This is a timely book about a very old question: how are madness and creative genius connected? We assume there is a special “art” to thinking and feeling and that the narrative act called consciousness can be shaped, authorized, by the secret writer inside us, regardless of its neurological origins. But what is the nature of this art, what does this narrative mean, and who is the writer? Hard questions in these post-Lacanian times.

Previous studies using Freud's psychodynamic model have focused on unconscious conflicts and unacknowledged losses,