Divine Madness: Ten Stories of Creative Struggle - Hardcover

..".fascinating and intimate portraits." (Glasgow Evening Times, February 2006) "The Last Victim is an engrossing and gut-wrenching read!" --Kirkus Reviews "On Being a Therapist is one of those rare and exciting books that reaches deep into the heart of a profession and discloses not only its day-to-day workings but also the very personal satisfaction, problems, doubts, and joys its practitioners experience." --Booklist "In Travel That Can Change Your Life Kottler . . . believes that the urge to travel is activated by more than the need to take a break or see new sights, that is actually an unconscious desire to change something significant about ourselves. Kottler's book builds convincingly on this intriguing theory. He offers suggestions for planning a journey that can lead to personal transformation." --Chicago Tribune It's commonplace to observe that the line between genius and mental illness is razor thin, and critics point to a long list of writers, artists and musicians--from William Blake to Sylvia Plath--as illustrations. Kottler, a professor of counseling at California State University, Fullerton, superficially probes the relationship between madness and creativity through 10 case studies of artists who are as famous for their mental instability as their work: Sylvia Plath, Judy Garland, Mark Rothko, Ernest Hemingway, Virginia Woolf, Charles Mingus, Vaslav Nijinsky, Marilyn Monroe, Lenny Bruce and Brian Wilson. An excellent storyteller, he uses these case studies to illustrate the loneliness, sensitivity and intensity that characterized the lives of these artists and the extent to which their personal traumas and psychological instability blossomed into creative genius. For example, he tells how Plath's contentious relationship with her mother and her tortured marriage to Ted Hughes drove her into depression and eventually suicide but also fueled her poetic genius. But the stories of these artists are already very well known, and Kottler offers no genuinely new insights. Moreover, he resorts to sophomoric and cliched notions--"we are all a little crazy, some more than others," "creativity is thinking outside the box"--to explain the relationship between madness and creativity. (Jan.) (Publishers Weekly, November 14, 2005)

This work offers dramatic stories of famous artists who suffered emotional turmoil in their quest for success and survival. In this engaging story of the emotional origins of creativity, Jeffrey Kottler writes about the dramatic and tragic lives of such genius artists as Judy Garland, Sylvia Plath, Ernest Hemingway, Virginia Woolf, Marilyn Monroe, Brian Wilson, Lenny Bruce, Mark Rothko, and others. In each case, he writes a fascinating personal story that also analyzes how each of these exceptional women and men struggled to overcome their emotional hardships, and how their psychological issues impacted their lives and work, as well as their great productivity and success. Jeffrey Kottler, PhD (Fullerton, CA), is Professor and Chairman of the Department of Counseling at California State University, Fullerton, and author or coauthor of 60 books, including the "New York Times" bestseller "The Last Victim" (0-446-52340-2) with Jason Moss.