Abstract
I intend in this chapter to focus on one specific side of genius—its relation to psychological states and diagnoses, most particularly obsessive thinking and compulsive behaviors. My interest is less to locate madness in any one person and more in observing the change of certain kinds of epistemological categories that reshape the nature of knowledge about madness and genius and the instantiation of that knowledge within culture.
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Notes
Lennard Davis, Obsession: A History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 48.
Alexander Anderson, An Inaugural Dissertation on Chronic Mania (New York: T. and J. Swords, 1796), 6.
Thomas Arnold, Observations on the Nature, Kinds, Causes and Prevention of Insanity, Lunacy, or Madness (London: G. Robinson, 1882), I, 106, 108.
Kinneret S. Jaffe, “The Concept of Genius in Eighteenth Century French Aesthetics,” Journal of the History of Ideas 4 (1980): 596.
Walter Scott, The Journal of Sir Walter Scott: Volume 1: From the Original Manuscript at Abbotsford, ed. David Douglas (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1890), 45.
William Sharpe, A Dissertation upon Genius (London: C. Bathurst 1755), 47.
Cheyne to Richardson, July 1742, in The Letters of Doctor George Cheyne to Samuel Richardson (1733–1743), ed. Charles F. Mullett (New York: Columbia University Press, 1943), 104.
Samuel Johnson, Rasselas: Prince of Abyssinia (Chicago: McClurg, 1889), 172.
Davis, Obsession, 77. See also John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (London: William Tegg, 1849), 94.
Étienne Esquirol, Mental Maladies: A Treatise on Insanity, trans. E. K. Hunt (Philadelphia: Lea and Blanchard, 1845), 39.
J. J. Moreau (de Tours), La psychologie morbide (Paris: Victor Masson, 1859), 53.
Anthony Trollope, An Autobiography (London: Oxford University Press, 1923; repr., 1936), 30.
Werner Muensterberger, Collecting: An Unruly Passion (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), 119, 121.
Edward Bulwer-Lytton, Confessions of a Water Patient (London: H. Bailliere, 1848), 15–18.
Arthur MacDonald, Émile Zola: A Study of His Personality (Washington, DC, 1898), 478.
Émile Zola, The Masterpiece, trans. Thomas Walton (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 41.
Francis Galton, The Art of Travel (London: John Murray, 1872; rpt., London: Phoenix Press, 2000), 79.
Francis Galton, Memories of My Life (London: Methuen, 1908), 154.
D. W. Forrest, Francis Galton: The Life and Work of a Victorian Genius (New York: Taplinger, 1974), 45; citing
F. Galton, Narrative of an Explorer in Tropical South Africa (London: John Murray, 1853), 115.
Jacques Derrida, Geneses, Genealogies, Genres, and Genius: The Secrets of the Archive (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), 1.
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© 2016 Lennard J. Davis
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Davis, L.J. (2016). Genius and Obsession: Do You Have to Be Mad to Be Smart?. In: Chaplin, J.E., McMahon, D.M. (eds) Genealogies of Genius. Palgrave Studies in Cultural and Intellectual History. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137497673_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137497673_5
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