem is that the criteria for being creative is never anything very creative,” Rothenberg told an interviewer. “Belonging to an artistic society, or working in art or literature, does not prove a person is creative. But the fact is that many people who have mental illness do try to work in jobs that have to do with art and literature, not because they are good at it, but because they’re attracted to it. And that can skew the data.”12
Working in art or literature not only fails to prove madness; it is widely seen as its antidote. “Nearly all mental hospitals use art therapy,” Rothenberg points out, “and so when patients come out, many are attracted to artistic positions and artistic pursuits.”13
The enduring power of the “mad” stereotypes over people’s perceptions suggests that certain anxieties might be at play, anxieties that may not spring exclusively from fear of mental illness, and yet exert tremendous inhibiting influence upon society’s ways of dealing with it. An important generator of these anxieties might be our friend the Other.
The alienation scientists experience is strikingly at odds with their centrality in creating the dynamics of the modern world, dynamics of convenience, health care, and communications, among others, that their detractors tend to take for granted as the natural, given condition of human life. The great naturalist and philosopher Loren Eisley virtually defined the Other in this context when he wrote, “It is frequently the tragedy of the great artist, as it is of the great scientist, that he frightens the ordinary man.”14
I frankly acknowledge that my lack of expertise in medicine, neuroscience, and even statistical analysis makes me an unreliable narrator in the areas I have attempted to explicate above. The fact that most neuroscientists remain, to a large extent, at odds with one another is cold comfort. Something terrible happened to my sons, and I want to know what and why.
I think, of course, of Kevin and his joyful virtuosity. I think of him near the end of his life, when he was deeply schizo-affective, yet (if yet is the right word) playing with an intensity and abandon—and playfulness—that went almost beyond musicianship. In the autumn of 2004, after a series of psychotic breaks made it clear that he could no longer cope with the demands of living away from home, we secured an enrollment for him at nearby Castleton College, where Honoree was then an associate academic dean, so that he could play with the jazz band. A common exercise for jazz musicians is “trading eights”: a horn player, say, will blow out a series of notes, and another member of the ensemble must immediately answer, note for note. The back-and-forth escalates in speed and complexity. Kevin’s bandmates told us later of watching, transfixed, as Kevin dueled with the instructor, an accomplished saxophonist. As the “stairstepping” of difficulty progressed, Kevin would continue to replicate the notes flawlessly on his guitar, until he grew bored with the drill and began to replicate them in reverse order.
I think of this, and the statistics and correlations begin to dance in front of me.
And I think of Dean, the storyteller who might have been a writer. He seemed always convinced that fabulous realms, peopled with beings very much like himself, stretched just beyond the curve of the mundane earth where he was obliged to live. He wanted to get to those realms. This could seem at times like ordinary petulance, a restless belief that the grass was always greener—somewhere. If he and I were successful at getting a kite into the air (which we rarely were), Dean immediately longed for a larger kite, a higher altitude, stronger winds. If I rounded a curve a bit too fast on one of Vermont’s many country roads, making the car veer a little, Dean, belted into his car seat, would crow: “Let’s do that again!” (And I did it “again,” more times than I care to admit.)
If enhancement of ordinary experience was not available via repetition or a larger kite, Dean could make it available in his mind. He could reach for that fabulous realm and pull it toward him, imposing it upon the mundane.
A couple of years after we’d settled in Middlebury, Dean began to explore the terrain near our neighborhood—largely wildflower meadows and pastures. One day he discovered the remains of an abandoned house foundation. It lay half-buried under weeds and vines at the edge of a rise on the far side of the blacktop road that led into town. It was just an old cracked cement rectangle, fortified by a couple of rusted beams. The spookiness of it grabbed his attention at once, but not in the way it might grab other children’s. For Dean, the remains weren’t spooky enough. They needed some mystery imposed upon them; a few ghosts, maybe. So he summoned the realm. And he asked me if I would enter it with him.
(“I shan’t be gone long,” Robert Frost wrote. “You come, too.”)
It was an enchanting invitation.
He wanted the two of us to write a story about the secret place he’d found. A mystery. I said sure. For several nights that summer we sat together at a table under a lamp in our screened-in back porch. With invisible crickets chirping in the darkness beyond the patio, we tossed around ideas for characters and plot and jotted notes on our yellow legal pads.
Collaborating in a fantasy with one’s child is a sublime pleasure, rarely given; but in the end it was not fully a collaboration. Nearly all the story is Dean’s. I think he liked me sitting there beside him in the tamed and terrible semidarkness. I think that for both of us it re-created nights already vanished, when Dean and Kevin were both small, and I would lie between them on the top bunk of their beds, an arm around the warmth of each, telling them my improvised stories as they floated to sleep. On the ceiling above us glowed the adhesive moons and stars I had bought at Woolworth’s. The fabulous realm had never seemed closer.
But now Dean had taken over the story—he’d taken over story. He’d fashioned the characters in his tale from himself and a neighborhood pal. And he fashioned those ruins into a realm that might have expanded into the cosmos as he grew older and more adept, had things gone differently.