From: Spike Jones <spike66@ibm.net>, Sat, 09 Sep 2000
>> To close this note, some of you may or may not know that John Forbes
>> Nash, Jr., the mathematical genius and winner of the Nobel Prize in
>> Economics (1994, for work in "Game Theory") was a paranoid
>> schizophrenic
>
>Another one would be Robert Pirsig, author of Zen and the Art of
>Motorcycle Maintenance. Dont know if it was P-S that he had, but
>he himself wrote that he was messed up psychologically, yet look
>at the product. John Steinbeck wrote East of Eden in an alcoholic
>fog, along with who knows what psychological conditions. Amazing
>what a partially disfunctional brain can accomplish.
Yes.
(BTW, the first five Americans who won a Nobel Prize for literature
were alchoholics: Sinclair Lewis, O'Neill, Faulkner, Hemingway, and
Steinbeck).
Some famous creative individuals thought to have schizophrenia were
Nietsche, Nijinksy, Van Gogh, Ezra Pound, Wittgenstein, Hoelderlin,
Blake, Kafka, Joyce.
The biggest difference between a creative person and the
schizophrenic person is that the creative person has his/her thought
processes (relatively-speaking) under control, in the process of
building of something creative.
The schizophrenic person, on the other hand, does not have their
thought processes under control, and is at the mercy of
associations, disconnected thinking; they frequently have an
inability to sort, interpret and respond in ways typical to normal
brains. An inner madness. Schizophrenia is the ultimate horror in a
disease -- with this disease one cannot trust one's own brain.
Another illness- manic-depressive, is more conducive to creativity
because the thinking process isn't as impaired, and because the
manic-depressive person in their manic state has high levels of
energy. Many more famous creative people are/were manic-depressive.
One of the things I find interesting in the schizophrenic illness,
though, is that the internal world of a schizophrenic is
self-consistent and extremely logical. They start from a premise,
and then build an elaborate set of logical connections from that
premise. To anyone on the outside, though, the premise is bizarre,
crazy.
One has to be careful about the tendency to romanticize these
people's great creative works. To a schizophrenic, especially,
having this illness can be extremely unpleasant. Probably when they
are gripped at the extreme of their altered state, they can't think
of being any different, however leading into and out of that state,
they often know that something is way off with how their brains are
functioning. I suggest reading letters from schizophrenics to see
how their inner world looks to them. Quite distressing.
"As for me, you mush know that I shouldn't precisely have chosen
madness if there had been any choice." (Vincent Van Gogh, 1889)
Amara
********************************************************************
Amara Graps email: amara@amara.com
Computational Physics vita: finger agraps@shell5.ba.best.com
Multiplex Answers URL: http://www.amara.com/
********************************************************************
"Sometimes I think I understand everything. Then I regain
consciousness." --Ashleigh Brilliant
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Mon Oct 02 2000 - 17:37:42 MDT