Nietzsche and the Psychology of Genius

In his retrospective account of a creative lifetime, the elderly Thomas Mann condenses his own story with the biographies of the most eminent artists and thinkers of his people, conceived as one figure, the composer Adrian Leverkühn. Mann represents the creative gifts of genius through the symbol of Leverkühn's Faustian bargain with the forces of darkness. At the same time, he borrows from mythology the theme of the destruction of the would-be artist by the arrows of jealous Apollo. On a more concrete level, he characterizes the consequence of commitment to the creative act as inevitable frustration of the needs of the genius for human intimacy. This fate leads the great creator to concentrate on the subject of emotional suffering in his most significant works. Hence Mann entitles Leverkühn's most masterful composition “The Lamentations of Doctor Faustus.”

Psychoanalytic studies of genius (e. g. Eissler, 1961, 1963, 1971; Sterba and Sterba, 1954; Nagera, 1964; Lubin, 1972) have tended to focus on the biographies of manifestly depressive personalities, such as Beethoven or van Gogh, or on those of others, like Leonardo da Vinci and Goethe, who had difficulties of some magnitude in their personal relationships. These studies therefore suggest that Mann's portrayal of the creative personality might well serve as a general prototype. Such a conclusion has been made explicit by K. R. Eissler (1967), who assumes that genius and psychosis necessarily bear many common features—homologies particularly likely to surface during adolescence and whenever the great creator may be deprived of the opportunity to exercise his gifts.

I have reservations, however, about the universality of this characterization of greatness (see Gedo, 1970, 1972a). I believe the proponents of this hypothesis have engaged in circular reasoning in deliberately choosing overtly disturbed personalities as the subjects of their pathobiographical investigations