Jean-Noël Beuzen is a physician-psychiatrist, working at Hôpital Sainte-Anne, in Paris.

Scientific research has taught us a great deal about music’s healing powers, as well as about the links between madness and creative genius. Many composers have overcome maladjustment and pathological states (depression, hyperactivity, psychoses) by creating great works of music. The history of musical creativity reveals the strong ties between music and madness, and of how they have nourished one another. Whether as inspiration, creative drive or as the subject of operas, madness fuels and inspires musical creativity, while music restrains madness and transforms it into a performance.
Music and madness have a common denominator: the brain. If you have feelings, you can feel pain. The brain that creates art also creates symptoms. Marvellous works of music or painful delirium may result from the same suffering brain.
The author’s aim is to help readers understand the complexity of the ties between music and madness — as revealed in the lives and works of numerous composers — and the emotions contained in music and the suffering brain alike.

• An invitation to the edge of three fascinating territories: music, emotions and madness.
• An exploration of the close ties between music and mental pathologies: as a source of inspiration, object of study, cure, stimulant and subject of creativity.
• Numerous references to classical and contemporary music and musicians.