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The controversy concerning whether an artist's creativity can exist in the absence of conflict or psychopathology is a longstanding one. At the turn of the century, Cesare Lombroso set out to prove that all geniuses had neurological diseases or psychoses. At times in his career, Freud compared neurosis to creativity. Freud's early views on creativity, in addition to those of Ernst Kris, who referred to the regressive mechanism used by artists—“regression in the service of the ego”—have been partly responsible for the correlation often assumed to exist between creativity and pathology. A plethora of stories like that of Van Gogh's cutting off his ear or Sylvia Plath's committing suicide have merely reinforced the popular image of the “mad artist.”
In his most recent book, Creativity and Madness, Albert Rothenberg, a researcher with a fondness for psychodynamic theory, promises to provide some long-awaited clarification on a most problematic topic by seriously tackling the most common myths and stereotypes about artists and the creative process. Because he is the director of an ongoing research project on creativity, with access to enormous amounts of data, one is unfortunately led to expect more than what the book delivers. Although it is highly readable and quite interesting, the book is uneven in its scientific rigor; methodology is hardly clarified, sources are often omitted, and contradictions can be found from one chapter to the next. It is unclear who Rothenberg intended his readers to be.
Although he does not propose a theory of creativity, Rothenberg postulates two cognitive processes, the Janusian and the Homospatial, which he believes are found in creative persons. In the Janusian process, a person is able simultaneously to perceive opposite tendencies or antitheses. The Homospatial process refers to the ability