Journal of Literature and Art Studies Issue 12 Vol.12 2022 December (original) (raw)
Related papers
Madness and reason in two works by Andrej Belyj
Slavica Lundensia, 2001
Russia witnessed a renewed fascination with madness on the part of artists and scientists alike. On the one hand, new theories concerning the role of the subconscious mind in the creative process brought perennial questions about the relationship between madness and genius to the fore once again. The artist's psyche became a focus of study, and psychiatrists combed literary works as well as the biographies of artists for clues to the psychology of creativity. More often than not, their findings led them to postulate a link between creative genius and mental disease. On the other hand, modernist writers revived the Romantic cult of madness, drawing on its images of madness as divine inspiration and casting themselves in the role of the mad poet.
“Just Fooling Around: Madness, Folly, and Artistic Creativity.”
Ever since at least Plato a connection between the artist and madness has been made. However, in recent centuries this has focused especially on psychological disorders. While such studies are not unimportant, overemphasis on this can lead to a one-sided, rather dark view of a self-absorbed artistic “genius.” Ultimately this distracts from the real subject of art, which is the diverse beauty of the world around us. This paper will argue that a better way to think of the artist is not in terms of madness but in terms of foolishness. The artist’s closest analog is not the mad person but the fool. In fact, the artist is not merely like a fool but the artist is a fool. The paper is divided in three parts. First, three different thinkers who all discuss the artist as mad are considered, Jacques Maritain, Plato, and Schopenhauer. For all three, the association of creativity with literal madness is only an analogy and the two have no direct connection, rather the artist participates in what Plato calls “divine madness.” The second part proposes that there is a general form of madness in modern society, which is the opposite of this divine madness, the result of the subjective turn toward the self in philosophy and psychology that leads to an obsession with the self. The third part considers how viewing the artist as a fool provides a response to this particular madness, a response that goes beyond simply returning to Plato’s divine madness as a dialectical alternative.
Psychology, 2022
The aim of this study is to evaluate the relationship between the concept of creativity and its practical application in relation to the historical figure of Ludwig II of Bavaria. The analysis took into consideration the monarch's construction of Bavarian castles in terms of both their building and their landscaping. This work demonstrates that the construction of the castles was a product of the monarch's imagination and creative genius. It also shows that Ludwig's historical events anticipate the fragilities, weaknesses, obsessions and anxieties of the modern man. In order to make the article complete and exhaustive, it was decided to make a comparison between the historical figure of Ludwig and the artistic and cinematographic interpretation proposed by Visconti in the film of the same title. Our objective is to make some psychological considerations about the historical Ludwig as well as Visconti's Ludwig.
Madness, Meaning and Mind. Experiences and Expressions
Madness and art have a lot in common. A look at the biographies of eminent artists like Vincent van Gogh, Robert Schumann or Virginia Woolf is suggestive of this link, but so are particular art forms and movements in modernist art such as Dada or Surrealism. These forms of art reveal an alternative look over the world and one's experience of it, different from the conventional way of perceiving reality and interacting with it. One particular phenomenon that gives this proximity between art and madness a new relevance is art brut, outsider art created beyond the limits of official culture, in particular art produced by people suffering from psychotic pathologies of different kinds. Paintings, texts and sculptures produced by insane asylum patients such as Adolf Wölfli or Ferdinand Cheval are admired as works of art and not as the mere expression of an abnormal inner life. This proximity between madness, in all its possible manifestations, and art raises the question of the significance of each in evolutionary terms. Art consumes a lot of energy and attention both in individuals' private life and in social existence, yet its immediate functional importance is not evident, nor is it clear in evolutionary terms what might have been the advantage of this particular form of cultural adaptation. Madness, on the other hand, is a cognitive dysfunction that evolutionary selective pressure has not eradicated, suggesting that there might also be an adaptive advantage in keeping it along the cognitive development of the species. In this paper we propose to explore the affinities between art (with a special focus on literature) and madness, and how this proximity is suggestive of a deeper connection in evolution, important for the development of human cognition as unique as we know it today.
Artist And Insanity. From Classical Antiquity To The Modern Age
The European Proceedings of Social and Behavioural Sciences, 2019
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 4.0 Unported License, permitting all non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
2013
INTRODUTIONThe aim of this article was to emphasize and summarize pathographies of eminent composers, about fifty of them, who suffered from psychoses. It is very important to state the relationship between composers' diseases and their creative work and composing.1-3Connection of ingenuity and insanity was noticed by ancient writers. For some philosophers (Schopenhauer), ingenuity is close to madness, because ingenious individuals are prone to strong emotions and irrational passions. An increased excitability of central nervous system is a very common cause for ingenuity and madness. On the other hand, Lomboso considered that sometimes psychotic states release fantasy and therefore might be useful for creative work. Another author, Ludwig (20th century), published in his study that the artists were likely to suffer from psychosis and suicide attempts 2-3 times more frequently than business people and scientists.4-7The first aim of this article was to highlight the significant a...
In the history of human sciences we find a special type of creator who is somehow trapped between the worlds of the arts and the sciences. This condition leads to special ways of self-actualization, like in the cases of Plato, Leonardo, Nietzsche or Freud. In the history of Hungarian human sciences and modern arts one of the most exciting representatives of the "Renaissance man" was Géza Csáth (original name József Brenner), a talented psychiatrist trying to use psychoanalysis for the first time in treating paranoid schizophrenia, and also a triple artist (writer, musician and painter) best known for his short stories. While living the life of a "doppelgänger" and doing a "wild analysis" with his psychotic patient, he became a morphine addict and, at the age of 32, murdered his wife and committed suicide. I use here the method of "multiple case psychobiography" to compare the life and works of Csáth with those of his cousine and friend Dezső Kosztolányi, one of the most outstanding writers of the time in Hungary. By analysing their personalities, their choices in life and characteristics for short stories about matricide we can take a look at the personal roots of their creativity and the goals and discontents of being such a complex personality as Géza Csáth certainly was.
ART AND INSANITY: THE OBSCURE SIDE OF CREATIVITY
One of the oldest debates in psychology concerns the relationship between creativity and madness. The prima facie evidences in the history indicate that creativity often comes with a certain price tag, the price tag being mental disorders or mental illness. The extent of the mental illness in the stipulated scenarios depends on person to person. However, the putative dichotomous coexistence of the two has time and again solicited umpteen numbers of questions and their subsequent studies. Although the concept of mad geniuses is based more on Hollywood movies than on scientific research, there is indeed some evidence of the counterproductive or the undesirable features associated with creativity. Throughout history, numerous artists have been found battling mental illness and leading scientists examining the link between creativity and mental illness. This paper aims to dig into this deeper, by reviewing and analyzing, in a brief manner, the studies that have taken place on the concept and trace back the lives of some of the most eminent artists that have ever existed. EARLY RESEARCHES: According to an early theory given be Cesare Lombroso, an Italian criminologist, the cause of 'Genius' was a constitutional defect, a defect that commonly showed itself as insanity, either in the genius or in his family. 1 Working from another direction, another researcher (Jamison), in 1989 took a sample of 47 famous living British Writers and Artists. They were people who had won major awards such as the Booker Prize, or were distinguished members of the Royal Academy of Arts. She found that 38% of them had received treatment for affective disorder (antidepressant, lithium and/or hospitalisation). The 'insanity' theory by Lombrosso was supported by several later studies, however, other studies seemed to be deviated from Lombroso's point of view and supported an