Touched With Fire: Manic-Depressive Illness and the Artistic Temperament

Jamison, Key Redfied, Ph.D. New York: The Free Press, 1993. Hardback, 370 pages; also in paperback.

I think continually of those who were truly great.
Who, from the womb, remembered the soul’s history
. . . . . . . . . Whose lovely ambition
Was that their lips, still touched with fire,
Should tell the spirit . . . . . . . .
Who wore at their hearts the fire’s centre.
--STEPHEN SPENDER

Kay Redfield Jamison, associate professor of psychiatry at The Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and a featured speaker at the 1993 DRADA symposium, has penned another groundbreaking book. (Previously, she coauthored the definitive medical reference Manic-Depressive Illness [1990, Oxford University Press].

Her newest effort, Touched With Fire, is about manic depression—the “disease of perturbed gaieties, melancholy, and tumultuous temperaments, and its relationship to the artistic temperament and imagination.” Dr. Jamison offers literary, scientific, and biographical evidence for a symbiotic relationship between the creative process and the “fires” of manic depression (or related mood disorders) that touch many writers, poets, composers, and artists.

Dr. Jamison defines the symptoms of manic-depressive illness and details the history of the view that artists possess a “divine madness,” citing the lives of famous artists such as Robert Lowell, Robert Burns, Hector Berlioz, Hugh Wolf, Theodore Roethke, Edgar Allen Poe, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, John Berryman, William Styron, Leo Tolstoy, and Percy Bysshe Shelly, among others. She clarifies the relationship between “moods and the creative process,” illustrating that for these creative individuals, “elation in mood often preceded the creative periods rather that being entirely a result of them.” She further documents seasonal fluctuations in productivity cycles for many of these artists.

Using George Gordon, Lord Byron as her vehicle, Dr. Jamison examines the genealogy of manic-depressive illness and its related temperaments. She develops a fully integrated picture of Byron’s “tumultuous passions,” weaving quotes from his physician, friends, biographers, and wife, as well as from his own journals, letters, and poetry. Byron becomes the picture of the manic-depressive artist, in his own words,
The apostle of affliction, . . . [who] knew
How to make this madness beautiful, and cast
O’er erring deeds and thoughts, a heavenly hue
Of words.
(“Child Harolde’s Pilgrimage”)
Dr. Jamison documents more briefly the genealogies of Tennyson, Schumann, James, Melville, Woolf, Hemingway, Johnson, Van Gogh, and others, showing evidence that “manic-depressive illness is a genetic disease, running strongly, not to say pervasively, in some families, while absent in most.”

Although Dr. Jamison also examines the treatments available for manic-depressive illness, this book is not a comprehensive introduction to the illness for the newly diagnosed or their family members. It is better suited to someone particularly interested in the artistic temperament and the problems, ethical issues, and misconceptions associated with tempering creative thinking.

Dr. Jamison should be recognized not only for the incredible scholarship of Touched With Fire (she cites over 800 pieces of scientific, literary, and biographical information), but also for her literary efforts. Dr. Jamison’s style is exquisite—although provoking, laced with lush images and poetry, and highly readable. In addition, her admiration and concern are obvious for these artists who create ‘in the wind’s eye,’ and [bring] back with them words or sounds or images to ‘counterbalance human woes.’

By Connie Pryor

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