3 days ago
Does Lady Macbeth Have Brain Cancer? A Psychiatrist Decodes the Mental Health of Writers and Their Characters
Literature is filled with characters suffering from mental health issues… and with authors who weren't necessarily much better off. In a fascinating book, a psychiatrist and a journalist attempt to unravel the mysteries of these minds.
Does Lady Macbeth suffer from a brain disorder? Is Don Quixote delusional? Did Montaigne experience post-traumatic stress disorder? Did Baudelaire really have 'spleen'? And we —who delight in delving into the flaws and wanderings of great authors and their characters — might we all be a bit depressed, perverse, voyeuristic or addicted? It certainly seems that way: psychic suffering, often taboo in real life, 'erupts from all sides in literary masterpieces,' where it is not only 'tolerated' but 'magnified, sublimated,' notes psychiatrist Patrick Lemoine.
After examining The Psychological Health of Those Who Made the World in his 2019 book, he now joins journalist Sophie Viguier-Vinson in exploring The Psychological Health of Writers and Their Characters. Together, they analyze some of literature's most beautiful pages to unearth madness.
Are geniuses mad? Probably a little — otherwise, their works might be more reasonable — and probably far less beautiful.
'Literature reflects the world's complexity' and how each era and society perceives it. 'But it also reveals… the inner self and its fractures… Many writers were at the forefront of modern psychiatry,' the authors emphasize. Some because they could describe the depths of the human soul with astonishing precision; others because they were fascinated by the emerging science of mental illness; and some because they personally lived through the very torments they described.
Each gets a diagnosis and prescription
Just as a doctor questions a patient to understand their suffering, the authors delve into the works of Charles Baudelaire, Franz Kafka, Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Stefan Zweig, Toni Morrison and others to find signs of mental illness. For each, the psychiatrist offers a diagnosis and a prescription — an original way to reread works everyone claims to know by heart… and discover surprising insights.
In some cases, the ailment is clear. Unsurprisingly, the book opens with French poet Baudelaire. Drug-addicted, syphilitic, the author of Les Fleurs du mal (The Flowers of Evil) lays bare his distress, starting with the spleen born of the 'low heavy sky [which] weighs like a lid.' Did the brilliant poet suffer from seasonal depression? From a neurological complication from syphilis, which a simple course of antibiotics could have spared him if only antibiotics had existed in his day? Or perhaps from bipolar disorder, explaining his creative bursts, disdain for norms, and reckless spending?
As for Lady Macbeth — William Shakespeare's guilt-consumed heroine who becomes obsessive and sleepwalks — the diagnosis is more surprising: 'I think Lady Macbeth suffers from RBD,' or REM sleep behavior disorder, 'very often a warning sign of a serious neurological disease such as brain cancer, Parkinson's, Alzheimer's, etc.' The prescription? Unfortunately, not much: perhaps an MRI to detect a possible early-stage neurological disorder, and melatonin to help with sleep disturbances.
Gregor Samsa, the young man who turns into a cockroach in Kafka's Metamorphosis, could have been treated. He clearly suffers from early-stage schizophrenia, observing with horror his body's transformation and falling into neglect while his family gradually gives up on him.
Madness or rebellion?
In other cases, the diagnosis is murkier, and the line between illness and rebellion against societal norms becomes blurred. Take Don Quixote: He doesn't seem to be lying, as a liar knows what he's doing. A mythomaniac? Maybe, but that's tricky to treat. There's no medication, and you shouldn't confront the mythomaniac with the truth (lest they mentally collapse), nor should you encourage the delusion. So let's keep believing that the man of La Mancha is a gentle dreamer, who harms only windmills and scientific rationality.
The Marquise de Merteuil in Choderlos de Laclos's Dangerous Liaisons is probably a narcissistic pervert 'and the term sadomasochism must be mentioned'; but she is also (above all?) a woman rebelling against male dominance, even if it means leaving victims in her wake.
Elsewhere, the psychiatrist has fun, as literature reflects our own inner flaws. Take French playwright Molière's Monsieur Jourdain: dreamy, naïve, a bit foolish but not mentally ill. Unless Alzheimer's is 'lurking,' which would explain a lot...
Or the clients in Émile Zola's Au Bonheur des Dames (The Ladies' Paradise), caught in a shopping frenzy (with one even resorting to theft), which we can't entirely mock — especially during sale season.
With Michel de Montaigne, it was a fall from a horse, recounted in Essays, that triggered a 'vertigo of death.' Yet after discussing PTSD, which traps the sufferer in a loop of traumatic reliving, the psychiatrist concludes Montaigne likely had sound mental health. He may have experienced 'a certain form of traumatic dissociation' — but recovered and transformed it into the basis of his introspective philosophy.
Lemoine is less sure, however, about Blaise Pascal's mental integrity. The mathematician became a philosopher after a serious carriage accident in which he almost fell off the Neuilly bridge. Could his Pensées (Thoughts) have been erased with a simple stroke of the pen by a psychiatrist prescribing EMDR sessions?
Lifting us out of our inner turmoil
'The mark of literary genius is the ability to convey a clinical truth with extreme accuracy and precision, as if it had been lived, even by those who may never have experienced it,' Lemoine writes.
Zola describes delirium tremens in L'Assommoir, while Zweig and Fyodor Dostoevsky masterfully depict gambling addiction. Guy de Maupassant and Edgar Allan Poe likewise brilliantly portray madness — Le Horla's psychosis and The Black Cat's alcoholic downfall — probably drawing from their own hallucinatory experiences.
'Of course, reading doesn't cure... but it can help us project ourselves beyond the torment,' Lemoine and Viguier-Vinson conclude. 'Because an author has turned suffering into something more: a moment of humanity and beauty to be shared.'
Literature also gives us hope, the psychiatrist adds, when its characters 'strangely adapt to their quirks, flaws and misadventures… These are all valuable lessons about the strengths of the psyche that give us hope and set us on our path.'
According to the World Health Organization, mental illness affects one in five people. That does not include the everyday disappointments that depress, sadden, exhaust or anger us. And literature, in all this? It's here to make us 'a little freer, perhaps'…
