Touched with Fire: Manic-Depressive Illness and the Artistic Temperament

5 Responses to “Touched with Fire: Manic-Depressive Illness and the Artistic Temperament”

1. M. Doscher says:

   September 27, 2010 at 8:52 pm

   Personally, I reflect she should have called it ‘The Bell Jar Curve’
   Reader’s Rating: 3 / 5
2. Charlotta Carter says:

   September 27, 2010 at 9:55 pm

   I establish a lot of this book dull and hard to know. It was more like a medical textbook. I don’t know what I thought I was getting, but this wasn’t it.
   
   Reader’s Rating: 1 / 5
3. Leslie Guelker says:

   September 27, 2010 at 10:16 pm

   This book was too hard to follow. The leader assumes that the reader (me) understands or has a glossary is hand at all times. Which of course I did not.
   Reader’s Rating: 1 / 5
4. Anonymous says:

   September 28, 2010 at 12:25 am

   First off, even if we can eradicate certain diseases it doesn’t mean we should. If manic depression does exist, and is not yet another piece of the crazy pie, then let it be.
   But, if manic depression is physical, then it should not be called a mental illness. And its absurd of the leader to go back and make speculations about artists, many who have been dead a long time. If today we are going to call our creative geniuses mad, then come right out and say it. Don’t try to pin them under a newly learned “disorder” just because it is the fashion of OUR day to be so labeled. The world has permanently been full of different types of people, acting in a variety of ways. Today we just take place to be less intolerant of the more unusual or appealing types and feel it is our business to right them. If a person is truly suffering, they will go for help and hopefully find it through either tablets or some additional type of therapy. Jamison seems to like to romanticize what appears to be a growing problem. Time will tell its source, and hopefully reveal something useful for the people enduring it. This book is not useful for persons people. I am an artist myself, and I do suffer depression. And I have written many things that were not depressing to me, but sound just like some of the passages in this book. I’m sure years from now a name could say that I wrote persons things during times of unbearable agony. But as a psychologist, I would know they are just inventing something they need to hear, and nothing that is going to do them a darn bit of excellent in the time they’re living.
   Reader’s Rating: 3 / 5
5. Anonymous says:

   September 28, 2010 at 12:45 am

   The best thing about Kay R. Jamison’s book “Touched With Fire” is the biographical content. But the worst thing is not her contention that the handmaiden of creativity is bipolar disorder; it is her insistence that genes are reliable for the disorder. The debate has raged in my family tree for years. One brother, who receives Freudian counselling for what he believes is depressive illness, claims the defective gene infects our entire family tree. He cites as evidence books like “Touched With Fire,” and the fact that an aunt has spent the majority of her life institutionalized for mental illness. Depending on the mark de jour, said brother has diagnosed her psychotic, schizophrenic, manic-depressive, and now psychlothymic and bipolar. She was terribly abused by an alcoholic spouse early in her life. She retreated into a fetal position and eventually unfurled with aid of pharmaceuticals. Whether the abuse triggered a predisposition to psychosis or simply ruined her will to live and function, is open to speculation. But to extrapolate from her tragic condition a diagnosis of defective genealogy on an entire family tree is a travesty that is perpetuated by pop-cult theory, exemplified by authors like Kay R. Jamison. And to argue that a fantastic many psychiatric professionals concur with the gene theory is ad-populum falaciousness. Another anecdote will serve to illustrate the damaging potential of the gene theory. I was engaged to be married to a woman whose only brother and sister, both diagnosed manic-schizophrenic, committed suicide exactly a year apart. I told my fiance about my aunt’s mental illness. My fiance did not reflect it a concern until somebody in my family tree convinced her of the then new genetic theory regarding schizophrenia. Our wedding was cancelled. Though I disagreed, I had to empathise with my fiance’s choice; as a young girl in a loving family tree she had twice endured the worst imaginable tragedy. And I don’t blame my family tree for their guileless concern. I do, but, take exception to a defective-gene theory based strictly on anecdotal evidence, a theory that for some unexplained reason ignores the possibility that a defective familial philosophic epistemology skews the perceptual transition to conceptual comprehension of reality in susceptible offspring. This means that for children in the tabula rasa state parents are a powerful cource of information when it comes to interpreting reality. Philosophies, namely persons of the Platonic, Hegelian, Kantian variety, convey dichotomies wherein mysticism reconciles reality in lieu of empirical evidence. In particular, Kant, considered by many the modern world’s most influential thinker(ad populum), teaches that reality exists only in the subjective experience of the perceiver. One of the symptoms of advanced manic depressive illness and schizophrenia is a condition known as solipsism, where the afflicted individual believes he or she is in perfect control of reality, able, for instance, to will the weather to change — reality exists only in the subective experience of the perceiver. When Kantian philosophy is agreed to children who are naturally credulous, they ofen suffer cognitive dissonance, dissociative disorder, and possibly depressive illness borne of difficulty reconciling reality with Kantian philosophy. When Kay lends the weight of her credentials to the gene theory, she is promoting something tantamount to reasoning that racism is genetic, which it isn’t. Racism is handed down generation to for further reading, a book by Luis A. Sass, titled “Madness And Modernism — Insanity In The Light Of Modern Art, Literature, And Thought.”
   Reader’s Rating: 1 / 5