Method and Madness in the Arts and Sciences

This article offers a new way to interpret the relation between mental illness and creative achievement. With some license for imagination, the author adopts the fractal metaphor to explain the "self-similarity" of results found at every level of analysis in a prior study of more than 1,000 eminent persons and a new exploratory study on 137 well-known visual artists. These results show that regardless of scale, the same pattern exists between mental disturbances and creative expression. Persons in professions that require more logical, objective, and formal forms of expression tend be more emotionally stable than those in professions that require more intuitive, subjective, and emotive forms. This same pattern even applies, for example, when we focus on the visual arts and compare persons using different artistic styles. These results, in their entirety, suggest that a powerful relation exists between the presence or absence of mental illness and particular forms of creative expression both between and within the sciences and the arts.