Creativity, Addiction, and Mood Disorders
November 21, 2019
Leslie Jamison, Writing, and clinical psychologist Kay Redfield Jamison, Johns Hopkins University. Moderated by Phillip Lopate '64 CC, Writing.
A conversation about the relationship between mental illness, psychic suffering, addiction, and creativity, focused particularly on the poets Robert Lowell and John Berryman. Lowell was a poet of astonishing originality and force. As well, he was subject to relentless attacks of psychotic mania and depression. He wrote in spite of illness, and at times because of it. He wrote with an iron discipline and commitment to his art; he wrote because "it takes the ache away." Berryman for many years believed his art “depended on his drinking,” but in the last years of his life struggled to understand a different relationship between his anguish, his booze, and the wild liberties of his art.
