Diagnoses Often Get Us Nowhere

Let me begin by saying this: No, I don’t believe every artistic genius is mad. Nor do I believe that every mad person is secretly (or not-so-secretly) artistic. Both are statistical outliers, the two do intersect occasionally in enormously interesting ways that I plan to talk about a lot, but they are not one and the same. There is no essential connection. A tendency that does seem to be increasing in frequency, however, and it’s a tendency I generally deplore, is the diagnosing of artists as a means of explaining their art. The process usually goes something like this: Sylvia Plath was consumed by the idea of killing herself, she was emotionally erratic, her moods were labile, she was occasionally full of rage, her interpersonal dynamics were complex, so she must have suffered from borderline personality disorder. “Shazam,” the interpreter declares, popping the champagne cork. “I have explained Sylvia Plath.” But a diagnosis is not an explanation. It is merely a description, a name for a set of thoughts, feelings, and behaviors, not a real answer. What we want to know is how someone became who she is, not what her DSM-derived “disease” might be. I talk a lot about this subject in chapter one of my Handbook of Psychobiography. You can check that out for more detail.

 Here’s a little illustration I use in my psychobiography courses. Say a mother tells a psychiatrist, “My son hears voices. Why?” The psychiatrist answers, “Well, sorry to say this, but it’s because he’s a schizophrenic.” Mom replies: “Oh. Well, how do you know he’s a schizophrenic?” Psychiatrist says, “Because he hears voices.” See how, in fact, we get nowhere?