CURIOUS -- RESPONSE TO BLUE DANUBLE REFLECTIONS

 CURIOUS – RESPONSE TO BLUE DANUBE REFLECTIONS

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.

© September 3, 2011

I'm curious -- and please don't forward my e-mail address -- but I'm trying to understand why you published this thing on the Danube, I mean, clearly you spent some time composing it.  Care to enlighten me?

DR. FISHER REPLIES:

Thank you for writing.  I loved the experience.  Also, it was our twenty-fifth wedding anniversary.  I love cities, love the history of our Western Civilization, and have spent some time in a good part of the world from London to St. Petersburg, from Helsinki to Johannesburg, form Toronto to Suriname, from New York City to Istanbul, and most parts between.  Then too, I have the luxury of writing about what interests me. 

Cities are the Mecca of culture because chaos and confusion are their boilerplate, not pastoral symmetry and splendor, although I appreciate them as well.  Great art, music, painting, and literature have been more often than not created in the seedy underbelly of cities, and yes, this is also true of great leadership. 

I mention the latter as I'm currently reading Nassir Ghaemi's stimulating "A First-Rate Madness: Uncovering the Links Between Leadership and Mental Illness" (2011).  As much as I love to roam through the great cities of our world, I also love – and have dedicated a good part of my life to this quest – to study how leadership is exercised and discharged. 

Incidentally, my “Blue Danube” piece is a lot about leadership.  Ghaemi’s studies and conclusions are insightful, and consistent with my experience.   Madness is often a part of the composition of people who push the rock of ignorance forward to reveal that which is hidden.


The psychiatrist uses history and the science of current psychiatric studies, from a post-Freudian perspective, to show that such leaders as FDR, JFK, Martin Luther King, Jr., Churchill, Gandhi, Lincoln, as well as Hitler and Stalin among many others suffered various forms of mental illness.  For example, depression and leadership are quite correlatively related providing the best prescription for leadership in crisis. 

Those considered "normal" with a supple intelligence, and whom we often designate as “brilliant,” are out of their depth in crisis, and therefore consistently fail.  I've seen that in my own work, so yes, I will most likely be writing about this book.  The paradox is that we try to bleed the madness out of our fledgling leaders, and therefore unique creativity from their minds.  Why -- because they step to their own drummer.  So, we stumble as we are now stumbling with no clue as to why or what to do about it.  We like people to fit and to behave “normally,” but people who don’t are the ones who consistently get us out of one mess after another.  

I have the luxury of writing about what interests me.  It is a bonus if it has any interests to you, but that is not my major objective for doing so.  I hope this helps.

Be always well,

Jim