Touched with Fire: Manic-Depressive Illness and the Artistic Temperament (Jamison)

Touched With Fire: Manic-Depressive Illness and the Artistic Temperament is a 1993 nonfiction book written by Kay Redfield Jamison, an American clinical psychologist and the Dalio Family Professor in Mood Disorders and director of the Mood Disorders Center at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine (Baltimore, Maryland, United States). Touched With Fire examines the relationship between mood disorders and artistic creativity, and integrates information drawn from artists’ and writers’ descriptions of their creative process and mood states, biographical and autobiographical information, and scientific information about mental illness.

Jamison’s point of departure is the relationship often stated in popular culture, sometimes by creative artists themselves (such as the poet Lord Byron), and in ancient myths and classical literature that creative people are all “touched” or crazy ...