Michael Fitzgerald acknowledges early in his intriguing book the scale of the task he has undertaken. In autism and Asperger syndrome, outstanding ingenuity is not unrecognised, but is most typically associated with mathematics, physics and engineering. Yet Fitzgerald is mounting a novel argument that artistic creativity is in many instances throughout history profoundly linked with these psychiatric syndromes.
The book is assembled in short chapters containing biographical sketches of outstanding writers, philosophers, musicians and painters, including George Orwell, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Andy Warhol, among many others.
The question which is raised is whether the multiplicity of odd personality traits and behaviours are indicators of Asperger syndrome. For example, there are Herman Melville's eccentric breakfast habits – he badgered cooks at home about the strength of his coffee and the consistency of his oatmeal – and the dislike of physical contact by Simone Weil (a French philosopher) who hated being kissed even by her parents. Simone refused to eat from a spoon from an extremely early age and became so thin that doctors gave her up for lost; eventually she had to be fed mush from bottles into which increasingly large holes were pierced.
One central difficulty in linking famous or outstanding achievement with some underlying psychological characteristic or dysfunction is whether the stresses of attainment in itself could cause psychological problems or whether, as is often claimed, it is the other way around. Correlation is not the same as causality, and the connection between two variables could easily be reversed in terms of which is driving what.
Michael Fitzgerald, Henry Marsh Professor of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry at Trinity College Dublin, makes a genuine attempt to tackle this difficulty from a developmental perspective, which is often lacking in this kind of project. He demonstrates in detail how the clues to Asperger syndrome were present early in the lives of this collection of geniuses. Of course the problem with this biographical approach is that it lacks the rigour of a prospective research trial. What we know of our own childhood and that of others is widely open to retrospective recollection bias, particularly when the past lives of the famous are being picked apart.
Despite these inevitable pedantic objections, the book will leave readers much better informed both about Asperger syndrome and artistic creativity, but the recurrent sense of tragedy in these lives raises an even deeper question as to why suffering and struggle – either with self or others – seems to characterise the reach for greatness. It is almost as if genius is not something that naturally arises out of normal humanity but despite it.
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