ABSTRACT. The genius and madness “debate” on the one hand, or the creativity and depressive illness “controversy” on the other hand actually promote one and the same idea, viz. the two notions overlap, not exactly like the two sides of the same coin but like two notions whose orbits may just intersect at some point. The extensive survey in the first part of this study fully illustrates this overall picture, while the second section of the article, coming complete with two circumplexes of the psycho-biological and anthropological-spiritual adaptive modalities that aggregate around the manic module and respectively in the depressive module, converges on the paradoxical hypothesis that creativity is a measure of normality, the normality of a normal individual. The eminent creative personalities are mostly normal people, and so are the individuals with some type of psychiatric pathology – who are mostly normal people. pp. 9–15

Keywords: genius; madness; creativity; bipolar disorder