Читать книгу Neurological Disorders in Famous Artists - Part 4 - Группа авторов - Страница 7

Creativity is one of the most fascinating human resources, and its deployment in art is one of its best examples. It reflects closely mind activity, so it is not surprising that either psychological disorders or damage to brain function may modify or alter it. Indeed, psychiatric and neurological diseases in artists (writers, musicians, or painters) often lead to dramatic expressions of creativity, either acting as a stimulus, or causing extinction or loss, or simply changes.

In the following pages of this fourth volume on Neurological Diseases in Famous Artists, we have included examples that are often closer to neuropsychiatry. This is the case for Franz Kafka’s relationship with his father, or with the issue of schizophrenia in his novel The Trial. The artistic output linked to depression with or without a brain lesion is also a fascinating topic, well reflected in many of the American abstract expressionists, Joan Miró, or Machado de Assis, while the interaction between psychological instability and drug abuse can be remarkably traced in Raymond Roussel’s life and writings. Roussel’s case is of particular interest, since he was followed and treated by Pierre Janet, Charcot’s pupil and famous rival of Sigmund Freud. In the writer Louis-Ferdinand Céline, a complex association between mythomania, paranoid beliefs, and devastating pamphlet production is also striking, and is complexified by posttraumatic injuries from World War I. More broadly speaking, this conflict was a particularly interesting setting for the intricate association between organic wounds and shell-shock disorders in several writers and artists.

The issue of dementia acting on artistic creativity has already been specifically studied, including in the previous volumes of Neurological Diseases in Famous Artists, but since the case of Willem de Kooning was so striking and well documented, a new address is proposed here.

Purer neurological cases are also presented, such as postamputation limb pain in Arthur Rimbaud, or tabetic ataxia in Édouard Manet. Other fascinating life trajectories associated with cerebral or psychological changes include those of the writers Tolstoi, Turgenev, Mann, Ibsen, and Pavese. We warmly thank the authors of the following chapters for providing these often extraordinary examples of human life and creativity as being influenced by mind and brain activity changes.

Julien Bogousslavsky

Laurent Tatu