The long sleep of death. The short sleep of the night. Perhaps insomnia is an attempt to ward off death. In the poet Frederico Gracia Lorca’s Ballad Of One Doomed To Die, the doomed prisoner “knows that to close his eyes, even in sleep, is to surrender to his fate.”
Many famous writers have been keepers of the night. Walt Whitman, Shakespeare, the Greek poet Sappho, Emily Dickenson, to name a few. Franz Kafka, the Czech writer of such works as The Metamorphosis and The Castle, thought of his insomnia as being the direct source of his creativity. And Vladimir Nabokov, author of the comedic and erotic Lolita, thought sleep was “the most moronic fraternity in the world.”
In her book The Forest for the Trees: An Editor’s advise to Writers, Betsy Lerner opines that by their very nature writers are neurotic and tend to exhibit the gamut of odd and disturbing behaviour, from insomnia and idiosyncratic tics to full-fledged paranoia and delusional episodes. Lerner might know. In addition to penning the above-mentioned book, she is both an editor and literary agent.
Lerner goes on to say that they develop these behaviours to protect them from the world. Kafka echoed those sentiments, saying that writing was the rock he could cling to as the rest of the world swept by in the tide. But poet Anne Sexton realized that retreating wasn’t always the best way:
“I, myself, alternate between hiding behind my own hands, protecting myself anyway possible, and this other, this seeing, touching other. I guess I mean that creative people must not avoid the pain that they get dealt…Hurt must be examined like a plague.”
*
Here are some statistics that pertain to female writers. These results appeared in the American Journal of Psychiatry, Nov. 1994, under the title Psychopathology and the Female Writer.
DIAGNOSIS WRITERS % GENERAL POPULATION % (NON- WRITERS)
DEPRESSION 56 14
MANIA 19 3
PANIC DISORDERS 22 5
EATING DISORDERS 12 2
DRUG ABUSE 17 5
CHILDHOOD
PHYSICAL/SEXUAL
ABUSE 39 12
Kay Redfield Jamison, professor of psychiatry at the John Hopkins University school of Medicine, believes that creativity and mood disorders are linked (see her book Touched with Fire: Manic-Depressive Illness and the Artistic Temperament). Research has shown that in word association tests, the number of “statistically common” responses to tested words dropped by one-third amongst manic people. Further, that the number of “original” responses increased three-fold amongst the same group. According to Jamison, the qualitative change in thinking processes that prevails in manic states “may well facilitate the formation of unique ideas and associations.”
One must obviously differentiate between the hodge-podge of ideas that manic people spew out and the truly creative. What accounts for the difference?
Dr. Oliver Sacks, professor of Neurology at the Albert Einstein Memorial Centre in New York, thinks that it is imperative for hypomanic people ‘to go deep’, lest the stream of rich fantasy always remain at a surface level. Going deeper, according to Sacks, means exploring “the depths of the mind and depths of the personality and the depths of the unconscious.” Notwithstanding the fact that not all manic people have the ability to be truly creative, for those who do, he believes that they must “go deep and create in a way which involves something much, much deeper, and more personal.” Once done, there must be integration or “synthesis” between that inner world and the outer, between imagination, dreams feeling, memory and perception, in order for true creativity to emerge.
Many famous writers have been keepers of the night. Walt Whitman, Shakespeare, the Greek poet Sappho, Emily Dickenson, to name a few. Franz Kafka, the Czech writer of such works as The Metamorphosis and The Castle, thought of his insomnia as being the direct source of his creativity. And Vladimir Nabokov, author of the comedic and erotic Lolita, thought sleep was “the most moronic fraternity in the world.”
In her book The Forest for the Trees: An Editor’s advise to Writers, Betsy Lerner opines that by their very nature writers are neurotic and tend to exhibit the gamut of odd and disturbing behaviour, from insomnia and idiosyncratic tics to full-fledged paranoia and delusional episodes. Lerner might know. In addition to penning the above-mentioned book, she is both an editor and literary agent.
Lerner goes on to say that they develop these behaviours to protect them from the world. Kafka echoed those sentiments, saying that writing was the rock he could cling to as the rest of the world swept by in the tide. But poet Anne Sexton realized that retreating wasn’t always the best way:
“I, myself, alternate between hiding behind my own hands, protecting myself anyway possible, and this other, this seeing, touching other. I guess I mean that creative people must not avoid the pain that they get dealt…Hurt must be examined like a plague.”
*
Here are some statistics that pertain to female writers. These results appeared in the American Journal of Psychiatry, Nov. 1994, under the title Psychopathology and the Female Writer.
DIAGNOSIS WRITERS % GENERAL POPULATION % (NON- WRITERS)
DEPRESSION 56 14
MANIA 19 3
PANIC DISORDERS 22 5
EATING DISORDERS 12 2
DRUG ABUSE 17 5
CHILDHOOD
PHYSICAL/SEXUAL
ABUSE 39 12
Kay Redfield Jamison, professor of psychiatry at the John Hopkins University school of Medicine, believes that creativity and mood disorders are linked (see her book Touched with Fire: Manic-Depressive Illness and the Artistic Temperament). Research has shown that in word association tests, the number of “statistically common” responses to tested words dropped by one-third amongst manic people. Further, that the number of “original” responses increased three-fold amongst the same group. According to Jamison, the qualitative change in thinking processes that prevails in manic states “may well facilitate the formation of unique ideas and associations.”
One must obviously differentiate between the hodge-podge of ideas that manic people spew out and the truly creative. What accounts for the difference?
Dr. Oliver Sacks, professor of Neurology at the Albert Einstein Memorial Centre in New York, thinks that it is imperative for hypomanic people ‘to go deep’, lest the stream of rich fantasy always remain at a surface level. Going deeper, according to Sacks, means exploring “the depths of the mind and depths of the personality and the depths of the unconscious.” Notwithstanding the fact that not all manic people have the ability to be truly creative, for those who do, he believes that they must “go deep and create in a way which involves something much, much deeper, and more personal.” Once done, there must be integration or “synthesis” between that inner world and the outer, between imagination, dreams feeling, memory and perception, in order for true creativity to emerge.
It may be then, that depression and other states of mental imbalances allow one to go this route, to go deep within. A condition such as mild depression (as opposed to full-blown depression in which the person is rendered inert) may be the vehicle for the creative individual to delve within and integrate the inner and outer. Over and over again, research has shown that people who suffer from mild depression actually have a better grasp of “reality” than people who are in “normal” states of mind (Sackheim, H. A. (1983). Self-deception, self-esteem, and depression: The adaptive value of lying to oneself, in J. Masling (Ed.), Empirical Studies of Psychoanalytic Theories, 1 (pp. 101-157). Hillsdale, N.J.: Analytic Press)
"Men have called me mad, but the question is not yet settled, whether madness is or is not the loftiest intelligence--whether much that is glorious--whether all that is profound--does not spring from disease of thought--from moods of mind exalted at the expense of the general intellect. Those who dream by day are cognizant of many things which escape those who dream only by night"
- Edgar Allen Poe
Why should depressed people have a clearer perception of reality than do their more normal counterparts? One theory is that people with depression are actually in hyper-sensitive states during which they perceive both pain (their own and perhaps others’) and their surroundings in more acuity than what would be considered “normal”. These finely-tuned people view the world without the protective filter that many do.
Many studies point to the conclusion that certain mental conditions do seem to aid in the development of creative thought. No less an authority than Socrates stated in the dialogue Phaedrus: “If a man comes to the door of poetry untouched by the madness of the muses, believing that technique alone will make him a good poet, he and his sane compositions never reach perfection, but are utterly eclipsed by the inspired madman.”
Creativity may actually be a way to distance oneself from the pain of reality and provide some structure to an otherwise chaotic jumble of thoughts, even to add meaning to a life gone awry.
Let us now consider individual cases of writers that suffered from mental problems.
"Men have called me mad, but the question is not yet settled, whether madness is or is not the loftiest intelligence--whether much that is glorious--whether all that is profound--does not spring from disease of thought--from moods of mind exalted at the expense of the general intellect. Those who dream by day are cognizant of many things which escape those who dream only by night"
- Edgar Allen Poe
Why should depressed people have a clearer perception of reality than do their more normal counterparts? One theory is that people with depression are actually in hyper-sensitive states during which they perceive both pain (their own and perhaps others’) and their surroundings in more acuity than what would be considered “normal”. These finely-tuned people view the world without the protective filter that many do.
Many studies point to the conclusion that certain mental conditions do seem to aid in the development of creative thought. No less an authority than Socrates stated in the dialogue Phaedrus: “If a man comes to the door of poetry untouched by the madness of the muses, believing that technique alone will make him a good poet, he and his sane compositions never reach perfection, but are utterly eclipsed by the inspired madman.”
Creativity may actually be a way to distance oneself from the pain of reality and provide some structure to an otherwise chaotic jumble of thoughts, even to add meaning to a life gone awry.
Let us now consider individual cases of writers that suffered from mental problems.
Edited by Susi Lessing.
{An abridged version of this essay appeared in Inscribed magazine}
{An abridged version of this essay appeared in Inscribed magazine}