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Essay / Research Paper Abstract
This 3 page report discusses Jamison’s 1993 book and the ways in
which it provides new insights into manic-depressive illness and how it may have had an
impact on some of the world’s greatest artists. Bibliography lists 2 sources.
Page Count:
3 pages (~225 words per page)
File: D0_BWmandep.rtf
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Unformatted sample text from the term paper:
results of inner demons and angels that could only find expression through art. Writer, actress, and professor of psychiatry at Johns Hopkins University, Kay Redfield Jamison understands this concept and
questions whether or not many artists throughout the ages were manic-depressives. Lord Byron, Vincent van Gogh, Hermann Melville, Robert Burns, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Virginia Woolf are all known to
have had manic depression running through their family histories and certainly showed evidence of it in themselves. Jamison explores the relationship between artistry and manic-depressive illness in Touched with Fire:
Manic Depressive Illness and the Artistic Temperament (1993). In fact, one reviewer, Phoebe-Lou Adams wrote in The Atlantic (04-93): "Her list of artists in varied fields who were, in her
opinion, manic-depressives is so long and so spangled with great names that one wonders whether any artists of merit escaped the condition" (pp. 133). Clearly, the notion of the suffering
artists is not something new. Understanding a Psychology One of the reasons the book is particularly powerful is that Jamison has personally experienced the turbulence, hysteria, and despair of
manic-depressive illness. In one of her subsequent books, An Unquiet Mind, Jamison describes her experiences of living with manic depressive illness was one in which her "periods of high enthusiasms,
[were] ... short-lived and quickly burned itself out" (PG). In Touched with Fire, Jamison makes it clear that she agrees with the mainstream medical and psychological communities that
manic-depressive illness of "bi-polar disorder" is a disease determined through biochemical and genetic predispositions. But she also asserts that such a disorder results in people struggling more passionately and feeling
things more deeply than most people. She is not dismissive of people who do not suffer from the disease, she only makes the connection between the ways in which artistic
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