{"id":63952,"date":"2017-03-06T17:15:40","date_gmt":"2017-03-06T23:15:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/?p=63952"},"modified":"2017-03-06T09:24:10","modified_gmt":"2017-03-06T16:24:10","slug":"ernest-hemingway-creativity-and-mental-health","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/2017\/03\/06\/ernest-hemingway-creativity-and-mental-health\/","title":{"rendered":"Ernest Hemingway Creativity and Mental Health"},"content":{"rendered":"

Dr Ruwan M Jayatunge<\/em><\/span><\/h2>\n

The American novelist Ernest Hemingway is considered as the\u00a0greatest writer of the 20th century.\u00a0Hemingway\u00a0explored universal themes such as life, love and death.\u00a0\u00a0His name was a synonym for an approach to life characterized by action, courage, physical prowess, stamina, violence, independence, and above all “grace under pressure (Yalom & Yalom, 1971).\u00a0Hemingway brought a revolution in style and was a keen observer of the contemporary world and human nature (Dieguez, 2010).\u00a0With his influential work Ernest Hemingway became the\u00a0the archetypal American writer. He\u00a0won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1954.<\/p>\n

Hemingway stated that his stories emerged out of lived experiences. According to Dieguez (2010) most of his writings have a quasi-autobiographical quality, which allowed many commentators to draw comparisons between his personality and his art.\u00a0Hemingway\u2019s life was on constant move and adventure.<\/p>\n

During the World War One Hemingway served as an ambulance driver and wounded in 1918. He witnessed the gruesome realities of combat in the World War One. In addition He worked as a war correspondent during the Spanish civil war. His War experiences inspired him to write his great novel A Farewell to Arms. His other works The Sun Also Rises”(1926), \u00a0 “For Whom the Bell Tolls”(1940) and “The Old Man and the Sea”(1952) became greatest novels of all time.<\/p>\n

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Throughout his career, Hemingway pinpoints the importance of witnessing and experiencing war on a writer (Robinson, 2010). As described by Putnam (2006) no American writer is more associated with writing about war in the early 20th century than Ernest Hemingway. He experienced it firsthand, wrote dispatches from innumerable front lines, and used war as a backdrop for many of his most memorable works.\u00a0 In Ernest Hemingway\u2019s short story, Soldier\u2019s Home he narrates a total alienation experienced by a soldier.<\/p>\n

Hemingway’s first novel, The Sun Also Rises became an an iconic modernist novel. It was about a lost generation \u2013 a group of disillusioned American expatriate writers live a dissolute, hedonistic lifestyle. The Sun Also Rises contained autobiographical elements from Hemingway’s own life and it became the testimony of the postwar disillusionment of his generation.\u00a0The term Lost Generation\u201d reflects the disillusioned, hopeless attitude the war generated (Zabala, 2007).<\/p>\n

A Farewell to Arms was based on his war experiences. In this classic novel\u00a0Hemingway concludes:\u00a0The world breaks every one and afterward many are strong at the broken places. But those that will not break it kills. It kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave impartially. If you are none of these you can be sure it will kill you too but there will be no special hurry.\u201d<\/p>\n

Perhaps one of the most interesting descriptions of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) was that presented in the short story Soldiers Home,\u201d which was written by Ernest Hemingway following his return to the United States after serving in the Italian army during World War I (MacNeill , 1995).\u00a0This short story can be read as an effort to identify, attest to, organize, and communicate the experience of a traumatized soldier which, on the evidence, is what Hemingway himself was (Seiden, & Seiden, 2013). War experiences transformed the great writer.\u00a0 In later years a number of PTSD related symptoms could be identified from Hemingway.<\/p>\n

Hemingway was\u00a0fascinated, preoccupied, and obsessed with war, murder, big-game hunting, bullfighting, death, and suicide\u00a0(Craig, 1995).\u00a0In 1925, Ernest Hemingway wrote to F. Scott Fitzgerald that the reason you are so sore you missed the war is because the war is the best subject of all. It groups the maximum of material and speeds up the action and brings out all sorts of stuff that normally you have to wait a lifetime to get (Vernon, 2016). According to the Psychiatrist and the Psychoanalyst Lawrence Kubie\u00a0Hemingway’s works contained two types of males, a destructive male and a kind father-figure who symbolically represents the threat of passive homosexuality. The latter figure inspires both love and hate. The main struggle, then, is against both homosexual seduction and fear of father through castration (Craig, 1995).<\/p>\n

As described by\u00a0Martin (2006)\u00a0Hemingway suffered psychological wounds during his childhood that predated by many years the traumatic experiences he encountered in World Wars I and II and all his subsequent injuries.He hated his mother for wrecking his father\u2019s life.\u00a0Hemingway’s deep and longstanding rage toward his mother may have shaped his conceptualization of his father’s suicide so that his father’s death became his mother’s fault (Martin, 2006).\u00a0He possessed deep unresolved anger towards his mother.\u00a0\u00a0Lynn (1987) writes that for long years Hemingway\u00a0carried this anger in his heart.\u00a0Hemingway’s writing can be seen as an adaptive defensive strategy for dealing with painful moods and suicidal impulses.\u00a0(Martin, 2006).\u00a0However the defenses were falling apart. Hemingway’s anxiety and depression stemmed in large part from his failure to actualize his idealized self (Yalom\u00a0& Yalom, 1971).<\/p>\n

With his adventurous life Hemingway suffered from numerous physical and mental health issues. He had problems with his liver, back, heart and veins. He suffered from eye problems and seems to have developed into a hypochondriac and by 1960, he had developed paranoid delusions of persecution which progressively became more serious (Trent, 1986). Furthermore Sexual dysfunctions that he experienced in the latter stages made him annoyed and dejected.\u00a0The FBI was hounding him and he could not stay in his Cuban sanctuary for any longer.\u00a0His alcohol addiction drastically impacted his mental health. Significant evidence exists to support the diagnoses of bipolar disorder, alcohol dependence, traumatic brain injury, and probable borderline and narcissistic personality traits in Ernest Hemingway (Martin, 2006). Towards the end of his life, Hemingway was psychotic, depressed, and paranoid (Craig, 1995).\u00a0Once he called his life a Kafka nightmare.\u00a0Ernest Hemingway\u00a0committed suicide on July 2 1961. This was the man once said; But man is not made for defeat…. A man can be destroyed but not defeated”<\/p>\n

References\u00a0<\/u><\/strong><\/p>\n

Craig, R.J. (1995).Contributions to psychohistory: XXIII. Hemingway “analyzed”.Psychol Rep.\u00a0 ;76(3 Pt 2):1059-79.<\/p>\n

Dieguez, S. (2010).’A man can be destroyed but not defeated’: Ernest Hemingway’s near-death experience and declining health.Front Neurol Neurosci.\u00a0 27:174-206.<\/p>\n

Lynn, K. S. (1987). Hemingway. New York: Simon & Schuster.<\/p>\n

Martin, C.D.(2006).Ernest Hemingway: a psychological autopsy of a suicide.Psychiatry.69(4):351-61.<\/p>\n

Putnam, T. (2006). Hemingway on War and Its Aftermath.\u00a0Retrieved from\u00a0https:\/\/www.archives.gov\/publications\/prologue\/2006\/spring\/hemingway.html<\/a><\/p>\n

Seiden, H.\u00a0M., Seiden, M (2013).Ernest Hemingway’s World War I short stories: PTSD, the writer as witness, and the creation of intersubjective community. Psychoanalytic Psychology, Vol 30(1),, 92-101.<\/p>\n

Trent, B.(1986).Hemingway: could his suicide have been prevented?CMAJ.\u00a0 15;135(8):933-4.<\/p>\n

Vernon, A.(2016). Teaching Hemingway and War.Kent State University Press<\/p>\n

Yalom, I.D., Yalom, M.(1971). Ernest Hemingway. A psychiatric view. Arch Gen Psychiatry. ;24(6):485-94.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Dr Ruwan M Jayatunge The American novelist Ernest Hemingway is considered as the\u00a0greatest writer of the 20th century.\u00a0Hemingway\u00a0explored universal themes such as life, love and death.\u00a0\u00a0His name was a synonym for an approach to life characterized by action, courage, physical prowess, stamina, violence, independence, and above all “grace under pressure (Yalom & Yalom, 1971).\u00a0Hemingway brought […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[68],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-63952","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-dr-ruwan-m-jayatunge-m-d"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/63952","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=63952"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/63952\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=63952"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=63952"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=63952"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}