European psychologists recently came to a literally sensational conclusion: genius is almost always an insanity inherent in geniuses by nature.
Of course, genius is wonderful, it is the engine of culture and progress, but he himself, as a rule, ends badly. The easiest option, if you just drink too much, or even out of the "coils" flies.
In confirmation of this, one can cite a whole list of great people, whose fate, really, you cannot envy. Of the geniuses of literature known to us from school, he does not, perhaps only the great Pushkin, who was distinguished only by an unbridled craving for the fair sex. And this, as you know, is not a vice. But the rest … Gogol ended his life as a schizophrenic. Lermontov was a pronounced schizoid psychopath. Dostoevsky suffered from epilepsy, which is also a sign of mental inferiority. In the west, the picture is the same. Mozart was convinced all his life that the Italians were going to poison him. Schumann at the age of 46 lost his mind, he was pursued by talking tables, and Beethoven and Mendelssohn dictated melodies to him from their graves. By the end of his life Newton suffered from mental disorders, absolutely could not stand any criticism, falling into a dull state. Swift died in complete mental disorder, and Rousseau believed all his life that not only all people, but all the elements of nature were against him. Even Leo Tolstoy suffered from hysterical-epileptic seizures, otherwise he would not have been a great writer.
And these are just psychopaths. There were much more alcoholics, and alcoholism in the end also leads to mental disorders. The greatest alcoholic was, it turns out, Alexander the Great, who, at the age of 33, did not die of fever, as was believed, but of wine - he drained the cup of Hercules ten times in a row. Drunken drunks were Julius Caesar, Socrates, Seneca, Rembrandt, Hoffmann, Musset, Beethoven, Handel, Gluck, Mussorgsky, completely drunk at the end of his life, and even the great healer Avicenna, who, probably like no one else, understood the harm of immense consumption of alcohol for health …
The list can be continued for a very long time. Benvenuto Cellini is a thief and a scoundrel. François Vignon is a housekeeper and a gallows man, who sagaciously wrote to himself: "And how much this ass weighs, the neck will soon find out." Maupassant spent the last years of his life in an insane asylum, completely losing his human appearance. A drunkard like Hemingway had yet to be found. García Lorca was a homosexual, and Salvador Dali is called his first "love".
So is genius really just a kind of madness? This has been debated for over two thousand years. And there is undoubtedly a subject for dispute. This is how humanity works - any deviation from the "average" state is evidence of trouble. This comes from ancient times. And genius is an undoubted deviation. So …
"So far, this does not mean anything," says the Kiev psychologist Lyudmila Mikhailovna Zvereva. - These are all conversations at the philistine level, and the man in the street loves to notice the shortcomings of the greats. Are there few psychopaths and alcoholics among ordinary people? They're just out of sight like celebrities. And scientific research gives a slightly different picture, much more complex. The problem of talent, genius in relation to mental illness really exists and was first put on a systemic basis in the 60s by the Italian psychiatrist and criminologist Cesare Lombroso. He also argued that a gifted person is almost necessarily mentally ill, substantiating this idea with large factual material. At one time, while dealing with this problem, I went through a considerable list of geniuses and talents, and not quite everyone had mental, let's say, oddities. Let me give you one example - Goethe. He was a very harmonious, calm person, without any "shifts", but his talent was undeniable."
Despite the fact that the human psyche is an incredibly complex and subtle substance, numerous experiments carried out in different countries gave the same result: half of talented and genius people do not suffer from any mental disorders. But what about the second half? - you ask.
Promotional video:
There is something in common between talented and simply mentally ill people. Namely, both of them non-standard, unusual, in their own way vividly and figuratively perceive a lot of the surrounding reality. They see in her what others do not see. Remember Iosif Utkin: "And the rails are thrown under the tram with the persistence of suicides." How can an ordinary, average person perceive an ordinary street situation like this? No, just talent, or a psychopath. But if this is by definition for psychopaths - they should be unusual, and if you want to perceive reality in a distorted way - then how to explain this deviation from the norm in talented people who are completely safe from a mental point of view? And here comes a paradoxical question: what is this norm? It turned out to be very difficult to establish it. Purely statistical methods are not suitable enoughbecause every person is different. And this individuality makes it difficult to establish a norm: each of it, at least in some way, falls out. This is why it is not so easy to diagnose a mentally ill person. And it is very difficult to understand that genius is not a disease, but the norm of the state of an individual. The norm, due primarily to the characteristics of his genetic apparatus. However, from ancient times to our times, it seems, they have not fully understood this. But if nature did not initially put a tragic ending in the fate of talented and brilliant people, how can we explain that half of them eventually either get mentally ill or drink too much, which also indicates mental ill-being? It turned out that modern science has its own, maybe even a somewhat paradoxical, hypothesis on this question."Talent is ninety percent labor," say the philosophers. This is the essence of the problem. Creativity is genetically inherent in a person, if they are not there, then, even if you give all your best from morning to night, you will not create anything outstanding. However, talent by nature can never show itself if he is lazy. Only work - huge, intense, incessant, allows you to create a work of art, develop a new scientific theory, invent or discover something. But imagine what a huge load gifted people put on their own brain, forcing it to work every second, not only during wakefulness, but also in a dream, subconsciously. Not every brain can withstand … And then, either alcohol, or a mental shift. Creativity is genetically inherent in a person, if they are not there, then, even if you give all your best from morning to night, you will not create anything outstanding. However, talent by nature can never show itself if he is lazy. Only work - huge, intense, incessant, allows you to create a work of art, develop a new scientific theory, invent or discover something. But imagine what a huge load gifted people put on their own brain, forcing it to work every second, not only during wakefulness, but also in a dream, subconsciously. Not every brain can withstand … And then, either alcohol, or a mental shift. Creativity is genetically inherent in a person, if they are not there, then, even if you give all your best from morning to night, you will not create anything outstanding. However, talent by nature can never show itself if he is lazy. Only work - huge, intense, incessant, allows you to create a work of art, develop a new scientific theory, invent or discover something. But imagine what a huge load gifted people put on their own brain, forcing it to work every second, not only during wakefulness, but also in a dream, subconsciously. Not every brain can withstand … And then, either alcohol, or a mental shift.allows you to create a work of art, develop a new scientific theory, invent or discover something. But imagine what a huge load gifted people put on their own brain, forcing it to work every second, not only during wakefulness, but also in a dream, subconsciously. Not every brain can withstand … And then, either alcohol, or a mental shift.allows you to create a work of art, develop a new scientific theory, invent or discover something. But imagine what a huge load gifted people put on their own brain, forcing it to work every second, not only during wakefulness, but also in a dream, subconsciously. Not every brain can withstand … And then, either alcohol, or a mental shift.
So the opposite is true. Psychopathy is not the cause of genius, but its effect. Well, you have to pay for everything. And geniuses pay with health for all the great that they give to grateful humanity.
Kirill IVANOV. Discovery and Hypotheses Journal