Simpsons' Take on Psychoanalysis

The Black City: A Fantasy Writer's Blog

Fantasy author John Marco announces in his blog post today that he’s done—with his latest book, Army of the Fantastic. He’s offering a book giveaway contest. How cool is that!

Marco’s blog gives fantasy writers like me an idea of a writer’s life and the writing process. 899 pages. That’s how long his latest book is. And he’s already “brainstorming” on his next book—character sketches, doodling out maps, and outlining the whole plot.

However, he’s taking a lunch break to eat and watch a DVD, The Iron Giant.

After reading his blog, I’m motivated to produce more pages of my own writing. Keep blogging, Marco. I need the push.

Dana Press Blog: Vonneguit, Creativity and Depression

Edgar Allan Poe’s melancholic colors are seen in many other writers. An example is Kurt Vonnegut Jr., writer of Slaughterhouse-Five, who died on April 11, 2007.

On the Dana Press Blog, Nicky Penttila posts an interview with Nancy C. Andreasen, a long-time friend of Vonnegut. “He matched the pattern of having significant mood disorder,” said Andreasen, a neuroscientist.

Vonnegut suffered with depression throughout his life and attempted suicide in 1984. “I would say the general pattern, for him and for most creative people, is they are not very productive when they’re depressed,” said Andreasen. “They do most of their creating after they’ve emerged from feeling depressed.”

Poe described his wrestling with depression in his letters. Similarly, Vonnegut expressed his melancholy in his writing. “But, in a sense, he overcame the sadness, to write,” Andreasen said.

By writing about the ebbs and flows of depression and mania, writers increase knowledge to recognize these forces in us or others. Awareness is part of the cure.

An Unquiet Mind

Poe’s well-known, harsh personality is typical of those who navigate the treacherous waters of the bipolar temperament. In her memoir, An Unquiet Mind, Dr. Kay Jamison describes the antagonistic temperament:

No amount of love can cure madness or unblacken one’s dark moods. Love can help, it can make the pain more tolerable, but, always, one is beholden to medication that may or may not always work and may or may not be bearable. Madness, on the other hand, most certainly can, and often does, kill love through its misbehavior, and, especially, through its savage moods. The sadder, sleepier, slower, and less volatile depressions are more intuitively understood and more easily taken in stride. A quiet melancholy is neither threatening nor beyond ordinary comprehension; an angry, violent, vexatious despair is both

As a sufferer of manic-depression, Jamison’s speaks about the familiar. But do we hear? Family members hear who have seen the descent of a loved one into madness. It's like a hurricane that ravages the mind. Unless the hurricane hits close to home, it's just another news story. Courageous sufferers of mental illness, such as Jamison, educate and enlighten.

Mental illness needs to come out of the closet. As we engage in more conversations about it, we not only support creative people, such as Poe, but others as well. Those others might live next door.

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.”

E. A. Poe: A Study of Creativity and Bipolar

Although scientific studies in recent years connect creativity to bipolar disorder (manic-depressive illness), the matter is not “settled” and controversies continue about the relationship between mood disorders and writers of prose and poetry. Edgar Allan Poe said:

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. They who dream by day are cognizant of many things which escape those who dream only by night. In their grey vision they obtain glimpses of eternity....They penetrate however rudderless or compassless, into the vast ocean of the light affable (“Eleonora” in Bartleby).

My position explores “much that is glorious” and perceptive about the ways that the manic-depressive (bipolar), artistic temperament influenced Poe’s creative life and his rhetoric in “The Raven.” His unique stream of consciousness from the well of the manic-depressive temperament brings forth a depth of grief and euphoria that reflects the heightened states (depression and mania), inherent in bipolar sufferers.