MALADIES AND ACHIEVEMENT

Press, Volume CXV, Issue 33869, 14 June 1975, Page 10

MALADIES AND ACHIEVEMENT

Creative Malady. By George Pickering. George Allen and Unwin. 327 pp. N.Z. price $12.75. The idea that all who achieve greatness. whether it is in the arts, in government or in religion, are in some sense of the word •'neurotic.” is now commonplace. Also commonplace is the idea that when certain people appear to be ill, and no organic basis for their symptoms can be found, a neurosis has induced the physical symptoms. In •'< reative Malady.” George Pickering links these two commonplace ideas together by discussing six people who were both ‘ ill” and achieved greatness. The central thesis of the book is that their illnesses in some way aided the people concerned to make their great achievements. “Without that illness.” Pickering writes, “the great work would not have been done, or done in such splendid style.” From the evidence Pickering offers it does seem that in two of the cases this statement holds true. Had Charles Darwin and Florence Nightingale not had the excuse of illness to protect themselves from social • and familial distractions. The one would not have written “ The Origin of the Species.' and the other would not have effected the great administrative reforms for which she was responsible. Darwin's illness has been of interest to his biographers for some time. Pickering’s claim that he was not suffering from any organic disease (some biographers have claimed that he was), and that his symptoms sprang from a psychoneurosis seems quite reasonable. So too does his diagnosis that this psychoneurosis sprang from a direct conflict “between his passionate desire to collect convincing evidence for his hypothesis and the threat imposed on his work by social intercourse."

In the chapters on Florence Nightingale. Pickering emphasises how abruptly the tirelessly active nurse in the Crimea became a reclusive invalid. Again he makes a plausible case for believing that she was not really ill in a physical sense, but that her invalidism can be traced back to psychological conflicts. Again too. a plausibe case is made for believing that only as an invalid could Miss Nightingale have achieved the colossal task of reforming the War Office.

After the chapters on Florence Nightingale and Darwin, the book seems to fall apart. No plausible connection is traced, in the other cases, between the individual's illness and the individual's achievement. Pickering admits that he is dealing with very different situations when he comes to deal with Mary Baker Eddy. Sigmund Freud and Marcel Proust. In these cases, he writes, “illness was an essential part of the act of creation rather than a device to enable that act to take place.”

Proust may be taken as an example. To some extent his illness does appear to have been induced by psychological rather then physical disturbances. But Proust would have gone into seifimposed confinement and written "Remembrance of Times Past” whether he had had the physical symptoms or not. The illness and the achievement had. to some extent, a common root, but existed otherwise entirely independently of each other. Freud seems. from Pickering’s material, a somewhat similar case. Suffering from a neurosis which manifested itself in symptoms of physical illness. Freud attempted to eliminate the psychological roots of the neurosis itself. In Freud’s case the physical symptoms incidentally

disappeared when this cure was effected. The case of Mary Baker Eddy is similar tp the cases of Proust and Freud, but more complicated. Her cure of her physical illness by 7 overcoming her psychological neurosis did lead to the formulation of the ideas which provided the foundation . for the Christian Science Church. Her particular achievement would have been different, and perhaps less spectacular, had her neurosis not caused her to suffer symptoms of physical Illness. But with this difference, her case resembles those of Proust and Freud rather than those of Darwin and Florence Nightingale. In the chapters on these last three persons (and perhaps in the chapter on Elizabeth Barrett Browning, where the confusion about the connection between Browning's neurosis and her creativity is almost impenetrable) Pickering is again dressing up a commonplace idea. In each of these three cases, the creative achievement did to some extent relieve the individual’s mental torment. An important shift takes place in Pickering’s ideas when he stops talking about Darwin and Florence Nightingale, and picks up his other cases. He stops talking about physical symptoms of illness which had a psychological origin and begins to talk about “psychological illness” itself. But those are two very different things.After his confusion between two very different concepts, Pickering’s conclusions about “the nature of creativity” and the connection betweeen “creativity and illness” turn out. understandably, to be a hotchpotch of conclusions others have reached after more systematic and coherent analysis of creative work.