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Originality has long seemed mysterious to its beholders, and hypotheses about its genesis have issued forth since antiquity in the form of general suppositions and postulates about individual cases. Plato, for example, in the Ion, invokes a notion of divine inspiration to explain the wonder of poetry; while, miming Homer at the start of the Iliad, Vergil supplicates the Muse shortly after his opening lines in the Aeneid. Curious folk, scholarly and otherwise, never tire of wondering how innovators of all stripes—philosophers, poets, composers, novelists, filmmakers, architects, and theorists—come up with their ideas. Recently, practitioners of neuroscience have entered the fray with their unique battery of experiments and formulae.
The case of Sigmund Freud is exemplary, for, despite the waning of his star in the 21st century, intense fascination with the genesis of his ideas persists, especially within the psychoanalytic community, where, as one might expect, the methodology used to probe this question borrows unabashedly from the very concepts the derivation of which it seeks to discover. Such curiosity about the wellsprings of creativity—when it relies on biographical detail—turns up, more than occasionally, in its wake, little-known and sometimes embarrassing facts about creators, facts which may or may not prove germane to their creativity. In spite of this, however, inquiries into the sources of highly accomplished individuals’ accomplishments may, as Freud himself coyly intimates in the opening lines of his brilliant, ever-controversial 1910 essay on Leonardo da Vinci, perform a species of idolatry. If that be so, I cannot but applaud;