Los Angeles ? To William Burroughs, it was “insufferable” – a sign that The Man was reaching his tendrils deep into a poet’s psyche.

To some Beats and fellow travelers, Allen Ginsberg’s time in Columbia Presbyterian Hospital, where he was sent by a judge as a very young man, seemed like a scene from “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest”: establishment America grinding down a free spirit.

And to the poet’s best-known biographer, it was the revenge of Squaresville: The doctors, Barry Miles writes in his 1989 “Ginsberg: A Biography,” “thought their job was to make Allen conform and fit into a ‘Saturday Evening Post’ view of society, with a wife and an ordinary job.”

But to a local literary scholar and psychotherapist, who gained unusual access to the poet’s psychiatric records, his seven months in the hospital’s psychiatric ward in 1949 and ’50 was not an assault on his individualism.

“My argument is that he was in a state of collapse and that he needed that hospitalization,” says Janet Hadda, a petite and energetic woman. Now a retired University of California, Los Angeles professor of Jewish and Yiddish literature, she came to her conclusion after reading a wide range of personal and medical records, including some seen by only a handful of people.

Rather than squelching his creativity, this period of enforced rest and routine actually made the callow young man a great writer. “I think he was allowed to be crazy,” Hadda says. “So everything came out – and he lived through it. Most people are terrified what will happen if they lose it. But it happened to him, and he survived. He didn’t have to be afraid because everything had already happened.”

In her article, “Ginsberg in Hospital,” to be published in the Freudian quarterly “American Imago,” Hadda describes this often overlooked period “as a seminal moment in the formation of Allen Ginsberg, poet and public figure, iconoclast and icon.”

Ginsberg’s year

In the literary world, 2006 was certainly Ginsberg’s year. There were several new books and many articles devoted to the genius of Ginsberg’s era-defining poem “Howl,” which just marked its 50th anniversary. This onetime rebel has been enshrined as an Esteemed Author and likened to Walt Whitman.

But in the late ’40s, Ginsberg was a bright but confused Columbia student with unconventional friends. Some of them, such as Burroughs and Jack Kerouac, would go on to become celebrated bohemian writers. Others were dodgy small-time hoods. Ginsberg was also hearing voices of dead artists and poets, including that of William Blake, and hallucinating that the people around him were grotesque “wild animals.”

Janet Hadda, a retired University of California at Los Angeles professor, got access to psychiatric records seen by few scholars when researching Ginsberg

What followed, says Peter Hale, director of the New York-based Allen Ginsberg Trust, is a chunk of his life that’s typically overlooked and that the poet never discussed with him. “No one has really looked into that period very much,” says Bill Morgan, the poet’s former archivist and author of the new book “I Celebrate Myself: The Somewhat Private Life of Allen Ginsberg.” “Other people haven’t had access to that material.”

It was when the budding poet was tied to an incident of burgling that he was sent to Columbia Presbyterian, which the writer entered as part of a plea bargain. This didn’t exactly predispose Ginsberg’s crowd to look kindly on the move: The arrangement, as Miles said by phone from his London home, seemed to pit “the forces of Columbia University and the family against Ginsberg’s bohemian lifestyle.” That the hospital tried to “cure” the poet’s homosexuality – standard practice in those days – didn’t help.

But Hadda said his correspondence and medical records show a young man whose life with a schizophrenic mother and the resulting need to be prematurely responsible wore him down, pushing him into either a narcissistic or “borderline” state. (The poet, born in Newark, N.J., in 1926, was the son of Louis and Naomi Ginsberg, his father a poet and high school teacher, his mother a communist who suffered from paranoia and schizophrenia.)

His sense of reality rose and fell during his hospitalization, and he went through a wide range of anxieties. Ginsberg was both troubled and excited by mental illness: He worried he’d end up like his mother, who’d been lobotomized, but was also energized by the madness of others. Hadda says he was able to come to terms with some of those contradictions there.

For one thing, he saw patients far more unhinged than he. “The people here see more visions in one day than I do in a year,” he wrote to Kerouac. “Allen did not successfully confront the boundary between unending madness and temporary collapse,” Hadda writes, “until his sojourn at the Psychiatric Institute.” That boundary ended up being quite strong: After this period, Ginsberg never had another mental breakdown.

Crazy myths

Ginsberg, of course, isn’t the only poet or artist to be a bit cracked. Robert Lowell was only one of many mad poets of the midcentury period. Romanticism, which was dedicated to reaching the irrational, produced more than its share of great figures who were unmoored. Some of romanticism’s myths die hard.

“Somebody just asked me over the weekend,” Hadda recalls, ” ‘Don’t you think that if so-and-so had had psychiatric care, he would not have been as great an artist?’ This is an absolutely pervasive idea: that mental health somehow blunts creativity. I hear it all the time.”

That notion, she says, “can be personally destructive to people” who could benefit from therapy, “but feel that they will cease to be themselves. It’s a very old idea: that madness and creativity go together. Which they often do, but the opposite isn’t necessarily true. I know there are a lot of mad people who are not creative. Most of them, I think.”