In the current climate of scholarship, when the “self” and the “subject” have been deconstructed, and the author himself pronounced dead, one hardly knows how to speak of genius and creativity. Caught in a web of disciplinary discourses, or destabilized by practices ranging from gender-flexing to hypertext, the self has lost its cultural cachet, and the artist has shed his mystique, if not his very agency, as creator. In The Artist and the Emotional World, John E. Gedo largely sets aside recent efforts to redefine and problematize the human subject, which is not to say he is unaware of them. Commenting on “the struggles of a creative life,” he notes the current fashion among reviewers “to deny that there is such a thing as a masterpiece or…geniuses” (p. 69) and alludes to