Stevan M. Weine’s Work in the News:
Book Q&A with Deborah Kalb
Q: What inspired you to write Best Minds, and how would you describe your relationship with the late poet Allen Ginsberg?
A: I have long been fascinated by how people make meaning and art from mental suffering. When I first read “Howl” and “Kaddish” as a teenager, I was immediately taken by Ginsberg, who was fully engaged in this kind of work.
I read everything I could and learned a little more about his mother, Naomi, who was diagnosed with schizophrenia and spent many years in psychiatric hospitals. I learned that Ginsberg himself was involuntarily hospitalized for eight months in his early 20s not long after he had visions of God inspired by William Blake.
Review from New York Journal of Books
Weine has woven together a fascinating portrait of genius and madness.
In Best Minds, Weine explores the psychological processes that made Ginsberg a poet and produced his revolutionary poetry. An admirer of Ginsberg’s poetry and a sympathetic observer of his character, Weine befriended the poet in 1986 and spent the next 35 years piecing together the story of Ginsberg’s artistic journey. Ginsberg trusted Weine, encouraged his project, and gave him access to his private journals and medical records, as well as Naomi’s medical records. From this vast trove of information, and using his skills as a trained psychiatrist, Weine has woven together a fascinating portrait of genius and madness.
Tony Trigilio in conversation with Stevan M. Weine
TT: Thanks for your terrific book. Your expertise in the history and practice of psychiatry deepens our understanding of Allen Ginsberg’s poems and his creative process. Contemporary literary studies is by necessity an interdisciplinary endeavor. But the combination of your psychiatric background and your attentiveness to his poems takes interdisciplinarity to a whole new level.
The Page 99 Test
Most of Best Minds’ page 99 is a 1953 photograph of Ginsberg’s lifelong friend Carl Solomon smiling and sitting cross legged on a bed, with two short paragraphs above which read:
When in 1986 I told Allen his diagnosis at PI was “pseudoneurotic-type schizophrenia,” I was surprised to hear he thought the diagnosis was accurate and to his liking. Allen said the constructs of pan-neurosis, pan-anxiety, and pan-sexuality were fairly apt descriptions of his situation, although he said he was not having much sex in those days. He really liked the idea that psychosis is near and accessible, which, notably, he saw as a good thing.
Inspired by madness? Beat, rock and the unstable mind (Simon Warner interviews Stevan Weine)
Simon: Madness is a somewhat loaded and potentially dangerous word in the hands of the amateur analyst, Stevan. What in a succinct sense is madness? Does it have a use, a place, in creativity in the broader arts?
Stevan: Madness is often equated with insanity or mental illness. But I see it as a much broader category which includes a wide range of phenomena including mental illness, but many other experiences such as ecstasy, visions, inspiration, liberation, deviancy, and more. The literary scholar W.J.T. Mitchell has even spoken of the need for a ‘Cultural and Symbolic Atlas of Madness’ akin to psychiatry’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual.
Interview with Poetry Society of America
How did Best Minds: How Allen Ginsberg Made Revolutionary Poetry from Madness come about?
In 1986, I was a 24-year-old Columbia medical student and aspiring writer when I wrote a letter to Allen, cold, asking him how he reconciled literary and psychiatric perspectives on his experiences and poetry concerning madness. A few days later, I was thrilled when he left a friendly message on my answering machine. We met shortly after, and Allen asked if I was writing a book on him and my makeshift answer was “Umm, yes.” Over subsequent years he encouraged me to pursue the project, gave me access to his archives, his psychiatric records, and the psychiatric records of his mother.
I knew this was a remarkable opportunity to learn more about how life and art interacted with Allen. I did not know it would take me so long to complete this book. Yet, Allen’s poems and journey enriched my life and I kept making new discoveries, about him, and me as a reader, which made the text much stronger.
Interview with Mind Matters (Illinois Psychiatric Society)
Why do you think Ginsberg took an interest in you and your work?
Ginsberg, like the other Beats, made literary myths out of their lives. This made for brilliant art, but at a personal level, it did not resolve questions or the emotional pain Ginsberg experienced, especially in relation to his mother Naomi. I believe he saw me as someone who could properly unravel the story for him – a story which encompassed both psychiatry and poetry.
What in Best Minds will interest psychiatrists and other mental health professionals?
This is a leap through time into American psychiatry in the late 1940s, with different approaches to diagnosis, treatment, and psychotherapy. It is extraordinary to read and learn from the progress notes about Ginsberg’s psychotherapy at a key moment in his life and development as a poet. We see how Ginsberg struggled and how his therapists helped him.
