Stevan M. Weine’s Best Minds: How Allen Ginsberg Made Revolutionary Poetry from Madness (Fordham University Press, 2023) is a key addition to Ginsberg scholarship. Weine’s interdisciplinary approach offers important insight into how Ginsberg’s family relationships, especially his complicated bond with his mother Naomi, influenced his body of work as a whole. Working from unprecedented access to Ginsberg’s and Naomi’s psychiatric records, Weine has produced one of the most comprehensive accounts we have to date of how Ginsberg’s psychological traumas and ecstasies shaped his poetics.
Dr. Stevan M. Weine is Professor of Psychiatry at the University of Illinois College of Medicine, where he is also Director of Global Medicine and Director of the Center for Global Health. For more information see his Author and University websites.
Tony Trigilio’s books include The Beats and the Academy: A Renegotiation, coedited with Erik Mortenson (Clemson UP/Liverpool UP, 2023), Allen Ginsberg’s Buddhist Poetics (Southern Illinois UP, 2012), and “Strange Prophecies Anew”: Rereading Apocalypse in Blake, H.D., and Ginsberg (Fairleigh Dickinson UP, 2000). He is editor of Elise Cowen: Poems and Fragments (Ahsahta Press, 2014). Trigilio is the author, most recently, of Craft: A Memoir (Marsh Hawk Press, 2023) and Proof Something Happened, selected by Susan Howe as the winner of the Marsh Hawk Press Poetry Prize (Marsh Hawk, 2021). He is a Professor of English and Creative Writing at Columbia College Chicago.
TT: Thanks for your terrific book. Your expertise in the history and practice of psychiatry deepens our understanding of Allen Ginsberg’s poems and his creative process. Contemporary literary studies is by necessity an interdisciplinary endeavor. But the combination of your psychiatric background and your attentiveness to his poems takes interdisciplinarity to a whole new level. For readers who might be learning about Best Minds for the first time, can you elaborate a bit about your approach to Ginsberg’s life and work in the book?
SW: Thank you for checking out Best Minds and for appreciating the interdisciplinary approach. For me, it starts and ends with the poems themselves, which to this day still give so much. I also found that learning more about Allen’s lived experiences with madness and involvement with psychiatry can help us to do a closer reading, to decipher some parts otherwise not understandable, and to gain new insights into how the poems work and why they matter.
Unlike prior biographers and critics, whose works I greatly admire and relied upon, including your excellent writings focused on prophecy, I was fortunate to have access to Allen’s psychiatric records from the New York State Psychiatric Institute and Naomi’s psychiatric records from Pilgrim State and other hospitals. To me, these were valuable because they contain rich narrative descriptions, so we can get inside of Allen’s struggles and hopes which he shared in psychotherapy at age 23, Naomi’s desperate condition and injurious treatments, Allen’s experience of her illness, confinement, and decline, and a close-up view of the failures and promises of American psychiatry in the 1940s and 50s.
Additionally, Allen let me interview him several times so we were able to speak about his experiences and perspectives involving madness and psychiatry, and how they related to his creative endeavors, and key events such as his 1948 visions involving William Blake. I also had access to Allen’s archives, where I read Allen’s journals and correspondences and Naomi’s letters from Pilgrim State Hospital, among many other documents.
It wasn’t just a matter of accessing these materials, but also letting them speak to one another in both filling out Allen’s story with some key revelations and in developing my analysis. I especially tried to see the connections between Allen’s personal experiences of proximity to mental illness, and his creative works which placed him as an artistic witness to madness in “Howl” and “Kaddish”.
TT: The story of how you came to write Best Minds is also interdisciplinary in its own way. It’s a narrative that unfolds at an exciting intersection of autobiography and scholarship. You met Ginsberg when you were a medical student in New York in the 1980s, and the two of you struck up an immediate bond. He trusted you enough to give you unprecedented access to his, and Naomi’s, medical records for your research. I’d love to hear more about how your personal history with Ginsberg guided the research and writing of the book.
SW: Recently, Bob Rosenthal, Allen’s personal secretary for more than 20 years, told me that Allen was accurate and fast in reading people. I believe Allen responded positively to my commitments to both literature and psychiatry and to my open-mindedness.
To me, Allen was first an idol, then a mentor and a friend for several years. To get down to the work of researching and writing Best Minds, I had to first get over being starstruck. Next, I had to tolerate the pain and disruption I was unintentionally causing by asking him to focus on matters involving his mother’s illness and lobotomy.
Allen encouraged me to use both literary and psychiatric approaches to understand his story and his poems. However, it took time for me to do the work of integrating such very different perspectives. This meant developing a holistic view that accounted for both Allen’s experiences of the psychiatric treatments of the 1940s and 1950s as well as what it meant for Allen the aspiring poet to have visions and walk with Blake.
Several years ago my late friend Schuyler who read early drafts pointed out to me that Allen was my number one imagined reader. Schuyler was right. I was writing for an Allen who wanted to know the truth, even if it hurt. And an Allen who wanted to see more tolerant and effective psychiatric practices.
Schuyler’s observation challenged me to widen the circle of intended readers to include all Beat fans, the Beat Studies crew, and people learning about Allen for the first time, as well as those interested in lived experiences with mental illness and creativity. I’m struck that at every book reading, people come up to me to share their own lived experiences and say they find hope in Allen’s story.
TT: It’s common knowledge that in 1949, when Ginsberg was twenty-three, he was hospitalized for eight months at the New York State Psychiatric Institute (PI) as part of a plea bargain that enabled him to avoid a jail term for theft. But your book, with its unparalleled access to Ginsberg’s medical records, explores in greater detail than any prior volume the extent to which Ginsberg’s time at PI shaped his life and work. Hospitalized at PI, he came face-to-face with the same psychiatric establishment that was treating his mother Naomi, who had been in and out of institutions since her first hospitalization in 1931, when Ginsberg was just five years old. Based on your study of Ginsberg’s medical records, you write in Best Minds that you have “mixed opinions” about his medical treatment at PI. Can you talk a bit more about your assessment of his time at PI, and how his experiences at PI can help us understand his life and work more thoroughly?
SW: Yes, there was a plea bargain, supported by letters from Allen’s esteemed Columbia professors Jaques Barzun and Lionel Trilling. However, this doesn’t mean there weren’t good reasons for his receiving psychiatric treatment. At the time, his involvement in visions was veering too close to psychosis, his comradery with junkies nearly landed him in jail, and he said his homosexuality was a problem he wanted to change, which of course was a capitulation to the bigoted views of the day. Like many gay men at the time, he was trying to figure out how to live and love in a society which condemned his identity and behaviors, on top of the emotional fallout he had from Naomi’s situation.
Despite the fact that the PI psychiatrists were performing lobotomies on people with the diagnoses Allen was given, some were also providing psychotherapy. From the progress notes, I learned how the psychotherapy he received was of help to Allen in several respects: reigning in his sense of grandiosity, challenging binary concepts of madness (sanity v. insanity), taking some distance from the Blake visions, and sharing his experiences of being his mother’s caregiver as a child. Even though the psychotherapists considered his homosexuality a symptom of mental illness, were overly focused on Freudian psychosexual matters, and did not appreciate the traumatic dimensions of his experiences with Naomi, nonetheless they still were able to provide a therapeutic experience which helped him.
After reviewing his records from PI, and speaking with Allen about it, I realized something amazing — his therapists never inquired and he did not mention how he had actually signed consent for Naomi’s lobotomy the year before his hospitalization. It reflects the extent to which the state mental health system and academic psychiatry was compromised by the lobotomy regime of that era. Allen really needed help with this and paid a price for not receiving it.
In an experiential sense, it was helpful to Allen to be inside the bughouse, as he liked to say, and to get to know fellow patients including the one-of-a-kind Carl Solomon, who is named in “Howl” (“Carl Solomon I’m with you in Rockland”). Entering further into that world helped make “Howl” and “Kaddish” possible. Over time, Allen’s writing shifted from writing about madness as an allegory (“The Shrouded Stranger”) to writing more about actual people and lives (“Skull Broken”).
TT: In “Kaddish,” Ginsberg famously describes Naomi as the “glorious muse that bore me from the womb, gave suck first mystic life & taught me talk and music, from whose pained head I first took Vision.” Your exploration in Best Minds of Naomi’s influence on Ginsberg is riveting. What do you think is most important for us to understand about Naomi’s simultaneously devastating and visionary effect on the writer that Allen Ginsberg became?
SW: I believe we can’t fully grasp Allen’s life and some of his poems without knowing more about Naomi. Until now what we know about Naomi is largely Allen’s recollections from many years later, which formed the basis for part II of “Kaddish” and its “refrain of the hospitals”. Naomi was one of a whole generation of women who disappeared into the state psychiatric system. It is remarkable that all these years later, we can actually get to know more about her and Allen’s relationship with her, through what’s in her records, her letters and even a story she wrote.
Despite her serious mental illness, the many years separated from him while hospitalized, and her behavior which at times traumatized him, Allen was still very attached to Naomi, though in a highly ambivalent way. In 1948, Naomi wrote to Allen: “For the love of Jesus I do not know how I got this sickness. It’s up to you to find out. Your loving mother, Naomi.” Allen heard Naomi’s desperate cry for help. Although it is on the one hand unanswerable, I believe Allen took this request seriously and for a time it informed his creative work and advocacy regarding madness. Allen absorbed and was inspired by Naomi’s own visions of God and her search for meaning and purpose in the face of a crushing illness and treatments of unspeakable cruelty.
“Kaddish” is a marvel which contains so much as you know well from your own scholarship. One dimension I’d like to highlight is how “Kaddish” provides a poetic template for mourning complicated and ambiguous losses such as a parent with serious mental illness or dementia. When a loved one has been both there and not there, incoherent and lucid, loving and hurtful, it can be so hard to remember them, but this is part of what “Kaddish” attempts and in my opinion masterfully achieves.
TT: Section IV of “Kaddish” opens with a direct address to Naomi: “O mother / what have I left out.” Your research on Ginsberg’s authorization of his mother’s lobotomy in 1948 encourages us not to read too quickly past these lines. When we consider why Ginsberg gave consent to the lobotomy—and when we consider how this haunted him throughout the rest of his life—this moment in Section IV of the poem is far more potent and unsettling than it seems at first glance. The lobotomy authorization is, of course, a key influence on the “Kaddish” triptych (“Kaddish,” “White Shroud,” and “Black Shroud”). But your research demonstrates that once the young Ginsberg signed the lobotomy consent form on behalf of his family, he set in motion a psychological conflict that would exert far more influence on his writing than we’ve previously considered. Best Minds suggests that the lobotomy authorization might be one of the central organizing principles in his body of work. Can you elaborate on the complexity of Ginsberg’s decision to sign the lobotomy consent form, and on how this decision can affect how we read Ginsberg’s poetry?
SW: Approximately 50,000 lobotomies were performed in the United States through the late 1950s. Lobotomy was being hyped as psychiatry’s great curative operation, akin to open heart surgery, though without the scientific evidence to support it. Some family members and patients were actually requesting lobotomies from their doctors. Allen didn’t have any such hopes about the lobotomy, and was falsely told by the doctors that without this operation his mother would die. So what choice did he have but to sign the consent? He decided alone, without talking with his brother or father, or any friends. Can you imagine how difficult this must have been for 22-year-old Allen to do and then to live with this decision the rest of his life?
Allen kept the lobotomy out of public knowledge for decades. I still remember the day in 1986 when I first found the lobotomy consent in his archives at Columbia’s Butler Library and another day not long after when I shared this finding with him. It was absolutely unbelievable to me that Allen signed consent and that it had been kept secret all these years. I have come to see the lobotomy consent as key, but it has to be viewed in the context of Allen’s life journey, the burden of Naomi’s illness on their family, and the history of psychiatry.
The lobotomy thrust him into a crisis, to which he responded informed by his hero Rimbaud, and the concept of the New Vision he shared with Jack Kerouac, Lucien Carr, and others, that a crisis can distance you from ossified mainstream values, practices, and language, and enabled reinvention.
Following the lobotomy, Allen had his Blake visions – in which he “saw God” and committed to becoming a visionary poet. Like Naomi he was having visions of God, but unlike Naomi he would be their master and in a way redeem her. He could not deny the destruction wrought by madness and psychiatry, but he could see and express other sides, with meaning, spirituality and liberation from constraints, which were also parts of madness.
Does knowledge of the lobotomy change how we read Allen’s poetry? Perhaps, in some limited ways for the poems you mentioned, but not at all for most others. The word lobotomy appears in only two poems: “Howl” (“demanding instantaneous lobotomy”) and “Kaddish” (“a scar on your head, the lobotomy” and “with your eyes of lobotomy”).
When in “Kaddish” Allen writes “mother, what have I left out”, I believe he is partly talking about leaving out the fact that he signed consent from “Kaddish”. He also never told Naomi. For whatever reasons, Allen considered this unspeakable for most of his life. “Black Shroud” from 1986 represents the lobotomy as an imagined ax murder with the protagonist burdened by guilt for what he did.
In a broad sense, we can also say that Allen’s celebration of madness and visions, sympathy for the best minds, championing of psychedelics and changes of consciousness, and battles with institutions over their truthfulness and use of force, were all manifestations of the work he felt was needed to make up for the irreparable harm of Naomi’s lobotomy and the destructive impact of her mental illness.
TT: You bring four decades of research on the effects of trauma to Best Minds. I appreciate your detailed and compassionate work with trauma in the book—both Ginsberg’s traumas and Naomi’s. As “Kaddish” reminds us, these traumas include the horror of child sexual abuse. Can you talk a bit more on how our contemporary understanding of trauma, in general, and child sexual abuse, in particular, can help us create a more complete understanding of what made Ginsberg the poet that he was?
SW: First let’s acknowledge the multiple layers of trauma which Allen and Naomi experienced including: the medical trauma and moral injury of signing for Naomi’s lobotomy and seeing its disastrous effects; the trauma of being exposed during childhood to Naomi’s paranoid delusions, hallucinations, suicidality, nudism and seductive behavior; Naomi’s own experiences of sexual abuse which I discovered in her medical records; Naomi’s and Allen’s traumas related to the practices of confinement, lobotomy, and other injurious psychiatric treatments; collective traumas related to forced migration, world war, and genocide.
Second, let’s acknowledge how experiencing these many different layers of trauma gave Allen access to a whole world of adverse experiences and truth seeking which brought forth new thoughts and feelings, new relationships, and new language.
Finally, let’s acknowledge that when both Allen and Naomi were living through these experiences, and even receiving treatments, there was no adequate language of trauma as there is today to make the connections between their exposure to extreme adversity and its mental health and psychosocial consequences. It was up to Allen and Naomi to invent the language and to make the connections.
In today’s trauma-informed spaces, we now expect that survivors typically want safety, care and support, and acknowledgement of the wrongs done to them. Back then, these were often not made available. Tragically, Naomi never received such support and care. Over time, the symptoms she developed were dominated by delusions, hallucinations, and paranoia and she was diagnosed with and treated for schizophrenia according to the standards of the day, which were a horror show.
Although Allen didn’t receive trauma-informed care, the psychotherapy he received helped him in several ways. He was heard and not judged. Instead of being told not to be gay, his therapist helped Allen and his father to reach an understanding that would tolerate his being with men. He was able to speak of his disparate experiences with his mother which were both seductive and terrifying.
What was also so important was that Allen had an extraordinary peer network, in Jack Kerouac and William Burroughs and others which gave him support, comradery, and encouragement to write. Allen was always intensely committed to independent literary scholarship and writing, which gave him access to literary ancestors (Blake and Whitman especially) for how to work with difficult life experiences.
What did Allen pull together through his poetry? Consider “Howl”, where Allen famously began, “I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness”. From a trauma point of view, this one poem achieves so much. One, Allen offers himself as a witness to a generation destroyed by madness. An empathic witness to injustice and suffering otherwise un-noticed or stigmatized. Two, Allen does so using language which captures the lived experiences, humanity, and meaning of those persons, not to mention their capacities to sustain and grow through these experiences. Three, we appreciate that what made them the best minds might be their responses to the attempts to destroy them. Four, Allen represents that the traumas may be caused or compounded by society’s efforts to manage or control them.
Importantly, Allen rarely if ever used the word trauma and he didn’t see himself as a victim. Instead of seeing himself as a person to whom bad things were done, he saw himself as an agent of change for self, art, and society. He embedded trauma-related experiences into the even broader construct of madness. In that sense there were definitely limitations to what he could do to advance the representations and understandings of trauma. Others would have to carry the ball further up the field, by being more deeply engaged in particular trauma survivor experiences, especially those of women and children exposed to violence in families, soldiers in wartime, and civilian victims of torture or forced displacement.
Psychotherapy Progress Note, New York State Psychiatric Institute, 1949 (c) Allen Ginsberg Estate.
TT: As you emphasize in Best Minds, biographical research can be both a virtue and a limitation in the critical study of an artist’s work. Discussing the biographical contexts of “Kaddish,” for instance, you write that “we must not forget ‘Kaddish’ is a poem, not a strictly documentary account, and should be appreciated and understood as such, especially with its remarkable imagery and language.” Best Minds as a whole lives up to this, balancing Ginsberg’s biography with a detailed attentiveness to Ginsberg’s poetics. Can you elaborate a bit more on your research and writing process for the book, especially on how biographical study deepened your reading of his poems?
SW: I love the poems, especially “Howl”, “America”, and “Kaddish” with their long lines and fully developed Ginsbergian language exploring madness. I also love the spare early works in Empty Mirror. I certainly didn’t want to offer analyses which detracted from the poems or rendered them something lesser, as has sometimes been done using a psychiatric, psychoanalytic or trauma lens, reducing either art or people to just symptoms.
I started out trying to answer these questions: What is the madness which Allen has brought to life in his poems? How can madness be so inspiring in “Howl” and so destructive in “Kaddish”. How would someone who has had personal and family involvement with mental illness and psychiatry approach writing about madness?
I will share a few points about my approach to research and writing.
Overall, my approach focused on understanding the contexts and processes by which he made art. In Best Minds, some chapters deal more with life and historical contexts, and other chapters track the story of how the poems emerged, and offer new readings of the poems themselves.
I saw Allen’s proximity to his mother’s serious mental illness, and his own struggles with visions that veered close to psychosis, as giving him access to experiences denied most others. I then sought to understand how he learned from other living writers, especially Jack Kerouac and William Carlos Williams, and literary forebears, especially William Blake and the Surrealists, about how to apply artistic models for representing these experiences.
It was clear that Allen was not someone who was suffering and then turned to poetry to help him to feel better. The opposite. Allen exposed himself to all kinds of risks for the sake of creating poetry that would achieve aesthetic, spiritual, and social transformation far beyond himself.
I tried to capture how some of Allen’s most famous poems were written in marathon sessions, but these were preceded by years-long processes of immersion, preparation, study, and creative work which made it possible. Allen transcribed his dreams, read widely, journaled and sketched. There were months of slogging through and moments of unusual clairvoyance, such as when Allen viewed Fra Angelic’s “Annunciation” at the Prado in 1956 which helped him to rethink his 1948 visions.
Learning about the life context of Allen’s most famous poems informed my interpretations. My reading of “Howl” is that Allen writes primarily from the position of a witness – one who saw more so than was mad. Regarding “Kaddish” I saw Allen as writing the first family member first person narrative of serious mental illness and trying to rescue Naomi’s voice, humanity, and dignity.
TT: Ginsberg once said to you, “I want to make you into my kind of psychiatrist.” As you note in Best Minds, this statement is more than just a reflection of how Ginsberg saw you; it also offers greater insight into the poet himself. “Somewhere within [Ginsberg],” you write, “there was a psychiatrist and psychiatric reformer waiting to be born.” In these two statements, I see much of the respect and compassion that you had for each other—and for those of us who seek psychiatric treatment. What do you think Ginsberg meant when he said he wanted you to become “[his] kind of psychiatrist”? And what would you like readers to know about the “psychiatrist and psychiatric reformer” that was inside Ginsberg?
SW: Allen had great compassion and appreciation for those who suffered from serious mental illness. He wanted to lessen their suffering and isolation and hear what they had to say. Through his mother he experienced the damage done by both prolonged confinement in psychiatric hospitals and highly injurious treatments, epitomized in the lobotomy. He knew we could do far better.
In 1961, Allen was invited to speak at a think tank called the Group for Advancement of Psychiatry. He read a poem about his visions (“Lion for Real”) and another written while tripping (“Mescaline”). Allen was looking for allies in psychiatry who were open to the transformative power of psychedelics and more humanistic approaches to treatment. He got to meet with turned-on psychiatrists like Humphrey Osmand who coined the term psychedelic and who referred Allen to Timothy Leary. Several years later in London, Allen met and became friends with the anti-psychiatrist R.D. Laing, though Allen didn’t reject psychiatry and was more for humanistic reforms.
When Allen mentioned that to me, he was being a little silly but mostly serious. I knew I was one of many young people that he made an investment in, as part of his quest to make the world a better place. His generosity was incredible and so different from the aloofness and unapproachability of many of today’s celebrities.
Being Allen’s kind of psychiatrist meant being open and non-judgemental, it meant learning from the lived experiences of persons with mental illness, and not defaulting to confinement or destructive treatments. It meant understanding and supporting family caregivers, and recognizing the humanity, meaning, and spirituality of people living with mental illness.
It also means being interested in people all over the world from different cultures and figuring out how they live and face death, what ails them, and how they heal and find strength. When I travel and work in global mental health, I try to emulate the openness, humility, and courage Allen demonstrates in his Indian Journals and his other travel journals. For example, he writes:
Once I thought to rebuild the world to supreme reality . . . the giant radio station of eternity would tune us into an endless program that broadcast only ourselves forever. Now I hear the reading of gongs and skull drums in Hindu temples, cries on the streets, peasant women waving sticks that hungry cows, the light bulb burning white, only so I can transcribe the weird suffering details, for whom to read, myself and my fond dying indifferent trapped fellows (Indian Journals, 136).
Allen’s writings taught generations not just how to travel, but how to be more attentive and humane in a world in flames. Today they remain as poignant and necessary as ever.
August 2023