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.
Thomas C. Caramagno's The Flight of the Mind is, quite simply, one of the most significant books on Virginia Woolf published in the last several years. Unlike other recent psychological studies which theorize that Woolf's lifelong affliction with mental illness arose from one or more traumatic biographical events—repeated childhood sexual abuse from her half-brothers, the failure to mourn her mother's untimely death, her father's oppressive patriarchy and extravagant mourning—Caramagno's research suggests that the novelist suffered from a biochemical disorder, manic depression, which was probably genetically inherited. The Flight of the Mind is, to my knowledge, the first “neurobiography” published on a major literary figure, and its importance far transcends the valuable insights it brings to bear on Woolf's life and art.
Caramagno is highly knowledgeable about the role of biochemistry in the development of mental illness and, to his credit, he has familiarized himself with nearly 1,200 reports on manic-depressive illness that appear each year worldwide in medical journals. The Flight of the Mind is truly an interdisciplinary study, impressive in both its psychiatric and literary dimensions. Caramagno notes that, perhaps more than any other psychiatric disorder, manic-depressive illness reveals the intimate connection between brain and mind. Whereas most literary psychobiographers tend to employ Freud's psychological model of the mind, which seeks to explain mental illness in terms of a patient's unconscious thoughts, feelings, and responses to external events, Caramagno's neurobiography abandons the effort to discover (or impose) an underlying psychological explanation for what is essentially a neurological disorder. Unlike neurotic conflicts, manic-depressive illness follows its own unique biological rhythms, in which episodes of mania