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MANIA AND CREATIVITY (a selection from REWRITING PSYCHOLOGY)

Since ancient times, a common perception is that genius and madness are closely associated. There are good reasons for genius to be associated especially with bipolar disorders, among the great variety of mental disorders. Hyperactive mental activity and grandiosity are conducive to creative productivity. Aristotle asks, “Why is it that all men who are outstanding in philosophy, poetry or the arts are melancholic?” The answer, I venture to suggest, is that feelings of anguish, self-rejection, and hopelessness in the depths of depression provide the raw materials for creative production. Melancholia, therefore, bars no creativity. Kierkegäärd writes, “A poet is an unhappy being whose heart is torn by secret sufferings, but whose lips are so strangely formed that when the sighs and cries escape them, they sound like beautiful music.”

Researchers (e.g., Nancy Andreasen) have provided empirical support for linking creativity to psychopathology, especially mood disorders. My firsthand experiences lend further support to this linkage. During madness, I was inspired; creative ideas rained down faster than I could cope. I had supreme confidence, with a touch of “megalomania,” enabling me to write without inhibition or self-doubt. I could become self-enchanted, captured by the allure of my own runaway thoughts, resulting in a blurring between the virtual and the real, as if I had entered into zouhuorumo. I erotized myself, other people, and the world. I yearned to share my creative insights with others. These were favorable conditions for productions of inspirational creativity (see “Madness may enrich your life: A self-study of 20 episodes of exuberance, none of depression”).

Creativity from a modified psychoanalytic perspective

From a psychoanalytic viewpoint, with repression vanished, the unconscious became accessible; my mind functioned with holistic oneness, interconnected. Superefficiency in memory retrieval and ideational association may then result from undoing or bypassing repression with ease, thus enabling me to gain unhindered, direct access to the unconscious, a condition for creativity as postulated in psychoanalytic theory. Such superefficiency has the effect of enhancing my aesthetic, empathic, and cognitive capabilities.

This conception may augment or even modify the psychoanalytic theory of creativity. It receives support from a recent study of highly creative individuals by Andreasen: Introspective accounts suggest that unconscious processes play an important role in achieving creative insights, and neuroimaging studies indicate that the association cortices are the primary areas activated during the state of "REST" (random episodic silent thought). Of special relevance to the notion of cognitive superefficiency is the finding that highly creative individuals have more intense activity in the association cortices when performing tasks that challenge them to “make associations.”