A revelatory look at how poet Allen Ginsberg transformed
experiences of mental illness and madness into some of the most
powerful and widely read poems of the twentieth century. Allen
Ginsberg’s 1956 poem “Howl” opens with one of the most
resonant phrases in modern poetry: “I saw the best minds of my
generation destroyed by madness.” Thirty years later, Ginsberg
entrusted a Columbia University medical student with materials not
shared with anyone else, including psychiatric records that
documented how he and his mother, Naomi Ginsberg, struggled with
mental illness. In Best Minds, psychiatrist, researcher, and
scholar Stevan M. Weine, M.D., who was that medical student,
examines how Allen Ginsberg took his visions and psychiatric
hospitalization, his mother’s devastating illness, confinement,
and lobotomy, and the social upheavals of the postwar world and
imaginatively transformed them. Though madness is often linked with
hardship and suffering, Ginsberg’s showed how it could also lead
to profound and redemptive aesthetic, spiritual, and social
changes. Through his revolutionary poetry and social advocacy,
Ginsberg dedicated himself to leading others toward new ways of
being human and easing pain. Throughout his celebrated career
Ginsberg made us feel as though we knew everything there was to
know about him. However, much has been left out about his
experiences growing up with a mentally ill mother, his visions, and
his psychiatric hospitalization. In Best Minds, with a forty-year
career studying and addressing trauma, Weine provides a
groundbreaking exploration of the poet and his creative process
especially in relation to madness. Best Minds examines the complex
relationships between mental illness, psychiatry, trauma, poetry,
and prophecy—using the access Ginsberg generously shared to offer
new, lively, and indispensable insights into an American icon.
Weine also provides new understandings of the paternalism,
treatment failures, ethical lapses, and limitations of American
psychiatry in the 1940s and 1950s. In light of these new
discoveries, the challenges Ginsberg faced appear starker and his
achievements, both as a poet and an advocate, even more remarkable.
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