Sounds from the Bell Jar: Ten Psychotic Authors

This ground-breaking work is a unique collaboration between an Oxford psychologist and two literary critics. It explores the lives and works of ten authors, among them Virginia Woolf and Sylvia Plath, who embody both serious mental illness and great originality of thought. Drawing upon personal diaries, historical archives, clinical records and literary productions, the book examines modes of thinking, such as divergent thought, over-inclusiveness, and autism, which psychosis and creativity might have in common.

Using genetics, experimental abnormal and clinical psychology, personality research, descriptive psychiatry, and literary analysis, Claridge, Pryor, and Watkins present the revolutionary idea that normality and psychosis are continuous with each other. Healthy varieties and styles of thought and perception substantially overlap with the inclination to psychotic breakdown, and indeed might at times be identical.

Psychologists, psychiatrists, counselors, therapists, and general readers will gain a deeper understanding of the relationship between madness and creativity from this book.