The march of science in explaining human nature continues. In Touched With Fire, Jamison marshals a tremendous amount of evidence for the proposition that most artistic geniuses were (and are) manic depressives. This is a book of interest to scientists, psychologists, and artists struggling with the age-old question of whether psychological suffering is an essential component of artistic creativity. Anyone reading this book closely will be forced to conclude that it is. Very Highly Recommended.


From Publishers Weekly
Drawing from the lives of artists such as Van Gogh, Byron and Virginia Woolf, Jamison examines the links between manic-depression and creativity. Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Library Journal
The author succeeds nicely in her effort "to make a literary, biographical, and scientific argument for a compelling association... between two temperaments--the artistic and the manic-depressive--and their relationship to the rhythms of the natural world." Jamison (psychiatry, Johns Hopkins Univ.) examines the lives of writers and artists afflicted with manic-depression, discussing at length the case of Lord Byron. In language comprehensible to the lay reader, she presents a thorough overview of current knowledge concerning the etiology, diagnosis, and treatment of this disorder, a topic also addressed, though in a less scientifically rigorous fashion, in D.J. Hershman and Julian Lieb's The Key to Genius (Prometheus Bks, 1988). The current work is recommended for all academic libraries; it will earn its keep in large and medium-sized public libraries as well.- Mary Ann Hughes, Washington State Univ. Libs., PullmanCopyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.


Robert Bernard Martin, author of Tennyson: The Unquiet Heart
Dr. Jamison roams with an ease unusual in a scientist over the works of the great poets, showing how many of them were deeply manic-depressive. By the end of the book the reader has quietly been rerouted to the profoundly ethical question of whether the eradication of this disease by modern molecular biology would not ultimately be a diminution of the human race. No final answer is given to this disturbing question, but the book is made more convincing by its deliberately low-key approach to the problem.


From Kirkus Reviews
Study of manic depression and inspiration that for many will be a hard read but that makes its points convincingly--if only fragmentarily--chapter by chapter. The relation between madness and genius is a fascinating subject, and Jamison (Psychiatry/Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine) has a rich lode of firsthand observers to quote from: Byron, Coleridge, van Gogh, Robert Lowell, John Berryman, Sylvia Plath, Theodore Roethke, Virginia Woolf, and many more, all of whom offer spellbinding words about their bouts with manic depression (paranoia and schizophrenia aren't covered). The basic argument here is ``not that all writers and artists are depressed, suicidal, or manic. It is, rather, that a greatly disproportionate number of them are; that the manic-depressive and artistic temperaments are, in many ways, overlapping ones; and that the two temperaments are causally related to one another.'' Genealogical studies of famed manic depressives show a definite genetic linkage, which is complemented by a seasonal one: Jamison includes seasonal tables of mood disorders, fluctuating productivity (``winter depression...summer hypomanias''), and peak times for suicide. Lithium and newer drugs, she explains, often dampen creative highs while relieving victims of turmoil and suicidal lows, but calm periods at optimum serum blood levels may allow longer, more productive periods of creativity. Some sufferers, however, choose to go with the lows for the rewards of the hypomanic state when it returns (hypomania is a middling state that gives a rich lift before the hyperactivity of mania or the colossal bleakness of melancholia). Jamison also finds a high incidence of manic depression among substance abusers, although she doesn't study the incidence of illness among abstinent drinkers or drug-abusers. Clear writing and research, but heavily clinical. -- Copyright ©1993, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

The anguished, volatile intensity we associate with the artistic temperament, often described as "a fine madness," has been thought of as a defining aspect of much artistic genius. Now, Kay Jamison's brilliant work, based on years of studies as a clinical psychologist and prominent researcher in mood disorders, reveals that many artists who were subject to alternatingly exultant and then melancholic moods were, in fact, engaged in a lifelong struggle with manic-depressive illness. Drawing on extraordinary recent advances in genetics, neuroscience, and psychopharmacology, Jamison presents the now incontrovertible proof of the biological foundations of this frequently misunderstood disease, and applies what is known about the illness, and its closely related temperaments, to the lives of some of the world's greatest artists - Byron, van Gogh, Shelley, Poe, Melville, Schumann, Coleridge, Virginia Woolf, Burns, and many others. Byron's life, discussed in considerable detail, is used as a particularly fascinating example of the complex interaction among heredity, mood, temperament, and poetic work. Jamison reviews the substantial, rapidly accumulating, and remarkably consistent findings from biographic and scientific studies that demonstrate a markedly increased rate of severe mood disorders and suicide in artists, writers, and composers. She then discusses reasons why this link between mania, depression, and artistic creativity might exist. Manic-depressive illness, a surprisingly common disease, is genetically transmitted. For the first time, the extensive family histories of psychiatric illness and suicide in many writers, artists, and composers are presented. In some instances - for example, Tennyson and Byron - these psychiatric pedigrees are traced back more than 150 years. Jamison discusses the complex ethical and cultural consequences of recent research in genetics, especially as they apply to manic-depressive illness, a disease that almost certainly confers

FROM THE CRITICS

Publishers Weekly