Excerpt of A Beautiful Mind by Sylvia Nasar
(Page 6 of 8)
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More than any symptom, the defining characteristic of the illness is the
profound feeling of incomprehensibility and inaccessibility that sufferers
provoke in other people. Psychiatrists describe the person's sense of being
separated by a "gulf which defies description" from individuals who
seem "totally strange, puzzling, inconceivable, uncanny and incapable of
empathy, even to the point of being sinister and frightening." For Nash,
the onset of the illness dramatically intensified a pre-existing feeling, on the
part of many who knew him, that he was essentially disconnected from them and
deeply unknowable. As Storr writes:
However melancholy a depressive may be, the observer generally feels there is
some possibility of emotional contact. The schizoid person, on the other hand,
appears withdrawn and inaccessible. His remoteness from human contact makes
his state of mind less humanly comprehensible, since his feelings are not
communicated. If such a person becomes psychotic (schizophrenic) this lack of
connection with people and the external world becomes more obvious; with the
result that the sufferer's behavior and utterances appear inconsequential and
unpredictable.
Schizophrenia contradicts popular but incorrect views of madness as
consisting solely of wild gyrations of mood, or fevered delirium. Someone with
schizophrenia is not permanently disoriented or confused, for example, the way
that an individual with a brain injury or Alzheimer's might be. He may have,
indeed usually does have, a firm grip on certain aspects of present reality.
While he was ill, Nash traveled all over Europe and America, got legal help, and
learned to write sophisticated computer programs. Schizophrenia is also distinct
from manic depressive illness (currently known as bipolar disorder), the illness
with which it has most often been confounded in the past.
If anything, schizophrenia can be a ratiocinating illness, particularly in
its early phases. From the turn of the century, the great students of
schizophrenia noted that its sufferers included people with fine minds and that
the delusions which often, though not always, come with the disorder involve
subtle, sophisticated, complex flights of thought. Emil Kraepelin, who defined
the disorder for the first time in 1896, described "dementia praecox,"
as he called the illness, not as the shattering of reason but as causing
"predominant damage to the emotional life and the will." Louis A,
Sass, a psychologist at Rutgers University, calls it "not an escape from
reason but an exacerbation of that thoroughgoing illness Dostoevsky
imagined...at least in some of its forms...a heightening rather than a dimming
of conscious awareness, and an alienation not from reason but from emotion,
instinct and the will."
Nash's mood in the early days of his illness can be described, not as manic
or melancholic, but rather as one of heightened awareness, insomniac wakefulness
and watchfulness. He began to believe that a great many things that he saw -- a
telephone number, a red necktie, a dog trotting along the sidewalk, a Hebrew
letter, a birthplace, a sentence in The New York Times -- had a hidden
significance, apparent only to him. He found such signs increasingly compelling,
so much so that they drove from his consciousness his usual concerns and
preoccupations. At the same time, he believed he was on the brink of cosmic
insights. He claimed he had found a solution to the greatest unsolved problem in
pure mathematics, the so-called Riemann Hypothesis. Later he said he was engaged
in an effort to "rewrite the foundations of quantum physics." Still
later, he claimed, in a torrent of letters to former colleagues, to have
discovered vast conspiracies and the secret meaning of numbers and biblical
texts. In a letter to the algebraist Emil Artin, whom he addressed as "a
great necromancer and numerologist," Nash wrote:
I have been considering Algerbiac [sic] questions and have noticed some
interesting things that might also interest you...I, a while ago, was seized
with the concept that numerological calculations dependent on the decimal
system might not be sufficiently intrinsic also that language and alphabet
structure might contain ancient cultural stereotypes interfering with clear
understands [sic] or unbiased thinking....I quickly wrote down a new sequence
of symbols....These were associated with (in fact natural, but perhaps not
computationally ideal but suited for mystical rituals, incantations and such)
system for representing the integers via symbols, based on the products of
successive primes.
A predisposition to schizophrenia was probably integral to Nash's exotic
style of thought as a mathematician, but the full-blown disease devastated his
ability to do creative work. His once-illuminating visions became increasingly
obscure, self-contradictory, and full of purely private meanings, accessible
only to himself. His longstanding conviction that the universe was rational
evolved into a caricature of itself, turning into an unshakable belief that
everything had meaning, everything had a reason, nothing was random or
coincidental. For much of the time, his grandiose delusions insulated him from
the painful reality of all that he had lost. But then would come terrible
flashes of awareness. He complained bitterly from time to time of his inability
to concentrate and to remember mathematics, which he attributed to shock
treatments. He sometimes told others that his enforced idleness made him feel
ashamed of himself, worthless. More often, he expressed his suffering
wordlessly. On one occasion, sometime during the 1970s, he was sitting at a
table in the dining hall at the Institute for Advanced Study -- the scholarly
haven where he had once discussed his ideas with the likes of Einstein, von
Neumann, and Robert Oppenheimer -- alone as usual. That morning, an institute
staff member recalled, Nash got up, walked over to a wall, and stood there for
many minutes, banging his head against the wall, slowly, over and over, eyes
tightly shut, fists clenched, his face contorted with anguish.
Copyright © 1998 by Sylvia Nasar.
