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The relationship between madness and genius fascinates the layperson and expert alike. Most geniuses are not mad and, in fact, except for their extreme dedication and heightened creativity, may be quite normal. In turn, madness in no way guarantees creativity. Nevertheless, confusion regarding the difference is not surprising when one considers that a mad person has lost contact with reality while a genius presents a new and unusual view of reality. Before the genius's “new reality” has been accepted by society, it may appear mad. A study of geniuses who have been episodically mad should thus help to clarify the distinction, particularly when the episodes have been short but intense and have had a precipitous onset and an equally abrupt remission. Not surprisingly, such individuals have an awareness and insight into their own madness and how this madness may have interfered with or contributed to their creativity. Many have described in diaries and letters the events that preceded, accompanied, and followed these episodic disorders. These descriptions of psychotic events often suggest prodromal symptoms of auras or seizural activity similar to what is reported by patients in whom “storms of electrical activity” (Barker, 1968) occur in subcortical limbic structures. Often creative individuals describe a simultaneous revelation, eureka experience, or brainstorm, hence the double entendre of the title of this essay, which I borrowed from the epileptologist Wayne Barker (1968).
I have elsewhere reported on my studies, in considerable depth, of five subjects with dramatic and repeated psychotic episodes: Mary Lamb with 37, Virginia Woolf with 27, Strindberg with eight, van Gogh with at least seven, and Edvard Munch with only one psychotic episode but otherwise many depressive and panic attacks (Monroe, 1990). In addition to the frequency of their attacks of illness, these subjects were particularly appropriate for study as they wrote copiously about their inner worlds. So