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Murray Jackson will be known to readers of the Journal both as a contributor of several papers in the early 1960s and more recently from the interview he gave shortly before his death (2011). Jackson trained as a psychiatrist before becoming a member of the Society of Analytical Psychology. He later trained as a Kleinian analyst with the British Psychoanalytic Society. One step in his journey from Jung to Klein is well-documented in his paper on symbolism (1963) in which he redefined Jung's understanding of the symbol in Kleinian terms and without reference to the transcendent. Together with the vigorous rebuttal this attracted from his respondent, Esther Harding, his paper opened up a fault-line in the interpretation and clinical application of Jung's thought across which analytical psychologists continue to debate.
The present monograph, published posthumously and with editorial input from Jeanne Magagna, presents short biographical sketches of the mathematician John Nash, the dancer Nijinsky, the Portuguese novelist José Saramago, and Vincent van Gogh. Jackson's title might suggest that these four will be used to advance the author's mature thoughts about the dynamics of human creativity and the relations between these dynamics and psychotic processes. This discussion has old roots in the concept of ‘creative illness’ dating back at least to Novalis and in the far older notion of ‘divine madness’. Jung made an important early clinical contribution to interpreting psychotic delusions, and it is ironic that, before the publication of Liber Novus and the serious historical study of Jung of the past 20 years, the idea that Jung himself had a psychotic breakdown in 1913 with creative consequences was a widely-accepted ahistorical libel frequently repeated by analytical psychologists. Jackson's title led me to anticipate a contribution to the creative illness/divine madness discussion from the author's long and distinguished engagement with psychotic patients.
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