The Disordered Mind

by Eric R. Kandel

  Moog was born in 1871 and grew up in poverty. His father was thought to be mentally disturbed, but Moog himself was kind and very bright, with a strong memory. After leaving school, he became a waiter and began to lead a loose life filled with wine, women, and song. During this time he contracted gonorrhea. He married in 1900, but his wife died in 1907. While working as a manager of a large hotel, he started to drink heavily, and in 1908 he suddenly experienced a psychotic episode. A few weeks later he was diagnosed with schizophrenia and committed to an asylum, where he lived until his death in 1930. Moog’s vision, as we see in Altar with Priest and Madonna (fig. 6.5), is dominated by religious imagery.17

  Figure 6.5. Peter Moog, Altar with Priest and Madonna

  Orth was born in 1853 to an ancient, noble family. He developed normally as a child and later became a naval cadet, but he began to be plagued with paranoia when he was twenty-five years old and was hospitalized from 1883 until his death in 1919. At various times he believed himself to be the King of Saxony, the King of Poland, and the Duke of Luxembourg. In 1900 he began to paint. As Prinzhorn said of Orth’s paintings, in his eagerness “no empty surface is safe.” He covered every inch of the page, much as Moog did, but unlike Moog he did not create intricately detailed drawings. Many of Orth’s paintings were seascapes and featured a three-masted ship that Prinzhorn believed was his training ship. In figure 6.6 we see an abstract version of a three-masted ship on the sea. The colorful diagonal areas “together give the effect of a mild sunset at sea,” wrote Prinzhorn.18

  Figure 6.6. Viktor Orth, Barque Evening at Sea, watercolor, 29 × 21 centimeters

  Another of Prinzhorn’s schizophrenic masters was August Neter, born August Natterer in 1868 in Germany. He studied engineering, married, and was a successful electrician, but he suddenly developed anxiety attacks accompanied by delusions. On April 1, 1907, he had a critical hallucination of the Last Judgment, during which he said ten thousand pictures flashed by in half an hour. “The pictures were manifestations of the last judgment,” said Natterer. “They were revealed to me by God for the completion of [Christ’s] redemption.”19

  Natterer attempted to capture in his artwork the ten thousand images of his Last Judgment hallucination. The images are always executed in a clear, objective style almost like a technical drawing, as they are in Axle of the World with Rabbit (fig. 6.7). Natterer insisted that this painting predicted the First World War—he knew everything in advance. According to Natterer, the rabbit in the painting represents “the uncertainty of good fortune. It began to run on the roller … the rabbit was then changed into a zebra (upper part striped) and then into a donkey (donkey’s head) made of glass. A napkin was hung on the donkey; it was shaved.”20

  Figure 6.7. August Natterer, Axle of the World with Rabbit, 1919

  SOME CHARACTERISTICS OF PSYCHOTIC ART

  The artworks pictured on the preceding pages very likely spring from the same type of intrinsic creative capability as any other work of art, but because the artists suffered from schizophrenia and were unfettered by artistic or social conventions, their work was thought by critics of the time to be a purer expression of their unconscious conflicts and desires. That is why most people have such a powerful emotional response to their art. That is also why these works strike us, even with our modern sensibility, as amazingly original. In fact, the publication of these works in the early 1920s caused people to reconsider the idea of “original” in Western art. Much of what we consider art, Roeske argues, is ideologically charged: “We expect certain things from art.” He goes on to say, “The Prinzhorn collection delivers many more aspects of the life of the individual and of life in society than conventional art can do.”21

  What makes the art that Prinzhorn collected different from that of other artists, trained or untrained? Schizophrenia, as we know, results in disordered thought, which detaches an individual from reality. This disturbance in the relation between a person and his or her social environment can lead to striking distortions of outlook, distortions that frequently alter the function of artistic form. Thus, one common characteristic of schizophrenic art is the juxtaposition of unrelated elements. Another is the depiction of delusions and hallucinatory images. Still others are ambiguous images or the reassembling of dismembered body parts. The work of each artist is characterized by recurring motifs that spring from his or her unconscious mind. Thus the works do have, as Kraepelin had predicted, distinctive themes that are specific to their creators.

  THE IMPACT OF PSYCHOTIC ART ON MODERN ART

  The Dada movement and the subsequent Surrealist movement emerged largely in response to the carnage of World War I. It is difficult to overestimate the psychic effects of the Great War. When the war began, many young people entered it enthusiastically, believing that war would lead to the rejuvenation of society. But within a year many people were left with a sense of utter, senseless destruction. The war called into question the belief in the inevitability of social progress; even more important, it struck at the heart of Western rational self-understanding. From the failure of reason there emerged the possibility that irrationality might be a life-affirming alternative.

  It was amid the chaos of the war that Dada emerged in Zurich in 1916. Surrealism originated shortly thereafter in Paris, where most adherents of Dada settled after the war. Although it was first conceived of as a literary movement, the techniques and orientation of Surrealism proved better suited to art. Like the Dadaists, the Surrealists were opposed to the tradition of academic art and the values for which it stood, but they were in search of a new, more creative and positive philosophy than the chaos of Dada. They found such a philosophy in the work of Freud, Prinzhorn, and similar thinkers.

  Freud had documented the importance of unconscious thought, which is not rational and is not governed by a sense of time, space, or logic. Moreover, he pointed to dreams as the royal road to the unconscious. The Surrealists attempted to eliminate logic from their work and to draw on dreams and myths for inspiration, thus unlocking the power of the imagination. In addition, they were determined, as were Cézanne and the Cubists after him, to move art from its historical representational trajectory onto a new one.

  Max Ernst, a leader first of Dada and later of Surrealist art, bought a copy of Prinzhorn’s book and took it to Paris, where it became the “Picture Bible” of the Surrealists. Although most of the Parisian members of the Surrealist group could not read German, the images in Prinzhorn’s book spoke for themselves, illustrating what could be accomplished outside conventional bourgeois attitudes and inhibitions.

  The complete naïveté of the psychotic artists was a powerful stimulus to the Surrealists. They set out to liberate creativity from the limitations of rational thought by exploring the hidden depths of the unconscious mind. They encouraged one another to explore and to express their own erotic and aggressive drives. Accordingly, every Surrealist artist relied on central motifs that derived from his or her distinctive, unconscious mental processes, just as the psychotic artists did.

  In 2009 Roeske put together an exhibition in Heidelberg in which he systematically compared Surrealist art and psychotic art from the Prinzhorn collection. The exhibition, “Surrealism and Madness,” focused on four processes, or techniques, that the Surrealists employed to tap into the unconscious, thereby emulating psychotic artists.

  Figure 6.8. Heinrich Hermann Mebes, Das brütende Rebhühn oder die herrschende Sünde (top); Frida Kahlo, Without Hope, 1945 (bottom)

  The first and most important process was automatic drawing. Automatism is a method of tapping into the unconscious that was introduced by psychiatrists in the nineteenth century. André Masson was a pioneer in automatic drawing. The second process was combining unrelated elements. The more distant the relationship between the elements, the truer and stronger the image. Ernst took the technique to an astonishing level of virtuosity in his Dada collages. Roeske compared an image by Heinrich Hermann Mebes from the Prinzhorn collection to a work by Frida Kahl
o (fig. 6.8).

  The third process, known as the paranoiac-critical method, was developed by Salvador Dalí. Dalí attributes the visual double meaning in his paintings, which are essentially picture puzzles, to the change in perception brought about by paranoia. Similar ambiguities can be found in pictures from the Prinzhorn collection. In the exhibition, Roeske placed a work by Dalí next to Natterer’s Axle of the World with Rabbit (fig. 6.9).

  Figure 6.9. August Natterer, Axle of the World with Rabbit, 1919 (top); Salvador Dalí, Remorse, or Sphinx Embedded in the Sand, 1931 (bottom)

  The fourth process was figure amalgamation, in which dismembered body parts are rearranged and fused, often to shocking effect. The Surrealist Hans Bellmer used this technique in his drawings.

  The Surrealists aimed to create a pictorial art that already existed in the art of psychotic patients by devising ways of tapping into their own unconscious mind. Whereas the psychotic artists did this naturally and unselfconsciously, the Surrealists’ deliberate efforts also succeeded, as Roeske’s exhibition demonstrates. Both groups of artists evoke in us the “disquieting feeling of strangeness” that Prinzhorn described. Moreover, whereas the psychotic artists were untrained, the Surrealists went to great lengths to unlearn their training. Picasso claimed that he used to draw like Raphael and it took him a full lifetime to learn to draw like a child.22

  WHAT OTHER BRAIN DISORDERS TELL US ABOUT CREATIVITY

  The idea that creativity derives from madness has been nourished for centuries by the unusual prevalence of mood disorders among writers and artists. A different sort of genius, the savant, has been observed among people on the autism spectrum. Even neurological disorders, such as Alzheimer’s disease and frontotemporal dementia, can uncover creative capability.

  In her book Touched with Fire: Manic-Depressive Illness and the Artistic Temperament, Kay Redfield Jamison reviews the extensive body of research suggesting that writers and artists show a vastly higher rate of manic-depressive, or bipolar, disorder than the general population.23 For example, Vincent van Gogh and Edvard Munch, two of the founders of Expressionism, both suffered from manic-depressive illness, as did the Romantic poet Lord Byron and the novelist Virginia Woolf. Nancy Andreasen, a psychiatrist at the University of Iowa, has examined creativity in living writers and found that they are four times as likely to have bipolar disorder and three times as likely to have depression as people who are not creative.24

  Jamison points out that people with bipolar disorder do not have symptoms much of the time, but as they swing from depression to mania, they experience an exhilarating feeling of energy and a capability for formulating ideas that dramatically enhance their artistic creativity. The tension and transition between changing mood states, as well as the sustenance and discipline that people with bipolar disorder draw from periods of health, are critically important. Some people have argued that it is these tensions and transitions that ultimately give an artist with bipolar disorder his or her creative power.25

  Ruth Richards at Harvard University has carried the analysis further.26 She tested the idea that a genetic vulnerability to bipolar disorder might be accompanied by a predisposition to creativity. She examined patients’ first-degree relatives who did not have bipolar disorder and found that the correlation indeed exists. Richards therefore proposes that genes which confer a greater risk of bipolar disorder may also confer a greater likelihood of creativity. This is not to imply that bipolar disorder creates the predisposition to creativity, but rather that people who have the genes associated with bipolar disorder also have the heightened exuberance, enthusiasm, and energy that express themselves in and contribute to creativity. These studies emphasize the importance of genetic factors in contributing to creativity.

  CREATIVITY IN PEOPLE WITH AUTISM

  People on the autism spectrum approach creative problem solving differently than neurotypical people do. In a study of both neurotypical people and people on the autism spectrum, Martin Doherty of the University of East Anglia in England and his colleagues found that people with a high number of autism traits generate fewer, but more original, ideas. He proposes that they are more likely to go directly to less common ideas because they rely less on associations or memory, which would constrain their creative thinking.27

  In one test, study participants were asked to identify as many potential uses for a paper clip as they could. Many people said that a paper clip could be used as a hook, a pin, or for cleaning small spaces. Less common responses included using it as a paper airplane weight, as a wire to cut through flowers, or as a token in a game. The individuals who generated the more unusual responses also had a higher number of autism traits. Similarly, when participants were presented with abstract drawings and asked to provide as many ideas as possible to explain the images, those with the highest number of autism traits tended to come up with fewer but more unusual interpretations.

  Some people on the autism spectrum have remarkable strengths, and a few have prodigious skill in music, numerical calculation, drawing, and the like. Many of these autistic savants have become well-known. One is Stephen Wiltshire, whom Sir Hugh Casson, former president of the Royal Academy of Arts, considered perhaps the best child artist in Britain. After looking at a building for a few minutes, Wiltshire could draw it quickly, confidently, and accurately. He drew entirely from memory, without notes, and he rarely missed or added a detail. As Casson wrote, “Stephen Wiltshire draws exactly what he sees—no more, no less.”28

  The noted neurologist and author Oliver Sacks was intrigued that Wiltshire could be so gifted artistically despite his enormous emotional and intellectual deficits. This caused him to ask: “Was art not, quintessentially, an expression of a personal vision, a self? Could one be an artist without having a ‘self’?”29 Presumably, anyone who has a sense of self must also have a sense of empathy for others. Sacks worked with Wiltshire over a period of years, and during that time it became more and more evident that the young man had extraordinary perceptual skills, yet never developed great empathy. It was as if the two components of art—the perceptual and the empathic—were separated in his brain.

  Another extraordinary artistic savant was Nadia, who at age two and a half started to draw horses and then a variety of other subjects in ways that psychologists thought simply impossible. When she was five years old, she could draw pictures of horses that were comparable to those produced by professionals. She showed an early mastery of space and an ability to depict appearances and shadows, a sense of perspective that gifted child artists don’t develop until they are in their teens.30

  We do not know what accounts for this creativity in autistic people, but a review by Francesca Happé and Uta Frith of numerous studies suggests that superior sensory acuity, focus on detail, visual memory, and detection of patterns may be involved, along with an obsessive need to practice. Almost 30 percent of people on the autism spectrum exhibit special skills in music, memory, numerical and calendar calculations, drawing, or language. Moreover, some individuals have developed multiple talents. Stephen Wiltshire, for example, has perfect pitch and musical talent, as well as his drawing ability. These findings suggest that the biological basis for talent in, say, numerical or calendar calculations does not differ appreciably from the basis of talent in art or music—a conclusion that may extend to neurotypical people as well.31

  Darold Treffert of the University of Wisconsin, who studies savants, holds that “Serious study of savant syndrome, including the autistic savant, can propel us along further than we have ever been in understanding, and maximizing, both brain function and human potential.”32 Allan Snyder, director of the Centre for the Mind at the University of Sydney in Australia, has pursued the idea that the left hemisphere’s control over the creative potential of the right hemisphere is lessened in people with autism.33

  CREATIVITY IN PEOPLE WITH ALZHEIMER’S DISEASE

  Many people with Alzheimer’s take up art to communicate with their family. Art thus becomes not o
nly a means of creative expression but also a language they can use when other avenues of communication have failed them.

  The converse is also true: artists who develop Alzheimer’s disease can continue to paint interesting works. This phenomenon was clearly evident in Willem de Kooning, one of the founders of Abstract Expressionism and the New York School. In 1989 de Kooning was examined and found to have Alzheimer’s-like symptoms. He suffered severe memory loss and was often disoriented, but when he entered his studio, he returned to being cogent and engaged. The simplicity, airiness, and lyricism of his later paintings was a dramatic departure from his earlier paintings, and it enriched his body of work.34 A number of art historians have argued that this should not be surprising, because in many cases, especially among Abstract Expressionists like de Kooning, creativity derives more from intuition than from intellect.

  CREATIVITY IN PEOPLE WITH FRONTOTEMPORAL DEMENTIA

  When frontotemporal dementia starts on the left side of the brain, it typically affects speech, leading to aphasia. In 1996 Bruce Miller of the University of California, San Francisco, noticed that some of his dementia patients with progressive language disorder had begun to exhibit artistic creativity. People who had painted before started to use bolder colors, and some people who had never painted took up painting for the first time. Specifically, some of Miller’s patients with damage to the left frontal regions of their brains were experiencing increased activity in the right posterior regions—regions thought to be involved in creating art.35