Best Minds: How Allen Ginsberg Made Revolutionary Poetry from Madness, by Stevan M. Weine

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'Best Minds' by Stevan M. Weine

In “Howl,” the poem that introduced him to a wide audience, Allen Ginsberg declared, “I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness.” His meaning encompassed many possibilities, including the architects of Mutually Assured Destruction, but his experience with what society called madness was personal. His mother, Naomi, diagnosed with schizophrenia, died in an insane asylum. He had been briefly confined to the New York State Psychiatric Institute for observation. One of America’s foremost psychiatrists, Nolan Lewis, hedged his bets on the young poet’s mental health. And more pertinently, the vision-prone Ginsberg, comparing himself to William Blake, wrestled in his writings with the liberating and destructive polarities of madness.

Steven M. Weine comes to the subject with a unique perspective. In 1986 while in medical school, planning to become a psychiatrist, Weine wrote Ginsberg a letter. Weine’s interest was literary and cultural as well as clinic. “Several days later, I am thrilled beyond belief to hear Allen’s deep voice on my answering machine,” he writes. Beyond the conversations that followed, Ginsberg gave Weine permission to access his records at the Psychiatric Institute—records the poet had never seen.

According to Weine, Ginsberg took an avuncular interest and encouraged his career. “I’m going to make you into my kind of psychiatrist,” he said. Ginsberg was fascinated with psychotherapy, but critical, and drawn, like many outré artists and intellectuals of the late 1940s, to the unconventional theories of Wilhelm Reich, Freud’s ostracized pupil.

Weine concludes that Ginsberg did not romanticize madness but understood it as double-edged, capable of producing illness and dysfunction but also ecstasy and inspiration. Best Minds is sympathetic but not a hagiography. The author acknowledges that Ginsberg “was not as vigilant as he could have been” in warning of the misuse of psychedelic drugs and was “willfully naïve” in his words of support for a pedophile association clinging to the fringes of the sexual revolution. He may have been sexually abused as a child.