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Every creative person is a duality or a synthesis of contradictory aptitudes.
Two discrete literatures address a bipolarity of sorts in highly creative persons. The first largely anecdotal and theoretical literature proposes that sexual “bipolarity” (Heilbrun, 1964) is prevalent among artists. Scholars frequently refer to a “certain bisexuality” (Hitschmann, 1956), “a shifting, at times, confused sense of maleness and femaleness …, a kind of primal biunity” (Oremland, 1985, p. 414) among the artistically gifted. The second literature documents somewhat more empirically the disproportionate rate of manic-depression among artists, especially poets. A striking, but previously unreported, observation is the apparent overlap between artists cited as manic-depressive and those described as androgynous.
The present paper reviews both literatures and attempts a more synthetic reading of affective illness and gender disturbance among eminent artists. Unfortunately, neither literature is sufficiently substantial or systematic to permit conclusive statements. Further, not a single paper has been located which addresses the curious coexistence of bipolar affective illness and “bisexuality.” Lacking more methodologically rigorous documentation, this paper relies heavily on artists' self-reports, and psychoanalytic case studies