BS#5 - Mind Your Madness
There might be a relation between genius and madness. But perpetuating the romantic idea of the mad genius only leads to unnecessary self-torture of already bright minds.
It is comforting to imagine the hypercreative as flawed like everyone else. It humanizes them. And it seems only fair. We tend to seek symmetry in all aspects of life and so opposing forces are often seen as naturally linked and complementing each other like Yin and Yang. Is it so far fetched that extremes of human psychology will not only lead to subjective experiences outside the scope of the average person but will also inspire to draw new connections and lead to original contributions? Everything must have a price and so one may think that where there is true mastery there must also be misery.
Let’s talk about the story of the mad genius.
The origin of the mythology
Van Gogh suffered from bipolar disorder, cut off his left ear and committed suicide, and Edgar Allan Poe as well was famously a tortured soul. So were many other artists and authors like Franz Kafka, Robert Schumann, Michelangelo, Hemingway…
The close friend of Albert Einstein and Bohr, the physicist Paul Ehrenfest was often miserable and deeply depressed. Even as a child. And his life had such a tragic early ending that his biographer Martin Klein decided to stop writing the book series about the physicist just after the first volume on his early life.
Einstein himself is, of course, not seen as the best put-together personality as well. Another popular example would be John Nash the mathematician, who was schizophrenic. Tesla was so eccentric, it is said that he even fell madly in love with a pigeon (that he claimed also loved him back). And of course, Isaac Newton especially, makes a great example of “one (psychological) evil comes rarely alone”.
The connection has been drawn in the distant past by Aristotle, too:
“No great mind has ever existed without a touch of madness.”
And in the centuries after, the relation between genius and insanity has become so notoriously repetitive that the mad scientist became a trope in literature in the industrial age, largely in gothic novels.
Victor Frankenstein was only insane in that in his scientific pursuit he created a creature of terror. But the fictitious scientist Dr Jekyll, in fact, actualized his own repressed evil urges and transformed into Mr Hyde, a mad monster!
Popularizing stories might relate insanity to creativity because it is the job of the artist, the creative, the scientist to leave the known, leave the standards of normalized society. It is a dangerous act that promises for good story material. And from the eyes of the normal man, those that willingly venture into the frightening horrors of the unknown must be mad!
And yet the structures surrounding science allow any diligent person to make progress in their field, no ridiculously high intelligence or superior creativity required. In the hard sciences, it is “easy” for individuals to add to the conversation due to the clear cut methodologies, standards and high amount of deductive reasoning.
So how is creativity related to psychopathology?
While the popular chant is often that anecdotes are not data, this is a misconception. If often highly biased, incomplete, and unreliable, that does not mean there is no meaningful pattern. When analyzing the lives of famous men, tendencies towards depression and alcoholism were found to be linked to kinds of valuable creativity (Post, 1994). This seems to be true especially for writers.
And it seems that, at least partially resolving the mad-genius controversy, scientists seem to exhibit the least psychopathology (Simonton, D. K., 2014) out of all creative disciplines.
“The dominant pattern that seems to hold is that the more particular professions rely on mathematical, natural, formal, and objective modes of creative expression or problem-solving, the lower the prevalence of mental illness in their members.”,
argues Arnold M. Ludwig (1998). But he then hypothesises that, as we focus on professions within professions, those more creative, again, also show a higher degree of psychopathology relative to their peers.
The debate is polarizing the field of creativity research.
Psychometrics is concerned with measuring the features of the human psyche and making predictions based on those. Here we get measures for intelligence, extraversion, quality of life, client satisfaction, neuroticism, schizophrenia, and so on. The observed individual differences are relatively stable across adulthood and have shown to be useful to make predictions for the future.
One must ask nonetheless if such tests really do measure something and what exactly that is! As of now, there have to be major philosophical assumptions to be made, which inevitably lead to concerns about the validity of even the most basic practices, as explained by Denny Borsboom in “Measuring the Mind: Conceptual Issues in Contemporary Psychometrics”.
The psychology and neuroscience literature is filled with studies indicating that there is a U-shaped relation between creativity and psychopathology (Richards et. al, 1988) A pinch of madness may improve creativity in some way.
Yet,
“... the VAST majority of creative people are not mentally ill and, more importantly, the VAST majority of those suffering from psychopathology are not geniuses. Seen in this light, the claim that creativity and insanity somehow go together sounds more like densely ignorant nonsense, the stunted idea of someone who spent too many hours in a hot tub.”,
writes the psychologist Arne Dietrich (2014) in an opinion article. With that, he is aligning himself with other authors like Judith Schlesinger (2012) with her book “The Insanity Hoax: Exposing the Myth of the Mad Genius”.
They believe that the current research is inconclusive, full of basic errors and vastly biased, which leads them to stand back and conclude as Abraham Maslow and Carl Rogers did: that creativity is associated with mental health, not instability.
The monsters we make
What should be clear is that mental illness is not essential in any way for creative success as any of the studies, books or great minds themselves will explain to you. In fact, for now, the only path to outstanding creative ability seems to be found in practice as there is no good theoretical understanding of what makes those that are this original truly exceptional.
Agnes Callard recently called the media and many of us out on the propagation of these ideas:
“The myth is of the genius “tortured” by some internal struggle the rest of us are not smart enough to understand so that the best we can do is step out of their way. The real torture is the one we enact by classifying people as geniuses, to serve our own fantasies of independence. Geniuses are the monsters we make.”
For some students, this should be a wake-up call, too. You are not exceptional because you deluded yourself that your allnighter was so incredibly productive while now you are too exhausted to function for the next two days. This is one example of self-destructive behaviour that is encouraged by the fantasy we talked about here.
I myself have often been indulging in actions no sane man would go through only to get me hospitalized repeatedly. Build a routine and take care of your wellbeing. The mind will naturally draw you towards chaos, creativity and, at worst, madness. There is no reason to give in completely thinking that it will bring additional creative insights.
Do everyone a favour and continue to shower.