My Master and a Subject

For my Master's at Purdue, my thesis which I rather hastily scrambled together (why it was hastily scrambled together is a different story), was titled “The Madman and the Mystic”. That I ended up doing this study was almost an “accident” and got done “by accident”. My initial idea was to explore creativity and genius. Creativity gets the short end of the stick within sociology (as does genius) and it's not too hard to uncover the reasons, although sociology does remain interested in exemplary leaders and social movement pioneers and in fact leaders of all sorts – even the demagogues, and it has a particular penchant for barmy cult leaders who have engaged in bloody and grisly acts of mayhem and murder (Charles Manson is one of the favourites) – not to mention tyrannical dictators, the more brutal, the better. ....I'm being a tad facetious here.

Creativity though, (and I remember Sulloway did do some work on creativity), and creative geniuses by extension do get sidelined though within sociology. Nothing funny or untrue about this. Creativity is a process which requires solitude and a great degree of "inwardness" and introspection, and probably comes across as too individualistic and too personal and too "elitist" a phenomenon to garner much serious interest, and so maybe that's the reason that sociology neglects it or lets "others" deal with the same. And so that was one of my reasons – to look into creativity because I didn't see why the creative geniuses should get left out of sociology. Of course then the question was creativity, creative genius and what?
The “natural” thing for me was to put in some aspect of “barminess” into the picture.

Why it “was” natural is rather interesting enough, and so I'll make a little observation. The choice of the 13 students who did go on to finish their Master's project would've been an interesting aspect to study in and of itself. Very many of us ended up choosing something deeply (almost embarassingly) personal and most of the students who did a qualitative study did something that they weren't "just" interested in but something that related to a very personal part of their Selves. (My original topic which I let go after pounding it out for a month and three days was of even more of a personal nature. I gave up on it because I was much too attached to the topic and knew that there was no hope of doing something that was balanced and sensible).

One of my friends did her Master's study on children of alcoholic parents; another friend did a study on the nature of memory in relation to participating in a social movement. I ended up studying schizophrenics and spiritual leaders (of course). I've noticed a similar trend in succeeding batches. There is one student who is doing a study on “Fat people”; another student finished dong a Master's thesis on the socialization of African-Americans students by their college student bodies; another very nice and interesting friend did a study on homosexuality among male Polish immigrants; I know of one annoying student who is doing a study on GLBT gatherings; yet another very glamorous and physically stunning British student did a study on (believe it or not) fashion parades in Paris. Finally, to end off with one last example - I also know of a very good friend who is studying violence against women during ethnic riots and the portrayal of violence in Indian literature.

Maybe my sample size is rather biased – for I seem to remember those studies where the personal aspect was so obvious that maybe it's just a matter of selective memory. Yet, whatever it is, in a way I think there are many students working within the social sciences who attempt to “objectively” and academically look at a problem, which is/was a part of themselves in a very obvious way. It's like studying rape if one has been raped or studying violence during war while one has been in the midst of it, or studying boot camps after one has been through some regimented training in some totalitarian institution or studying stigma in relation to some physical characteristic or handicap.....the list is endless.

In some ways - I'm wont to think – at least for some students, the academic poking and prodding at a personal issue helps them to create some emotional distance between themselves and the personal issue or gets them to thinking about something intellectually without emotion and sometimes even helps them to deal with/manage whatever that personal bag contains. Sometimes it helps one to understand the “thing”/ “aspect”/ “process” from different angles and in hopefully a more holistic way. For yet others it might be the knowledge that there are “others” out there like me (maybe there is a sense of companionship).

For yet others I think, studying sociology is simply a waste of time. I cannot and never will be able to see the sociological point of anyone studying fashion parades. But that’s an easy one. Not many would. What about studying fat admirers? Now what’s this all about? It’s studying men who find obese women physically attractive. Hmm. Of course you do bring in a fair bit of gender theory into it, and “ta-da”. How bizarre can things be!

For some students the same feature of the personal and the academic follow through during their Ph.D years as well. For some it shifts completely. For others there's somewhat of a reframing/restructuring/reconstructing if not a complete overhaul. Yet others find/discover other stuff that seem interesting, and others just get bored at the thought of dwelling on the same topic for yet another three straight years and just hurry out (or in) to find something else.

To return to the point regarding my Master's. During the first month, I was getting acquainted with the literature on creativity, and so I was quite sure that there was plenty of space for me to do “something” on creativity and mental health. I remember the first summer I went back home and was talking with a friend up on the terrace, and was rambling about what I was planning to do. My friend's reply was “creativity is linked to being slightly off-kilter, of course...” I nodded and then the conversation went on to other things. I found out later that there were quite a number of interesting studies and some extreme (as is usual) studies which looked into creativity and mental health – especially creativity and what is known as bi-polar disorder/manic-depression.

Some authors loudly attacked others who did not see a link. Other authors loudly protested against any connection between being bi-polar and creativity. One author claimed that the idea that there could be any connection between a deadly disease and creativity was outrageous since the two conditions were absolutely opposed to one another (Albert Rothenberg). One clinical psychologist, who in recent years, explicitly drew a connection between the two, is the very famous (and sort of infamous) Kay Redfield Jamison. She cooked up a veritable storm in the 80s with her theory that bi-polars were more creative than the “normals” (and guess what? Yes of course. She had been diagnosed with bi-polar disorder). One of her books Touched by Fire has been cited till kingdom come – and quite frankly I wouldn't mind not hearing her name again. Very many others have critiqued her book till kingdom come saying the usual stuff: that she used a biased sample, that she didn't really have much evidence to carry her argument, that she was completely value-laden in the discussion of her results, and the unusual but not the unexpected: that she was a monster for now putting pressure on the poor folk who were bi-polar by making them feel that they were obliged to be creative! In any case what Jamison said wasn't entirely novel. Some folks had dabbled with similar perspectives – but Kay Redfield Jamison is the one who “made it”.

One study (published in 1992 in the American Journal of Psychotherapy) by Arnold Ludwig, I greatly enjoyed reading (and still remember!): he demonstrated and quite satisfactorily (I thought) that an overwhelming number of people who were bi-polar were to be found within the spaces of the creative arts and related fields where the said individuals had a certain (and greater than usual) degree of freedom in when and how and where and why they worked. Thus, it wasn't so much that creative people were bi-polar or that bi-polar people were creative but that “simply speaking” bi-polars were somehow aware that they weren't fit to work in routine 9-5 jobs, and so found jobs where they could choose their own working hours; or, to see it in funny terms – the bi-polars who did end up surviving and made it in the “real” world made sure that they didn't have 9-5 routine jobs within a tiny cubicle. Soon enough (so many years ago!) I was reading a tidy pile of books by some known and some middling but no-less interesting authors – Laing, and Sasz, Jung and Maslow, Huxley and Timothy Leary, William James,and Foucault, Walsh, Daniel Nettle, Hershman and Lieb, some Benedict and Bourginon, and a bit of Howard Gardner and others. I enjoyed reading most of the literature, and raced through entire books, some of which were outrageously funny (and most of them were actually not strictly sociological textbooks, although they did belong to the broad category of social science) even the halfway medical ones, and plodded through some articles as well. By and by, as enthralled as I was by the process of creativity – and as full as my head already had been with all the information and “knowledge” regarding at least two broad categories of mental illnesses – schizophrenia and bi-polar disorder, I hit upon a couple of theses of my own.

1. It seemed that the writers and artists and composers who had been “barmy” were better able to deal with their condition/manage their condition for a certain period of time at any rate (till they dropped dead or walked out of the game of life on their own terms) in comparison to the scientists who had been afflicted by some strains of “barminess”. Yet the creative artists didn't do as well as the spiritual prophets.

2. The spiritual prophets seemed the ones who had been able to deal with their mental states with an unbelievable degree of grace, self-confidence, an absolutely shining "arrogance", and composure (among other things).

3. The spiritual prophets manifested symptoms that were alarmingly close to some of the most marked characteristics of schizophrenia, while the creative artists definitely sounded more manic-depressive than schizophrenic, while the scientists were difficult to peg (small sample size and well-documented instances were fewer for this category) – but seemed, tentatively speaking to display more schizophrenic traits than manic depressive traits.

4. Spiritual prophets wrote the least about their mental journeys (although they wrote volumes on their spiritual philosophy), scientists came a very close second, writers did engage in writing a fair bit, as did musical artists (in the form of letters and memoirs and personal essays); but the maximum number of memoirs/full-fledged books were written by the mad – both, schizophrenics and manic-depressives. The last category had produced an outstanding and bewildering collection of memoirs – some of them notable for no other reason other than the fact that the individual had gone barmy – that was his/her claim to fame; I have no idea “how well” such books did in the regular market.

I realised quickly that my first three theses although they made a great deal of intuitive sense (I still stand by my original hunch that I had for points 1, 2, and 3) – were impossible to study really. Maybe it's not impossible – but I didn't find any ways of really formulating a research study and getting it done. Afterall I couldn't talk with dead people, and the live ones were no good to me. Points 3 and 4 stuck to my head though, and the Masters got done in the end because I was taking a qualitative course that same semester, and I wrote a research paper using bits and pieces of ideas 3 and 4.

In retrospect I realise that I had great fun while writing up my Master's. There was also a tongue-in-the-cheek aspect about the whole study. One of the concluding paragraphs in my completed thesis reads,
"....what can be undeniably accepted is that prophets, saints and true charismatic, spiritual leaders (as defined in the literature review) are definitely creative in that they bring in new ways of understanding life. Also it can be accepted that they are hardly “dysfunctional” or “pathological” – insofar as they can negotiate between their inner insights and external reality. In this they do display the element of “creative self-awareness” which can be differentiated from the schizophrenic’s heightened sensitivity, hyper-reflexivity and keen awareness in that for the mystic these attributes are fully realized and fully manifest; the mystic is able to wield these and employ these in a manner which results in his full potential being realized within different spaces of social reality – even if these "spaces" relate to the philosophical, religious and cosmic dimension....the schizophrenic and the mystic thus while they have similar experiences and even insights, they have radically different means of dealing with the aberrant, the unusual, and the unlikely...."

I should most likely apologise for the above post. I had really wanted it to be more informative and now I realise that I've hardly made it clear as to what schizophrenia is all about or how it has been classified or how I made connections between charismatic spiritual leaders/mystics and schizophrenics or how the study actually got done. Some may wonder about my presumptuousness, my level and degree of absolute self-centredness or even wonder why I bothered doing the study in the first place. Yet others may wonder why I bothered talking about my Master's.

But it's not so much about being presumptuous or being self-obsessed or maybe it is. As I finally get around to going out and collecting my data for my Ph.D I was in the mood to ruminate on some aspects about my Master's and how I zoned in on a subject of my choice. And funnily enough, as I'm reluctantly nearing the end of a beautiful book by Amartya Sen, I'm reminded too of the number of ways that our multiple identities are not just formed but made manifest. For many students and researchers even the specific choice of subject/topic of research is an expression of their "identity" (for some it may be an entirely sub-conscious process, although I doubt it) and for others it's absolutely open and self-claimed (feminist scholars, holocaust/genocide scholars are some examples that immediately come to mind) - and which identity? Most likely the one that is the most salient. (I'm reminded of the game with which I started off my social psychology class a year ago: a game in which the students write 20 points to the question "Who am I?") Given the existence of multiple identities - I somehow feel that there is one identity (at least for some people) which emerges as the "primary identity". Sometimes there is a problem with that - but it really depends on what that primary identity is. Depending on what that primary identity is, I would argue that having a primary identity or a single identity may not be a problem.

I think I'll end this post for now. Some other day I'll write more on identity and identity salience, on choosing of research topics and what choices go out of the window and maybe I'll write something about choices as well.

P.S: I made an egregious mistake in not mentioning three of my professors without whom I could not have finished my Masters. My advisor Professor Eugene C. Jackson, who supported me and allowed me to go around hunting, exploring, and experimenting - and put up with my barminess; Professor Harry Potter who never seemed "too busy" for some long, rambling, and interesting conversations, and Professor Jack Spencer who had and has given me chances when I didn't think I deserved them.
21st November 2008