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This has been a book waiting to be written, a psychoanalyst’s observations on instances when genius is akin to madness. In fact, it was unfinished when Murray Jackson died in 2011, and so it had indeed to wait; Jeanne Magagna subsequently put the text together, and added connecting and clarifying parts. Here are four case histories arrived at from published sources of men (no women yet) who have the highest honours, even at the Nobel level, and who remained vulnerable to the worst of mental illness. Magagna has collected these four ‘cases’, and has contributed editorially with Jackson and substantively. And she starts with a summary of the specific features which repeat themselves through the four.
Murray Jackson is well known for his humane writings that get benignly under the skin of psychiatric patients. Here, he follows a model used by Freud in the ‘analysis’ of Judge Schreber, the use of published texts to explore in a speculative way the core of the person’s terrible problems. In Freud’s case, this gave rise to fruitful additions to his theories, despite the fact he never met the patient outside the published text. Not least was the formulation of the reality principle. The present title suggests we will be introduced to a possible correlation of creativity and psychotic states of mind.
We meet the four only from their appearance in various biographical and autobiographical texts. But we do have the benefit of Jackson’s intuitive reading between the lines, and exposing the ‘psychotic core’; he places his eye on this ‘psychotic wavelength’, as Richard Lucas called it. He shows us the childhood experiences of John Nash, Vaslav Nijinsky, Jose Saramago and Vincent Van Gogh in a new light. He shows first their creation of a new reality; it is their psychotically imagined one – psychotically believed. Jackson lights up the nightmare world, which these tortured people actually see in those around them, in the places, events and relationships of ordinary life. The point