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The problem of the relationship between genius and psychosis has been investigated in the life and work of Nietzsche, Strindberg, Van Gogh, Blake, Dostoievsky, and many others. But since she was first taken seriously as a poet, no one has suggested that Emily Dickinson may have had psychotic interludes a study of which could contribute to an understanding of her genius. This is the more remarkable because in her own day the notion that she was “crazy” was freely discussed by her acquaintances, and the theme of insanity is one with which she deals repeatedly in her poems and letters.
Her family chose to cover all her non-conforming behavior with one romantic blanket explanation. If they were trying to divert attention from an embarrassing illness their success has been strikingly greater with posterity than with their contemporaries. Their explanation was that her eccentricity was caused by an unhappy love affair, and they succeeded in diverting every biographer who has written about her into a search for the identity of her lover or a demonstration that he never existed.
If she suffered from an emotional illness no layman could hope to diagnose it after the lapse of a century. Whether a medical man could do so on the basis of the evidence I do not pretend to know. The purpose of this paper is to point out some of the indications that she may have been psychotic for at least one extended period of her life and to open a new avenue of investigation that others may follow if they choose.
Let us try to summarize her life story in terms resembling those of a case history. She was born December 19, 1830,