Artistic
Expression with Dementia. |
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By
Kate Scannell, MD
Finally,
the words just disappear. Alzheimer's erases them from the brain so
completely that the names of mundane objects like "pen" or
"watch" cannot be spoken. As his illness began and progressed,
before diagnosis, Dr Shearn turned more and more to painting. A
burnished sunset stretched across a sleepy, rugged landscape. A
glossy eye unflinchingly stares back. Sixteen hands--opened,
emptied, suspended in motion. The primordial
beginning of life (cover).
He speaks
in tones of blues and greens and pinks and reds, and he transcribes
the internal images with brushstrokes across canvas. He reaches through
the fog of his dementia, where the glorious words he had once mastered
are obscured, and he connects still--in this inventive way, through
this new medium. He continues to do what he has always done as a physician
and researcher, venturing beyond the conventional limits of language
and medicine to discover and communicate new constructs.
It would
be preposterous to pretend knowledge of Dr Shearn's creative intention
or process, impossible to propose an understanding of his art derived
from medical theories of disease. Still, much has been written about
the relationship between neurocognitive states and artistic expression,
and the urge to speculate on that relationship arises here too. After
all, we physicians are consummate diagnosticians who daily seek scientific
explanations for our patients' subjective complaints, and we constantly
filter those complaints through a focus on pathology. We believe that
we can--and even should--discriminate the voice of mind from the voice
of body when our patients speak about suffering and distress.
We read
medical literature that associates creativity with prefrontal dementias,
analyzes Willem deKooning's abstract expressions through the influence
of his Alzheimer's dementia, or interprets Ernst Josephson's paintings
through his schizophrenia. The new genetics fascinate us and lure us
into believing that heredochemical factors might explain our personalities,
proclivities, and aesthetics. As physicians, we uniquely wander and
wonder about the mysterious nexus between mind and body, health and
disease, living and dying.
And still,
with every available diagnostic tool in hand, we cannot locate human
creativity. We cannot tell where it resides in our system of propositions
for health and disease, our medical notions about personhood and agency.
Looking carefully and analytically at artwork created by people in demented
or psychotic "states" does not reveal the vast, inscrutable
internal worlds from which this creativity originates.
No matter
how hard we have examined the human brain--rummaging through thick clumps
of tangled neurons or searching under the dark crusts of a thousand
cortical scars--we do not know how people create and why they must.
Creativity flows from a source of their being that artfully defies our
medical investigation and scientific discourse. Creativity humbles us
in our quest to become masters of the psyche and body, and it "re-minds"
us of our astounding incapacity to understand the most rudimentary element
of our patients' lives: their exquisite, fundamental aliveness.
I suspect
that Dr Shearn was drawn toward the mystery. I imagine that he ventured
purposefully into it, with whatever tools he possessed, to create something
new--much as he had always done--in his unique fashion and radical,
enduring aliveness.
