Eternal Companions - Creativity And Mood Disorders: A New Book About People Of Genius - Reviews

A new, third book by psychiatrists Alexander Shuvalov and Oleg Buzik from the Eternal Companions series has been released. The authors now analyze the relationship between creativity and mood disorders.

Shuvalov A. V., Buzik O. Zh.

Eternal companions - creativity and affective disorders.

M.: Institute of Consulting and System Solutions; All-Russian Professional Psychotherapeutic League, 2017.

Alcoholism, drug addiction and, moreover, schizophrenia (themes of previous books by the authors) seem to be unconditioned mental disorders with a negative ethical connotation. Who will be afraid of mood swings, signs of depression now? These are quite familiar, almost “normal” affective deviations for our time, which not every person will force to turn to a psychologist, and even more so to a psychiatrist.

Meanwhile, one should know that affective polar states - mania and depression - largely determine human behavior

In creatively gifted people, they not only influence the mechanism of the creative process, but also penetrate both the plot of the narrative, when it comes to the writer, and the plot of the picture, when it comes to the painter.

The most detailed about these aspects of affective pathology and tells a new book. Pathographic studies of the biographies of historical figures force us to free ourselves from the stencil into which our perception has been driven from school years. The antimythological nature of pathographic texts produces a sanitation of consciousness in relation to outstanding personalities.

Consciously or unconsciously, we choose famous people as positive reference points or, on the contrary, as negative models. And we do not tire ourselves at all with a deeper understanding of man. The book allows you to look at many facts from the biography of famous geniuses from a different angle.

It will be interesting to know that most often the talent (genius) achieves maximum productivity exclusively in “special states of creative upsurge” of mental activity. And it is achieved either with the help of psychoactive substances, or in a state of "endogenous creative obsession" (for example, due to a schizophrenic process), or during a period of "productive manic".

Various combinations of these states are also possible.

But always a genius creatively produces only what follows from the structure of the personality, from the depth of feelings, from things that are close and understandable to him that fill his own unique world. And the emotional coloring of a work directly depends on the state of its affective sphere

The book deals not only with the history of affective disorders, but also with the connection of the creative process with affective disorders. Examples of images of affective disorders in fiction, painting and cinematography are given.

It is worth emphasizing that the methods of pathographic research, like the psychoanalysis of Sigmund Freud in its time, can and should be extended not only to the study of the activities of historical leaders and luminaries of culture, including works of literature and art, but also to social institutions, state and political activities.

The second part presents 15 pathographic studies of various prominent figures (Hugo Wolff, Virginia Wolfe, Disney, Dumas, Levitan, Khrushchev, Chopin, Schopenhauer, etc.).

The book is of interest not only to a narrow circle of professionals, but also attractive to a wide range of readers, one way or another connected with the creative process.