The mad man as artist: medicine, history and degenerate art.

Abstract

Are crazy people more creative than their sane counterparts? R. D. Laing, the British psychiatric guru of the 1960s, presented this argument more forcefully than most. He saw and still sees madness as a creative response to an untenable world. For Laing, it is the family (or perhaps even society) which is destructively mad; those whom society labels as mad are only reflecting the craziness by which they find themselves surrounded. Their mimetic response to the insanity of the world into which they are thrust takes the form of a creative reworking of the insanity to which they are exposed. This response is labelled by that diseased world (or family) as an 'illness' and this view determines how the individual is perceived and, more importantly, treated. In R. D. Laing's view of the world, the creative response of the mad is denied, even though it presents the roots for any true understanding of the nature of madness. To use Michel Foucault's formulation, the mad are denied their own voice. 2 They are forced to speak through those institutions which either caused their madness (such as the family or society) or which deny them any insight, such as medicine. In the 1960s, Laing undertook an experiment to show that the insane could be treated and restored, if they were, in a sense, reprogrammed. Laing's creation was Kingsley Hall, a community of patients and therapists, which attempted to return 'ill' individuals back to that stage in life at which time they were exposed to the pernicious influence of the sick world about them. They were encouraged to return to infancy and relive their early life in a new, caring, protective, 'healthy' world, the world of Kingsley Hall. Laing's Kingsley Hall had a favourite patient whose name was Mary Barnes. Together with her therapist, the American psychiatrist Joe Berke, she wrote an account of 'a journey through madness'.3 Now, most psychiatrists or mental healers who see themselves as establishing a new order have 'pet' patients who serve them as the ideal example of the efficacy of their method. From Philippe Pinel, the