An Old Idea About Genius Wins New Scientific Support

By NATALIE ANGIER
Published: October 12, 1993

As long as there have been poets to pierce the darkness with their diamond songs, and painters to capture rays of sun shattering on cool cathedral stone, and artists of all persuasions to consort with the gods and articulate the union, there have been social critics to notice that an awful lot of these creative people are mentally unsound.

"Why is it," Aristotle asked in the fourth century B.C., "that all men who are outstanding in philosophy, poetry or the arts are melancholic?" Three hundred years ago, the English poet John Dryden wrote,

Great wits are sure to madness near allied;

And thin partitions do their bounds divide," a sweet couplet that has since degenerated into the sorry cliche "There is a thin line between genius and madness." ...

Photos: Virginia Woolf (The New York Times); Robert Schumann (Culver Pictures) (pg. C1); Herman Melville, left, the 19th-century author, and Robert Lowell, the American poet, emerged as masters despite and perhaps because of the manic depression they are believed to have suffered. (Bill Potter) (pg. C8) Graph: "Mapping Madness and Genius" shows the quantity, if not the quality, of the composer Robert Schumann's output varied strikingly with episodes of depression or mania and the relatively benign periods between. (Source: E. Slater and A. Meyer, "Contributions to a Pathography of the Musicians," Confinia Psychiatrica, 1959. Reported in "Touched With Fire" by Kay Redfield Jamison.) (pg. C8)