Abstract
The double relation between “genius and madness” and “mental deviance and creativity” constitutes a long-standing, deep categorization in our culture (Becker 2008). This double dyad has been represented frequently in extraordinarily successful movies and it emerges just as often in both everyday life and scientific and academic research. Among the various psychopathologies, schizophrenia and autism spectrum disorders (ASD) play a key role. Sacred-D project aims at showing that this identification is a
form of the mythology of creativity qua madness, and madness qua creativity (Barthes 1956), which now has clear effects also within scientific research, for instance through tools like the Torrance Test of Creative Thinking. SACre-D will reconstruct, rethink and reform the assumptions that ground a mythology of our time: the connection between creativity and madness.
The project aims at:
i) framing through a semiotic analysis the connection between madness and creativity as a form of deep categorization that has emerged in our culture;
ii) rethinking it through analytical tools and experimental data;
iii) building a lexicon of creativity in the form of an open access digital tool, showcasing which features our culture considers to be constitutive of the concept of "creativity";
iv) building new possible scientific tools alternative to the “Torrance Test of Creative Thinking”, “Williams' Test of Divergent Thinking”, and some specific tasks such as the “Divergent Association Task”, “Alternative Uses Task and the Bridge-the-Associative-Gap Task”;
v) setting up and publishing a "catalogue of the possessed", showing how the link between creativity and madness rests on a view that sees both inspiration and madness as a form of possession;
vi) setting up a Database that will contain, in digitized form, all the written and artistic productions of schizophrenic and paranoid subjects found in the archives of various former mental institutions;
vii) working on this Database with the most advanced tools of artificial intelligence and semiotic analysis, keeping together quantitative and qualitative methodologies;
viii) building the web portal SPLIT, Semiotics and Psychopathology of Language in Italy;
ix) disseminating the results through academic and non-academic channels, involving associations, institutions, cultural organizations, museums and citizenship in a series of networking initiatives.