Tobias Dahlkvist, history of ideas. Stockholm University

2011-2016

The aim of the project was to study the conception of genius as a form of insanity in the medicine and science of the late 18th and early 19th century. The aim was not changed in any radical way during the project; but I chose to concentrate primarily on the decades in the middle of that period. The most important debates on genius took place between c. 1880 and c. 1910.

The three most important results of the project
To my great surprise, one diagnosis was far more important than any other in the literature on genius. My initial expectation was that different persons would suggest different diagnoses as the pathological substrate of genius, and that the conflicts within the discourse would concern which diagnosis was correct. It turned out that more or less everything revolved around one diagnosis: epilepsy. Doctors would carry out extensive reinterpretations to show that for instance Poe and Leopardi really were suffering from epilepsy. A number of persons who in retrospect are considered archetypical insane geniuses - Nietzsche, Baudelaire and van Gogh, for instance - did not belong to the key examples at the turn of the century. Their illness did not fit the pattern, because it could not easily be interpreted as epilepsy.

A second result is that the genius issue was very much part of a discourse of criminal anthropology. Genius was associated at least as much with crime in the medicine of the fin de siècle period as with insanity. Criminal anthropology was dominated by two schools: the so-called Lombroso school, to which the criminal's tendency to commit crime was the result of an innate pathology, a form of atavism or degeneration that inescapably disabled the moral compass of the individual, and the so-called Lyon school, which saw crime and its causes as a social problem. Representatives of both schools discussed genius and various geniuses. While Lombroso and his followers considered genius a degenerative psychosis of epileptic origin, the Lyon school saw the genius as a future type of human that had materialised before its time, whose problems to adapt to our time might appear to be pathological but were really manifestations of a higher form of health. In spite of this radical difference in the view of genius, both schools agreed that genius occasioned a special ability to anticipate the development of science through intuition, making discoveries that the ordinary scientists would have to wait for decades to make. Both schools thus held that genius could be put to use by science: the 19th century medical literature on Dostoevsky in particular contains extensive reflections on how his novels anticipate the results of criminal anthropology.

A third result is that there was an interchange between science and medicine on the one hand, and the literature on the other, through which myths were entwined with positivism. Though this interchange obviously was not unknown to me, it turned out to be much more extensive and intricate than expected. This lead in its turn to a slight change in my publication strategies. I had originally planned to discuss the literary context to the medical literature on genius quite cursorily, but it turned out that studying the interplay of medicine and literature at depth in a few select cases was a much more fruitful approach than trying to sum up the entire field.

New research questions generated through the project
A number of other writers seem to me highly interesting to study with the methods that I have developed within the project. Émile Zola, Fernando Pessoa and Otto Weininger all had deep knowledge of the genius issues of the day, and were also, especially Zola, among the writers who were discussed as examples of insane geniuses. Nietzsche and Baudelaire would be very interesting to study, precisely because they were so seldom discussed by the representatives of medicine. Something about them made them not fit the medical model of genius: the texts that did discuss them consequently become all the more important. Madame de Staël and George Sand, finally, are very interesting because they often were considered geniuses in spite of being women, and in spite of genius in itself carried very strong male connotations.

A research question a little further from the project that nonetheless was generated by it concerns the degeneration issue in Sweden. The genius issue formed part of a larger medical discourse on the degeneration of modern man. All over Europe, doctors issued warnings of how man deteriorated physiologically in modern society: hundreds of alarmistic books and articles were published in the second half of the 19th century, in which genius often was considered to be a kind of positive side effect of a degeneration that in itself was pathological (dégénérescence superieure). Sweden formed a highly interesting exception here. Firstly, degeneration came to be discussed at a very late date: it was not until the late 1890s, when the degeneration issue was dwindling on the continent, that Swedish doctors started using the concept. Secondly, degeneration was discussed in a much more moralistic register in Sweden than elsewhere. Whereas French and German doctors considered degeneration a medical problem, it was instantly transformed into a primarily moral problem when introduced into Sweden. Drawing on the knowledge that the project has given me, I would like to study the Swedish degeneration issue with the methods of the Begriffsgeschichte.

Methodologically, the project has given me the opportunity to develop a working method to approach the genius issue: a kind of contextualising cultural history of medicine and science that has turned out to be very fruitful. It may not be a research question in the strict sense, but still an important result of the project.

The international underpinning of the project
The most important international underpinning of the project consists in the fact that the greater part of the articles that the project has generated as well as its planned continuation in the form of a monograph have been or will be written in English. I also presented some results at an international conference on Strindberg in Rome.

Information outside the scientific community
I took part in a broadcast of Vetenskapsradion Historia in the radio channel Sveriges Radio P1 on December 6, 2012, discussing my research and preliminary results of the project. I took part in an interview for the webpage of RJ.

The two most important publications
The single most important publication must surely be my article on Dostoevsky as an example of an insane genius, "The Epileptic Genius: The Use of Dostoevsky as Example in the Medical Debate over the Pathology of Genius", published in the October issue of The Journal of the History of Ideas in 2015. Dostoevsky's epilepsy and his probing of the psychology of the criminal made him the perfect example of an insane genius, and of how genius can anticipate the development of science intuitively, to the criminal anthropologists of the turn of the century. A large conflict between the representatives of the Lombroso school and the Lyon school ensued in the 1880s and 90s regarding whether Dostoevsky was a genius because of, or in spite of, his epilepsy; a conflict that never really has been described at depth before. It was by working with the Dostoevsky image of criminal anthropology that I came to realise to what extent the history of literature and the history of medicine are entwined in the genius controversy. The article itself came off very well, among the best things I have written and certainly published in the finest scientific context.

The other publication that I would like to single out is the article "'Alcoholic and Epileptic Nightmares': Cesare Lombroso, Poe and the Pathology of Genius", accepted for publication in Poe Studies: History, Theory, Interpretation. If genius, crime and epilepsy were combined in Dostoevsky's person and his novels to an extent that a conflict on how to understand his example was bound to break out, Poe was a totally different kind of example and had to be made subject of an extensive interpretation to fit the medico-anthropological model. Poe's well-known drinking was the point of departure of all interpretations: but there ensued a violent polemics concerning whether to consider him a dipsomaniac whose drinking led to epilepsy, or whether his dipsomania on the contrary was a symptom of an undiagnosed epilepsy. The example of Poe is also interesting because there existed already in the 1880s a critical biographical literature on him. But it was not to this that the representatives of medicine when they needed biographical facts to support their interpretations. Instead they drew in particular on Baudelaire's mythical interpretation of Poe. Consequently, in spite of its positivistic pretensions, the medical Poe literature of the turn of the century helped consolidate the Poe myth rather than dispersing it.

The publication strategy of the project
My publication strategy consisted in writing articles mainly in English with the aim of publishing them in international, peer-reviewed journals, that will eventually be fused into a monograph to be published by a suitable, international academic publisher. I made two exceptions from this strategy: firstly a paper that was originally presented at a conference dedicated to Strindberg, in other words in a context were Swedish was the natural language of choice; secondly a lengthy article published in Lychnos that sums up the main results of the projects: it seemed reasonable to writes this kind of article in Swedish. I have consistently submitted my papers to journals that are either freely available through Jstor or Project Muse, or that make the articles freely available through the website of the journal. The article of Strindberg will be included in a volume of conference proceedings that in its entirety will be freely available on-line.

Publications

Utgiven:
”The Epileptic Genius: The Use of Dostoevsky as Example in the Medical Debate over the Pathology of Genius”, Journal of the History of Ideas, vol. 76: 4 (2015), s. 587–608

Antagna för publicering:
”’Alcoholic and Epileptic Nightmares’: Cesare Lombroso, Poe and the Pathology of Genius”, antagen för publicering i Poe Studies: History, Theory, Interpretation (2016)
”Geniets patologi: En studie i 1800-talsmedicinens genibegrepp”, antagen för publicering i Lychnos (2015)

Inskickade men ännu inte bedömda:
”’The Most Modern Type of the Insane Genius’: Schopenhauer and the Pathology of Genius, 1870–1900”, skickad till Schopenhauer-Jahrbuch den 26 januari 2015
”Strindberg som vansinnigt geni: Strindberg, Lombroso och frågan om geniets patologi”, skickad till utgivaren för den peer review-granskade konferensvolymen Strindberg Across Borders den 16 november 2014.