A Poe Theory

In her book, Touched With Fire: Manic-Depressive Illness and the Artistic Temperament, Dr. Kay Redfield Jamison discusses “artists and their voyages, moods as their ships of passage, and the ancient persistent belief that there exists such a thing as a ‘fine madness’”.

Jamison's book is a landmark study of manic-depressive illness and “its relationship to the artistic temperament and imagination.” The professor of psychiatry at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine discusses more than 175 writers (including Poe), composers, musicians, and artists. As the co-author of the standard medical text, Manic-Depressive Illness, which was chosen in 1990 as the most outstanding book in Biomedical Science by the Association of American Publishers, Jamison knows well the furies of manic-depression, as she discusses in her 1998 PBS interview:

I have a mood disorder. I think they're interesting. I think moods are intensely human. I think they are to some extent a great deal of what defines us as humans: our ability to experience them. I think our society gets very hung up on IQ and intelligence and intellectual functioning. I personally think the capacity to feel deeply is as great a gift—and sometimes burden—as the ability to think extremely well (PBS).

She argues that the scientific data is compelling “due to the extraordinary advances in genetics, neuroscience, and psychopharmacology, much of modern psychiatric thought and clinical practice has moved away from the earlier influences of psychoanalysis and toward a more biological perspective."

Science writer, Mary Beckman, poses a question in her November 11, 2005, ScienceNOW story, titled “Driven to Create”: “Insanity and imagination often seem to go hand-in-hand, but is there really a link between the two?” In her article, Beckman reports the findings of a study by psychiatrist Terence Ketter of Stanford University and colleagues. They tested whether 40 bipolar adults and their children were more creative than 18 healthy controls and their kids.

The researchers found that the bipolar children scored higher on a creativity index than their peers who did not have the disorder. Beckman notes that the results indicate a “genetic connection between psychosis and creativity.”

Moreover, psychiatric geneticist Susan Smalley of the University of California, Los Angeles, commenting about the data says: “This is the first study to show that individuals genetically predisposed to bipolar disorder may also inherit greater creativity.”