You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
It is all too easy for psychoanalysts to write reductionistic and patholo-gizing applied psychoanalytic studies of artists and philosophers—overlooking or downplaying their genius (out of envy perhaps?)—and focusing on their psychological conflicts, character distortions, regressions, infan-tilisms, pathologies, and perversities. It was the proclivity of members of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society to engage on Saturday evenings in this enterprise—Freud's Leonardo being a case in point—that caused the critic and satirist Karl Kraus to set aside his initially favourable attitude toward psychoanalysis and conclude, “Nerve-doctors who pathologize genius ought to have their heads bashed in with the collected works of the genius” (Kraus in Szasz, 1976, p. 113).
In response to Atwood's (1994) essay, “The Pursuit of Being in the Life and Thought of Jean-Paul Sartre,” I wrote, “As a typical ‘pathography’