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Wilder at Heart

A new study of eccentrics raises old questions about who is really sane and insane in modern society

By Jordan Elgrably

San Jose's Sarah Winchester--the widow of arms manufacturer Oliver Winchester--believed that the ghosts of people killed by her husband's rifles would haunt her "unless she built a magnificent house large enough to accommodate a legion of friendly ghosts to protect her." As neuropsychologist David Weeks and co-author Jamie James write in their new book, Eccentrics: A Study of Sanity and Strangeness, the result was an ever-expanding mansion to which Winchester added rooms for 38 years.

When Winchester died in 1922, her famous folly in San Jose was eight stories tall, with 158 rooms, 2,000 doors, 10,000 windows and 48 fireplaces. "It is a bizarre place, filled with snares intended to thwart malicious spirits," writes Weeks of the tourist attraction now known as the Winchester Mystery House--and San Jose's best claim to full-blown eccentricity.

At about the time Sarah Winchester embarked on her obsession, another, even more flamboyant eccentric flourished in San Francisco. Joshua Abraham Norton, an English Jew who called himself Emperor of the United States, "reigned" from 1859 to 1880. Among other things, he "suspended the Constitution and dissolved both the Republican and the Democratic political parties on the grounds that 'their existence engendered dissensions.' "

Emperor Norton, who always wore a blue military uniform with gold epaulettes, patrolled the streets of San Francisco for more than 20 years, never missed a session of the state Senate and was clearly loved by his subjects. When he died in 1880, the San Francisco Chronicle ran the headline, "Le Roi Est Mort," and 30,000 mourners attended his funeral.

During a recent interview, Weeks touts his book as the first-ever clinical, rather than just anecdotal, study of the weird, the wacky and the wild in human behavior. After interviewing more than 1,000 subjects he identified as eccentrics during a 10-year period, in both the United Kingdom and the United States, Weeks found that they typically embrace strangeness, flout convention, reject conformity and thrive on creativity and imagination. Often they're natural-born rebels, even if there's not a political streak in them.

Through standard statistical analysis applied to the study, Weeks concluded that "classic, full-time eccentrics" number only about one in 10,000 people. But these rare individuals exercise a considerable fascination and can tell us a great deal about how we see ourselves.

By using the methodology of clinical psychology to produce his census of eccentric individuals, Weeks forces us to question our own normality, and to ask whether or not conventional behavior is, ontologically, the right existential choice for everyone.

Weeks describes the eccentric as essentially "nonconforming; creative; strongly motivated by curiosity; idealistic: he wants to make the world a better place and the people in it happier; happily obsessed with one or more hobbyhorses (usually five or six); aware from early childhood that he is different; intelligent; opinionated and outspoken, convinced that he is right and that the rest of the world is out of step." The portrait is so fascinating that Weeks seems to be more an advocate than an observer of strange and highly individualistic behavior.

Indeed, he includes in his study's historical sample such visionaries as Newton, Blake and Einstein, as well as lesser-known eccentrics. Among the contemporary American oddballs he interviewed is Marvin Staples, "an ebullient Chippewa Indian from Minnesota, who walks everywhere backwards," because he says it makes him feel younger and has cured him of chronic backache and arthritis.

Weeks also talked with Patch Adams, a Virginia physician who often dresses as a clown when he visits patients. Dr. Adams, writes Weeks, "believes that money has ruined medicine" and does not accept payment for his services. Dr. Adams' philosophy is that "if everyone's life was bathed in friendship, humor, love, creativity, hope, curiosity and wonder--wheeee!--we would need a lot less medicine. It would eliminate Prozac overnight."


Photo by Derek Hudson/Sygma

Cauldron of the Wild: Dot and Reg Griffiths brew up a charm.

Eccentric, of course, is a lay term, an adjective that describes those who deviate from the norm in the extreme. Everyone harbors at least a few eccentricities, but most of us are so socialized that we rarely act out our wilder impulses.

Defining eccentricity clinically is difficult. Eccentric people rarely come in for treatment, because, as Dr. Louis J. West, professor of psychiatry at UCLA, notes, "generally speaking, they're not unhappy, and they're not out of touch with reality."

Although eccentrics are content marching to the beat of their own drummer, neurotics--which our culture produces in far greater numbers--suffer from not conforming to what is expected of them, or what they perhaps unrealistically demand of themselves. The neurotic person, says Dr. West, "is one whose emotions are painful to him."

Eccentrics, on the other hand, explains Weeks, tend to be at the opposite extreme from people suffering from chronic personality disorders--those who are anxious, hostile and depressed. He finds that eccentrics frequently enjoy good health, and even live longer than the rest of us.

"Eccentrics experience much lower levels of stress because they do not feel the need to conform," Weeks insists, which means that "their immune-response systems function more efficiently." He emphasizes that positive forms of stress, however, such as "sex, exercise and the intellectual excitement of new ideas, have been found to trigger the release of slightly more growth hormone, which helps keep us young."

A Freudian psychiatrist in private practice in New York (who insisted on anonymity), says that if eccentrics "are not bothering anybody and are reasonably happy, I wouldn't touch them with a 10-foot pole." He has reservations, however, about what might be viewed as unusual behavior in the culture, and paraphrases Freud's belief that "we have to give up a certain amount of our wild nature in order to live in society."

Otherwise known as sublimation in shrink-speak, harnessing our desires to be different is a social imperative that, for Freud, meant "finding an expedient accommodation" between the will "of the individual and the cultural claims of society."

Arthur Kovacs, a clinical psychologist practicing in Los Angeles, worries that the sublimation of eccentric behavior may be overly repressive. "I'm often the enemy of culture," he says. "Culture demands that we submerge parts of ourselves, rein parts of ourselves in, that we live out only certain parts of our nature and not express other parts."

Unfortunately, modern therapy often defines mental health as being "well-adjusted" in the culture--at the expense of our individuality. Says Kovacs, "I don't believe in therapy as the psychology of adjustment, because every culture does terrible things to members of that culture."

The vast majority of the eccentrics Weeks studied were white and middle-class, with only about 25 African Americans in the sample, a statistic that also reveals something about how society deals with unusual behavior. Dr. Rebecca Rojas, a clinical psychologist who teaches in the graduate program at the Antioch University satellite campus in Marina del Rey, notes that Weeks' American eccentrics were mostly members of the mainstream culture.

In this context, Rojas says, "It might be okay for someone not to conform and still be able to get by, but for those cultural ethnic groups where even when they try to conform to the letter they still can't get by," eccentricity is not an option. Rojas, who is of Latina and Native American heritage, adds that minorities "don't have the luxury of being outspoken and out of step."


Photo by Derek Hudson/Sygma

Postcards From the Edge: Inventor John Ward.

Weeks' eccentrics often seem similar to the people psychologist Abraham Maslow called "self-actualizers," individuals who are unafraid to challenge convention. Maslow's self-actualizers enjoy what he termed "peak experiences"--moments of great awe, understanding and rapture.

Freud, on the other hand, while expressing admiration for some artists, tended to condemn those who acted out their wilder impulses. In Civilization and Its Discontents, he wrote of excessive individuation from the culture as "the desperate attempt at rebellion seen in psychosis."

But rebellion may be, after all, one of our most desirable traits. In his ground-breaking work The Mothers, British anthropologist Robert Briffault found that Western children are indeed rebellious by nature. Briffault argued that it is only when we are able to "shake off the dead hand of traditional heredity" that we reach our highest potential.

According to Weeks, "Freud's initial theories would have led to a kind of revolution in society, but he backtracked; his agenda didn't go very far because basically he was a capitalist living in a capitalist culture, whether it be Vienna or London. [Freud's] place in psychiatry was built, and had a hierarchy, very much like most corporate structures."

A recent trend in American psychotherapy has taken the position that perhaps it's time to stop using sessions to fix up individuals so that the system works better, and start changing the system so that individuals are healthier as a result.

Sometimes referred to as "activism therapy," explains Rojas, this approach may diagnose patients as "perfectly healthy, but they find themselves in an unhealthy environment. I really believe that the system is dysfunctional, people are really struggling [with it], and what we're sometimes looking at is ways in which the person can maybe work to change the system as what will help them the most."

There is little doubt that modern consumer culture has depersonalized relationships, addicted us to acquisitive behavior and contributed to the erosion of community. Therapist and theologian Thomas Moore, writing in Care of the Soul, views the current state of American mental health as suffering from what he calls "psychological modernism," which he defines as "an uncritical acceptance of the values of the modern world, blind faith in technology, inordinate attachment to material gadgets and conveniences, uncritical acceptance of the march of scientific progress, devotion to the electronic media, and a lifestyle dictated by advertising." Moore puts forth some skillful arguments on how to replenish the impoverished self with many of the qualities inherent to Weeks' eccentrics.

Eccentrics, according to Weeks, are in fact less likely to be addicted to consumer culture than the general population. And fewer than 30 of the more than 1,000 eccentrics he sampled had been substance abusers or alcoholics.

Several of the therapists I spoke to readily agreed that mainstream psychiatrists have often been the agents of social control. "There's an inherent danger in any kind of psychiatric diagnosis, including probably calling people eccentrics," says Dr. Peter Breggin, author of Toxic Psychiatry and Talking Back to Prozac and head of the Center for the Study of Psychiatry in Bethesda, Md.

"A lot of people I love and admire, and people who have had a lot of [positive] impact on society--like Ralph Nader--would probably fall into Weeks' definition of eccentrics," says Breggin. "On the one hand, I'd be concerned about making any such diagnosis of people; on the other hand, thank God, psychiatrists haven't made this diagnosis before, because we would go about drugging these people, and you would lose a lot of creativity and hurt a lot of people."

Weeks' criteria for defining eccentrics allow for a lot of latitude--often he seems to be describing many artists, and perhaps most geniuses. When I ask what he considers the single most defining value of eccentrics, Weeks replies, "their courage and resilience under fire, on an ongoing basis. And that's what I think I really admire about them."

Nonconformity, extreme curiosity and irreverence for the strictures of culture continually resurface as the most distinguishable eccentric traits, and these are indeed qualities that most of us consider admirable. Breggin, however, warns that these very qualities may be endangering rebellious children who are falling through the cracks of the public education system.

"You have this whole movement," he says, "that is now involving millions of children, to diagnose them with attention-deficit disorder, which is in fact going to be catching a lot of people that Weeks is defining as eccentric."

Breggin also criticizes a new diagnostic trend in psychiatry called "subclinical depression," in which "they're trying to define people as in need of treatment who don't meet any criteria previously published for depression. So psychiatry is constantly pushing the edges, to try to find more people to diagnose and drug."

In the same vein, Dr. Arthur Kovacs notes, "The diagnostic manuals we use are not scientific documents at all; they are lists of stigmatized behavior the culture says should be stamped out." Employing the standard therapeutic bible--the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, or DSM IV--Kovacs says that therapists "can treat almost anybody who walks into your office complaining about anything." The catch is that few eccentrics ever go in for treatment.

"In my studies," says Weeks, "there are some American eccentrics whom I would describe as rugged individualists. And there are many others that I would call 'tender-minded individuals.' I do think, though, that we are all stranger than we think we are, in our thinking, and we try to control that because we're scared of what we'll find in there."

Explicitly addressing the issue of how his profession deals with those deemed to be abnormal, Weeks continues, "Psychiatrists and pharmaceutical companies, as well as the insurance industry, have a vested interest in diagnosis and treatment. There's a whole corporate system that propels people into treatment and rewards those who think in terms of treatment paradigms for individuals where the actual problem is not in the individual, necessarily, but in the culture itself."

One psychiatrist I spoke to, however, expressed skepticism at Weeks' method for defining eccentrics, and wondered whether these weren't individuals who were purposely trying to attract attention to themselves. Counters Weeks, "The eccentrics we studied, by an large, were not at all exhibitionistic; that is, overly self-dramatizing, over-emotional, histrionic or attention-seeking."

As a result of his study, Weeks has developed something he calls "eccentric-thinking therapy." He encourages neurotics to steer away from their overwhelming seriousness by re-educating their sense of humor, having them watch the films of Buster Keaton, Abbott and Costello, and others. He also urges them to explore ideas and creativity. The goal, Weeks says, is teleological--getting his patients "more interested in where their thinking is taking them."

As Eccentrics illustrates, wild-minded people tend to be happier and healthier precisely because they are more in touch with their imaginations. "Having no outlet for the creative urge," Weeks writes, "can be as stifling and ultimately as depressing as the effects of poverty: it is a deeper deprivation, of the mind and the spirit. Similarly, the habits of mind induced by popular mass culture have promoted so much boredom, such deep feelings of powerlessness, that we would do well if we could exchange our excessive material acquisitiveness for the eccentrics' inner inquisitiveness."

Can therapy help encourage the benefits of eccentric thinking and behavior? Says Dr. West, of UCLA, "The purpose of therapy is to make people free. I would see defining the cultivation of eccentricity as a goal of therapy, as perhaps a special way of communicating the need for people to have greater freedom of action and thought. But freedom, I think, is the generic term, not eccentricity."

More than just a catalogue of the quixotic and outlandish behavior exhibited by some of society's most bizarre individuals, Eccentrics makes a larger point: The very qualities that set eccentrics apart also make them free. What's so crazy about that?

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Eccentrics, A Study of Sanity and Strangeness
By David Weeks and Jamie James
Villard; 277 pages; $23 cloth


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