Creativity and Schizophrenia: On Romanticism, Modernism, and Madness

1
Creativity and SchizophreniaOn Romanticism,
Modernism, and Madness

• Louis A. Sass

2
Historical, Cultural, Diagnostic Reflectionson
Creativity and the Schizophrenia SpectrumLouis
A. Sass(Rutgers University 2008-09 
Institut dhistoire et de philosophie des
sciences et des techniques, Paris)
3
Psychologist Colin Martindale (1989)

• Creative process in poetry, science, and other
  domains is really the same thing.
• The creative product has 3 essential attributes
• It must be original,
• it must be useful or appropriate for the
  situation in which it occurs, and
• it must actually be put to some use. (p 211)

4
Issues I will treat

• 1, Concepts of creativity in Western culture,
  and in psychology and psychiatry
• 2, Visions of creativity in 20th-century
  modernism and postmodernism
• 3, Nature of schizophrenic and schizotypal
  conditions in relation to concepts of creativity
• 4, Prominent explanations of schizophrenic
  consciousness in cognitive psychology and brain
  science compatible with notions of
  hyperreflexivity and alienation in
  schizophrenia.
• 5, Some limitations of previous empirical
  research on schizophrenia and creativity in light
  of the above issues.
• 6, Understanding of modernist and postmodernist
  orientations can help us recognize potential
  forms of creativity within the schizophrenia
  spectrum.

5

• 1, Concepts of creativity in Western culture, and
  in psychology and psychiatry
• 2, Visions of creativity in 20th-century
  modernism and postmodernism
• 3, Nature of schizophrenic and schizotypal
  conditions in relation to concepts of creativity

6

• 4, Prominent explanations of schizophrenic
  consciousness in cognitive psychology and brain
  science compatible with notions of
  hyperreflexivity and alienation in
  schizophrenia.
• 5, Some limitations of previous empirical
  research on schizophrenia and creativity in light
  of the above issues.
• 6, Understanding of modernist and postmodernist
  orientations can help us recognize potential
  forms of creativity within the schizophrenia
  spectrum.

7

• Relation between creativity and schizophrenia
  spectrum examine in light of diversity of
  nature of creativity in different fields, media,
  genres, stylistic traditions, cultural settings,
  historical epochs.

8

• NOTIONS OF CREATIVITY ROMANTICISM AND ITS
  LEGACY
• The creative imagination
• Expressivist notion of art.
• Versus mimetic or didactic (pre-Romantic) Versus
  objectivist (post-Romantic).

9
Romantic view of creativity

• sense of unity between self and world,
• escape from self-conscious ego,
• liberation of instinct and emotion (Wordsworth
  and Coleridge re spontaneous overflow of
  powerful feeling. Coleridge poetry does
  always imply PASSION.)
• Early childhood.

10
William Wordsworth
11
Psychoanalysis, psychology, psychiatry

• Ernst Kris regression in the service of the
  ego
• Colin Martindale re primary-process states of
  consciousness.
• Kay Jamison re the tumultuous passions of Lord
  Byron

12
Lord Byron
13
Modernism and (proto) Postmodernism

• Baudelaire dispassionate deliberation and
  conscious craft artifice above nature
• Mallarme poet should cede initiative to words.

14
Stephane Mallarme
15

• Romanticism and Modernism both seek to overcome
  the numbing of perception that comes with
  habituation.
• But Modernism not a return to childhood but a
  detached, fragmenting mode of perception.
• Poststructuralist and Postmodernist figures such
  as Derrida, de Man, and Andy Warhol.

16
Romantic landscape by Thomas Cole
17
Cityscape by Giorgio de Chirico
18
Jacques Derrida
19
Andy Warhol
20
Affinities between 20th century culture and
schizophrenia spectrum

• French phenomenological psychiatrist Eugene
  Minkowski re loss of vital contact with reality
• Negative symptoms poverty of speech,
  avolition/apathy flattened affect anhedonia

21
Eugene Minkowski
22

• Sass, Madness and Modernism (1992) 7 features of
  modernist or postmodernist stance
• 1, adversarial stance
• 2, perspectivism and dizzying relativism
• 3, fragmentation and passivization of the ego
• 4, loss of the worldhood of the world
• 5, loss of temporal flow or narrative unity
• 6, intense self-reference
• 7, extreme detachment or emotional distancing,
  often with disconcerting irony

23
Sass, Madness and Modernism
24

• EXPLANATIONS OF SCHIZOPHRENIA
• Theories emphasizing perception of novel stimuli
  and use of past experience for categorization and
  control of ongoing cognitive processing (e.g.,
  Hemsley, Gray).

25

• RECENT RESEARCH DIAGNOSTIC ISSUES
• Kay Jamison, Touched with Fire Manic-Depressive
  Illness and the Artistic Temperament (p. 60)
• as we shall see, virtually all of the
  psychosis in creative individuals is
  manic-depressive rather than schizophrenic in
  nature.

26

• Kay Jamison 2 key (and problematic) assumptions
• I acceptance of neo-Kraepelinian view of
  schizophrenia as a dementing illness akin to
  Alzheimers disease (p. 96).
• II exceedingly wide notion of affective
  psychoses, and narrow definition of schizophrenia
  (together with neglect of the schizophrenia
  spectrum)

27

• RECENT RESEARCH CONCEPTIONS OF CREATIVITY
• Romantic tradition (mostly English) including
  Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, Blake
• proto-romantic figures such as William Cowper
  (1731-1800), Oliver Goldsmith 1730-1774), Thomas
  Gray (1716-1771), Thomas Chatterton (1752-1770)
• post or late-romantic writers such as Lord
  Tennyson, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Delmore Schwartz,
  John Berryman, Robert Lowell.

28

• Rather than, say Pope, Addison, or Dryden
• or modernists such as Auden, Eliot, Gerard Manley
  Hopkins, Ezra Pound, James Joyce.
• Or, in France Mallarme or Flaubert

29
Several distinctions

• Thomas Kuhn re normal versus revolutionary
  science.
• Heidelberg psychiatrist, H. Tellenbach (1961),
  also Alfred Kraus re the Typus Melancholicus.
• Wolfgang Blankenburg (1971) re loss of natural
  self-evidence or common sense (natürliche
  selbstverstandlichkeit)

30
Cultural influence of

• probable schizophrenic or schizo-affective
  individuals such as Friedrich Hölderlin, Antonin
  Artaud, Vaslav Nijinsky
• such probable schizoaffectives as August
  Strindberg and Gerard de Nerval
• severely schizotypal (possibly even
  schizophrenic) individuals such as Alfred Jarry
  and Raymond Roussel
• many individuals with markedly schizoid or
  schizotypal disposition, such as Baudelaire,
  Kafka, Joyce, Beckett, Nietzsche, Wittgenstein,
  de Chirico, Salvador Dali, Marcel Duchamp, Andy
  Warhol.

31
Gerard de Nerval
32
Antonin Artaud self-portrait
33
Alfred Jarry
34
Raymond Roussel