Genius and Psychosis

Thanks to very fine teachers I used my time in training on call studying the long history of psychiatry.  I read the original works of Jung and Freud , Reich, Adler, and later Frankl, Menninger, Erickson.  It was in their personal writings that so many of the most profound insights were recorded. I love R. D. Laing living with Schizophrenics and the original community projects and other experiments that clarified modern ideas of mental illness.

 Today too much emphasis is placed on the ‘evidence based’ scientific study since it’s inherent limitations are the money and selection of the research that such studies so commonly are designed for.  Clearly the Grant Study like the Framingham study, prospective studies with profound insight are a step above so many others.

I liked the original observers who questioned matters like ‘secondary gain’ and considered the ‘advantages of insaneity’ and why it persisted.  What ‘value’ did these states have.  The disease model has been so fixed on eradication without consideration of the benefits.  The studies of distribution and the genetic studies of the turn of the century showing a crazy aunt or uncle in the attic of all the greatest of the New England seaboard were that kind of insight.

I liked the the studies which showed the relationship of genius to Schizoprehnia.  What was the difference between the grandiose idea of the manic depressive and the grandiose idea of the great creator, statesman or artists. 

Today there’s a beurocratic emphasis on the median and mediocrity whereas that was not always the case.  I fear that the end of the world is more likely to follow such stultifying reductionism than it is to any cataclysmic world event.  There’s a wearing tedium to this safe thinking and safe behaviour and emphasis on safety that has been shown associated with the fall of great eampiers and not associated with the greatest breakthroughs. Science is the world of wonder and daring whereas too often the politics of today is based on fear rather than belief. 

In my own work with geniuses and with schizophrenics and manic depressives I’ve I saw  that often the only real distinction was in the outcome of the ideas as opposed to the variation. Both the ideas of a mad man and the ideas of a genius are equally frightening and alien. This explains the common concept of ‘awe’ before encounters with God.  It is difficult to maintain an open mind and more easy to take the safer route of being closed minded.

Yet to the mediocre genius is wholly alien.  

Now having met folk who feel that eating their neighbours would be a great idea there’s limits to one’s open mindedness especially if one is the close most proximal neighbour to this ideology.  Yet that’s less a concern than the tendency to reduce the possible to the limits of the mediocre especially where there is fear and frank cowardice.  

Every day we live with miracles that would have had us shot, locked up or burnt at the stake were it not for risk taking and open mindedness.  I thinkit’s  important to embrace genius and also to have the humility to recognize that genius is commonly so much beyond the scale of one’s own conception. It’s childlike in wonder.  It’s birthplace is curiosity and I would add love.  

I truly am thankful to have had the privilege to have known genius, rare and wonderful and struggling to relate in a world where they are not the masses. To the majority, their genius was not so much as blessing as a curse.