NCJ Number
105868
Journal
Deviant Behavior Volume: 6 Issue: 1 Dated: (1985) Pages: 67-81
Date Published
1985
Length
15 pages
Annotation
This paper examines the links among creativity, madness, stigma and crime as illustrated in the life of Vincent van Gogh and Antonin Artaud, a biographer who grappled with his own stigma and madness in writing of the life of van Gogh.
Abstract
It is argued that the predisposition to morbidity is a combination of biological potential and skewed familial interactions, particularly with the mother during the early oral stage. The creative innovator views his surroundings differently from the norms, and this is inherent in his authentic creativity. Through this deviance, van Gogh and Artaud could create an art with a different form and content than those forms accepted in their fields. Both used their predisposition to madness as dialectical raw material for their creation, which provided a means for adjusting to their outsider status and the resulting social stigma. For both, internal and external factors resulted in the predisposition to madness and stigma becoming impossible. Unable to continue creating, they succumbed to the emptiness and madness of death. 26 references.