The Psychology Of Men Of Genius

Ernst Kretschmer

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781136332685
• Topic: Medicine
• Subtopic: Health Care Delivery

This is Volume XI of twenty-one of collection of works on Individual Differences. Initially published in 1931, it offers a look at the psychology of genius and is created from the careful examination of a very comprehensive primary source of material in the form of artistic works, but more especially of letters, diaries, memoirs and the original reports of contemporaries. This book is concerned entirely with the personality of genius, the laws governing its biological origin and the psychology of its inner instinctive structure.

PART ONE

LAWS

FIRST CHAPTER

The Inner Voice

SINCE the Italian alienist, Lombroso, first coined that pregnant expression “ genius and madness ” there has arisen in educated circles a very lively discussion, which, however, has been forced to close with the recognition that modern psychiatry has been responsible for—some might say guilty of—establishing such a connection. There is no denying that the partial connection of genius and mental derangement is to many people so distressing anotion, and subject to such inferences, that they would prefer to forget about it altogether. Yet the assertion that these qualities are totally unrelated is so mistaken that Lombroso was already able to quote remarks, some two thousand years old, out of antiquity, affirming the inner kinship of genius and insanity. Such is the observation of Aristotle on the Syracusan writer who could make splendid poetry as long as he remained in a state of mania, but was quite unable to write a single passage when he returned to sanity. Or take the following passage, also from Aristotle: “ Famous poets, artists and statesmen, frequently suffer from melancholia or madness, as did Ajax. In recent times such a disposition occurred in Socrates, Empedocles, Plato and many others, but especially in our poets. ” Elsewhere, the saying of Seneca is encountered : “ Non est magnum ingenium sine mixtura dementiae ”. Lombroso brings forward from a later period, a passage from the French philosopher Diderot, who remarks :

“I have often thought that these reserved and melancholy men owe their extraordinary, almost godlike acuteness of insight to a temporary disturbance of their whole mechanism. One may notice how it brings them now to sublime and now to insane thoughts. They themselves fancy that some godlike being rises up within them, seeks them out and uses them. How near is genius to madness! Yet one is locked up and bound with chains whilst to the other we raise monuments ”

What do men of genius themselves say to all this ? Strange it is to notice how differently the average man on the one hand and certain men of genius on the other, regard these exceptional, exalted emotional states, these conditions of mental disease. “ Ha, how he raves, the unfortunate— and doesn’t know against what he is raving, ” shouted young Goethe, a propos of himself. Nietzsche, in his holy inspiration, rebukes the inert multitude : “ Where is the madness with which you should be inoculated ? ” But Schopenhauer says briefly and drily : “ Genius is nearer to madness than to the average intellect. ” Whilst thus many men of genius themselves prize madness and insanity as the highest distinction of the exceptional man—the biographer stands with uplifted hands before him and guards him from desecration by the psychiatrist !

I should like to add here, yet one more fine dictum of Socrates, which, of course, like many things that have come down to us through the Platonic dialogues, is capable of being variously interpreted. Socrates said of philosophers : “ There are many who carry the thyrsus, but few bacchantes ” In this, he would seem to demand ecstatic emotional conditions in great thinkers and enquirers into truth. Just as Socrates himself ascribed the guidance of his subjective life to his ’daemon’ his inner voice, so also, the related idea of daemoniacal possession is found everywhere among ancient peoples and has been carried thence into more recent times in connection with epileptics and the mentally diseased. We find that in primitive folk consciousness, the three circles of ideas connected with good and evil genius, possession by gods and by devils and mental disease, were never clearly separated. Similarly, the half-mythological forerunners of what to-day we should call the naturalist or medical man of genius, for example, the Faust figure and related types of the Middle Ages, were easily transformed in popular imagination to wizards who stood in league with the same devil as entered into a ’possessed’ mentally-diseased person.

If we really wish to get nearer to the problem of mental aberration and genius, we must ask of the facts themselves. We can ascertain in the first place how many men of genius have been in the strict sense of the word insane, or who have later become mentally diseased. Their number is by no means small. I can recall, to mention only a few of the most famous names, the philosophers Rousseau and Nietzsche, the scientists Galton, Newton and Robert Mayer, the old field-marshal Bliicher, the poets and writers Tasso, Kleist, Holderlin, C. F. Meyer, Lenau, Maupassant, Dostoievsky and Strindberg, also Rethel and Van Gogh, and the composers Schumann and Hugo Wolf.

But if now I proceed to enumerate alongside these clear cases of mental disease, all those severely psychopathic personalities of the type of Michelangelo, Byron, Grillparzer and Platen, with all the isolated psychopathic traits, hysterical and paranoiac reactions, and all abnormal forms of sensibility, such as are encountered at every step in the lives of men of genius, I should not come so easily to the end of my list.

Since it is only with difficulty possible to fix the lower limit to the capacities which we describe as belonging to the realm of genius, it is scarcely practicable to aim at percentage figures to show the degree of overlap of genius and the psychopathic disposition. Only this much can one say: that mental disease, and more especially, those ill-defined conditions on the boundary of mental disease, are decidedly more frequent among men of genius, at least in certain groups, than they are among the general population. This is the fact which sets us off on our trail of reasoning.

Why now does one run against such powerful opposition when one reasserts this fact ? And why does this fact only reveal itself when one takes the trouble to study original material, remaining hidden, painted over and touched up in traditional biography ? Largely owing to the prejudice of ’ psychopathic inferiority ’ ; the opinion that the mentally sound are always superior to the less spiritually normal, not only in a biological, but also in a social, sense. Now, to be completely healthy in mind is very agreeable, but never, in itself, meritorious. The mentally normal man is, according to the conception itself, identical with the typical man, the average man, the philistine. I shall refer later to the scientific conception of normality. For the present, we may say that a sound mind is possessed by the man who is emotionally in a state of stable equilibrium and who has a general feeling of well-being. Peace of mind and restful emotions, however, have never been spurs to great deeds.

To be psychopathic is always a misfortune, but it is a condition which occasionally leads one to great honour. Possibly you have already, at some time, wondered why the man of genius toils through his life as through an endless bramble-bush, why he continues his strivings, misunderstood by his teachers, rejected by his parents, and ridiculed or ignored by his acquaintances. You may have wondered why he is always thrown over by his patrons, why the finest prospects are barred from him again and again by what appears to be secret malice, why his whole life wears itself away in care, rage, bitterness and depression.

Certainly a great deal of the blame lies where it has always been looked for : in the environment, in its complete inability to understand anything that is out of the ordinary, and—consciously or unconsciously—in the simple, downright envy, which commonplace people feel for the strange personality that is overtopping them.

However, the remaining half of the difficulties which beset the life of genius lies in a different place. The healthy, normal-minded man accommodates himself; he accommodates himself in the end even to the most difficult situations; he elbows his way through difficulties, has patience, maintains a cheerful spirit and knows how to take life as it is. With sound instinct he finds his way about in social life among other healthy people. And among men of genius, the relatively healthy ones, though afflicted with nervous troubles, have, as in the cases of Goethe and Schiller perhaps, managed after a time, to acquire this power of adapting themselves to their difficult milieu, even though the ability only comes at the end of a very stormy and conflict-ridden period of youthful development. Any man with an apparently normal mental constitution, however, who continually fails to adjust himself is really no healthy-minded being at all. One can think of such careers as those of Michelangelo or Feuerbach—a constant, abrupt alternation Of success and failure, a chain of exasperation, despair, and disappointment, of violent scenes and a staggering out of one conflict into another. Now this is the surest medical test for the irregularly-constructed personality, the psychopathic individual; that in normal, everyday life he is constantly kicking against the rules and running off the rails. And among men of genius we find a considerable number who are certainly unbalanced according to any reliable token. We find them inclined to delusions of persecution, possessed of tendencies to pathological affect reactions, with pronounced mental disease in the next of kin, and the like.

In short the tragic course of the lives of many geniuses can only be rightly understood when seen from two sides. On the one side, the environment; the normal man with his naive dislike and envy of the uncommon quality which thrusts itself so tiresomely before his eyes, and, with his healthy coarseness of fibre, which does not permit him to get easily disturbed. On the other side, the genius, the exceptional psychopathic man, with his over-sensitive nerves, his intense emotional reactions, his restricted powers of adaptability, his moods, his whims, his ill-temper. And this same being not only treats the honest, bourgeois citizen all too frequently in an irritating, inconsiderate, haughty manner, but also upsets the lives and strains the patience of those who genuinely love him, who would like to do good to him and further his success.

When the wife of a famous scientist after his death had an audience with the King of Sweden, she responded to a sympathetic enquiry about the dead man with the remark : “ Your Majesty, he was intolerable. ” If all biographers had the honesty of this woman, there would be many pedestals to genius decorated with that inscription.

One reads, with a slight smile of superiority, of these teachers of youthful genius who predicted for its bearer a place in a lunatic asylum, simply because they saw in him a truant and a ne’er-do-well and were blind to his real greatness of spirit. But these teachers were absolutely right in their direct observations, for a certain strangeness and irregularity of character is already there, and may be seen even in the earliest years, though genius can only develop at a much later period. In youth, both dispositions—that which leads to genius and that which causes the genius to run amok socially—develop as a single stem. That again is a fact most clearly recognised by geniuses themselves. Bismarck, as a student, remarked, “ I shall become either the greatest vagabond or the first man in Prussia. ”

And Gottfried Keller has put forward the same observation in a well-known sonnet in which we are shown the two greatest wasters and rogues of their school class, meeting again as they pass by in the glimmer of a street lamp—the one a poet, the other a ragged criminal and vagabond.

The way in which Duke Charles Eugene of Wurtemberg schoolmastered the youthful Schiller was certainly very despotic and unintelligent. But that does not mean that the Duke was not, from the standpoint of his own ideals, quite right, when he sought to educate his pupil to the importance of orderliness and moderate living. One can scarcely demand that those who have to live with such characters shall be as wise and clever as the biographers who subsequently survey the whole life course of the genius. At that phase of his life, Schiller did, in fact, offer to the outsider a real problem character, and the picture admits of so little retouching because Schiller was himself in later life its most unsparing critic. He showed in adolescence an astonishing lack of mental symmetry, such as occurs in many cases of typical psychopathic adolescent development. Thousands of mentally abnormal people show at this age the same gestures of genius, the same loud, shouting, boastful, theatrical pose. Yet from these, there develops no genius, only some neglected, foundered, silted-up existence—a slovenly, ineffective student, a coffee-house poet, a common swindler; at best, an odd, eccentric person or an emigrant to distant parts who has vanished without trace.

Now, just one glance from the individual into the general. Who, in general, makes revolutions and similar decisive movements in political or intellectual history ? Is it, perhaps, the moderate people, the peaceful, considerate, industrious, comfortable souls who attain happiness in these revolutionary catastrophes and achieve self-expression in them ? Is it the great majority of people of all ranks, the men who, considered from the medical point of view, possess the greatest measure of spiritual health and stability ?

The essence of every kind of health, mental as well as physical, consists in a feeling of comfort and well-being and a state of equilibrium. For that reason the mentally sound man, just because he is of a restful spirit and knows how to accommodate himself judiciously, does not, in any reasonably tolerable situation, break out into poetry, revolution or war. Most of the outstanding movements in intellectual culture and politics are born of men who do not possess that feeling of completeness and well-being; that is to say, speaking as a psychiatrist, of men mentally abnormal, neurotic, psychopathic and mentally diseased. For the less inner equilibrium a person possesses, the more easily will he lose it altogether under the blows of circumstance. Similarly the less he is endowed with that inner feeling of restful well-being, the more easily will the point be reached when outer circumstances become intolerable : thus he is driven to turning things upside-down, long before the patience of healthy people is exhausted.

Let us observe the extremist, radical political elements which, at the revolutionary turning-points of history, command the political situation from both wings, and, impressing their own nervous energy upon the mind of the inert mass between them, stir into ever fresh commotion the spirits of people more inclined to rest and tranquillity than themselves. Do we not invariably find among these extremists, on the one side fanatics, stormy, morose emotionalists, enthusiasts and prophets ; on the other side cynical, decadent men of letters, the wrecked existences of those who have lived too much, the blase ones who require some new sensation, the gossips, swindlers, poseurs, murderers and perverts ? It is indeed remarkable, when we run over the natural features of these revolutionary types—they are just the same as those which appear in the peace-time practice of the psychotherapist. You will find them depicted in the psychiatric text-book in the section which deals with borderline conditions. They are the psychopathic ones, those who live in delicate psychological equilibrium, in the broad transition zone between the healthy and the mentally diseased. And truly this holds as much for the highly gifted as for the small fry in the general rabble. They are in part, the same people as pass daily through the hands of us nerve specialists in times of peace, to whom we give help and advice in their spiritual need, and on whom we provide expert opinion for families, officials and the law. They are the people who are unstable and feel themselves askew, who do not fit into normal life, who are tossed here and drift astray there, and who, under unfavourable circumstances, fall ill with paranoiac delusions, attacks of hysteria or maniacal outbursts.

And if we now turn to the leading geniuses of great revolutions, the picture only alters in one respect; that we now have before us men of surpassing intelligence. These men are in nowise less psychopathic than the mass of subsidiary, revolutionary types. That is a fact already evident in the stormy drama of the German Reformation, and it becomes clearer still as we pass into the bright biographical illumination of more modern times. Let us glance at the most famous names among the intellectual pioneers and active leaders of the French Revolution : Rousseau, Mirabeau, Robespierre. Robespierre, the son of a father smitten with melancholia, the prototype of the schizoid psychopath and the nervous eccentric. Mirabeau, an adventurer with a problematical past, a degenere superieur with a temperament toned to hypomania. And lastly Rousseau, according to the depth and breadth of his intellectual creativeness, by far the greatest genius of the three— the philosopher Rousseau, severely mentally diseased with persecutional insanity.

So we may conclude that psychopaths and the mentally diseased play a most important part in the development of national life, a role which might be graphically compared to that of the microbe in other organisms. If the intellectual temperature of a period is normal and the social life sound, then the abnormal ones that wander through the mass of healthy people are powerless and ineffective. But if a sore place appears, if the air is close and tense, if there is anything about, which is decayed or corrupt, then the bacteria become at once virulent and active : they penetrate everywhere and bring the whole mass of healthy people into a condition of inflammation and active putrefaction. Hence it is only a small part of the truth when one says that this or that revolutionary fanatic or prophetic idealist has set alight a revolution. The brilliant enthusiast, the radical fanatic and the prophet are always there, just as the tricksters and criminals are—the air is full of them, but only when the spirit of the times gets overheated are they able to produce wars, revolutions and great rearrangements of thought. The psychopaths are always there, but in cool times of peace we give medical reports on them, and in times of social fever— they are our masters.

Among the connections between psychopaths and men of genius at which we have so far glanced are the following : the frequency of psychotics and psychopaths among geniuses, especially in certain groups, such as poets or revolutionary leaders; similarities in the life curves of geniuses and ordinary psychopaths, particularly in the period of youthful development; and, in relation to society, the fermentative effect on world history and intellectual movements which emanate from both groups.

Shall we now draw from all this, the conclusion of Lombroso : genius is madness ? Certainly we shall not. But we shall say: genius is, from a purely biological standpoint, an extreme variant of the human species. Such extreme variants show, over and over again in biology, a diminished stability of structure, a heightened tendency to degeneration and, in inheritance, greater difficulties of propagation than are found in the normal individual of the species. I am thinking at the moment, perhaps, chiefly of human giants and dwarfs with their lowered vitality, or of the hypersensitiveness and liability to disease of highly bred, pedigree horses. Hence we shall not be surprised to find that these extreme variants of the human species, the men of genius, show in their psychological structure an unusual instability, and hypersensitiveness, together with a very considerable liability to psychoses, neuroses and psychopathic complaints. This fact is indeed expressed by our statistics. It is still entirely possible, from the standpoint of a philosophical valuation, to consider the genius as the ideal type of the human species, but it would be in complete opposition to weighty scientific evidence, to attempt to assert, as is very frequently done, that genius expresses the highest degree of soundness and capability in the biological sense...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Foreword
• Preface
• Introduction
• PART ONE
• THE INNER VOICE
• INSTINCT AND INTELLECT
• THE CHIEF FORMS UNDERLYING PERSONALITY DIFFERENCES.
• THE BREEDING OF TALENT
• GENIUS AND RACE
• PART TWO
• SPIRITUAL PERIODICITY. THE ARTIST OF LIFE
• SEX AND PUBERTY.THE CURVESOF LIFE
• THE SCIENTIST
• HEROES AND LEADERS.
• INSPIRED CHARACTERS AND MANKIND’S VENERATION
• THE PROPHET
• PART 3
• PRELIMINARY REMARKS
• PORTRAITS
• SOURCES OF THE PORTRAIT COLLECTION
• INDEX