Sounds From the Bell Jar: Ten Psychotic Authors

Acknowledgements

The authors are grateful to the following for their help: The Archives Department of the Bethlem Royal Hospital and Maudsley Hospital and the Archivist, Miss Patricia Allderidge; Susan Chitty; Lyndall Hopkinson; Ted Hughes and the Sylvia Plath Estate; the Librarian, English Faculty Library, Oxford; the Master and Fellows of Magdalene College, Cambridge, and the Pepys Librarian, Dr Richard Luckett; the Librarian, Swarthmore College, Pennsylvania; the Librarian, Trinity College, Cambridge; Dr David Newsome; Mrs Alice Russell, Trustee of the Benson Deposit, and the Bodleian Library, Oxford; Marion Schulman; Drs R. L. Spitzer and J. Endicott, New York State Psychiatric Institute; Dr Kerith Trick, St Andrew’s Hospital, Northampton; Karina Williamson; Dr Pamela Clemit; Rachel Norris; and, finally, their publisher’s Editor, Sarah Roberts-West.

Preface

Even a cursory glance at the contents of this book will reveal that it falls outside the usual attempts to combine psychological and literary analysis and, having been asked by my co-authors to write the Preface, it rests upon me to explain the purpose of the book and how three people of such disparate professional backgrounds – a mediaevalist, a critic of Victorian literature and an academic/clinical psychologist – have appeared in print together.

My own involvement is easily explained, the germ of such a book being sown many years ago when I was a Sixth Form pupil at school. In preparation for the Oxford Entrance Examination (which I never took), I was asked by my English teacher to write an essay on the subject of the Dryden quotation, part of which forms the title to our first chapter here. I have no idea what I wrote and I cannot imagine that I reached any sensible conclusion about whether or not great wits and madness really are ‘near ally’d’. All I remember is that, either to deter me from reading English at University or to encourage me into my future profession, the teacher wrote across the bottom of the essay: ‘You should become a psychologist!’ And so it turned out, though it is almost a career later – coinciding with my eventual, much more recent arrival in Oxford – that I, for my part, have had the opportunity to try writing the essay again.

The chance to do so arose through a fortuitous meeting with my co-authors, Gwen Watkins and Ruth Pryor, who, I discovered, also had an interest in the topic of creativity and madness, albeit from the different perspective of the literary scholar. A year of incubation (and some trepidation on both sides about whether it would work) and the idea was born for a jointly authored book which drew upon our three respective fields of expertise.

Even so, it may be asked what is unique about the book given that a considerable amount has already been written about creativity and madness generally and about their specific association in literature. The answer, we believe, does indeed lie in the fact that there have been no previous attempts to address the topic in quite the way we have here – by combining a detailed knowledge of literature and literary figures with ideas that can be distilled from contemporary thinking in psychology and psychiatry. As my co-authors have frequently pointed out to me, literary experts who ‘psychologise’ about their subject matter are mostly ignorant of psychology. On the other hand, professional clinicians writing on the topic have tended to do so from a very particular point of view. In both cases the most favoured approach has been psychoanalytic. We do not wish to decry the importance of psychoanalytic ideas (indeed we occasionally draw upon them in our book) and we recognise the affinity that has traditionally existed between Art and psychoanalysis, which appears to offer attractive concepts and a natural language for understanding and describing creativity and the creative person. However, by concentrating exclusively (either through choice or through unfamiliarity) on one narrow psychological approach, much has been missed from other branches of psychology and psychiatry which can also inform our understanding. This is especially true of the possible connection between creativity and psychosis. As shown in the opening chapters of this book, we can actually bring to bear on the topic a good deal of empirical evidence and theory from genetics, experimental abnormal and clinical psychology, personality research, and descriptive psychiatry. These sources have never been discussed before in one place; yet taken together we believe they add an entirely new dimension to an old debate.

Having said that, we should make it clear that it is not our main intention to try to prove whether John Dryden (or others who have written in a similar vein) were right or not; but rather to use the conclusions we reach in the first two chapters as a background against which to examine a particular set of authors whose insanity we will demonstrate is not in doubt. A large part of the book is taken up with a detailed discussion of these authors, whose lives and works stand in their own right as examples of the co-existence of serious mental illness and originality of thought. From a literary viewpoint they are of interest because of what a knowledge of their psychopathology can tell us about them as people and about their writings. To the psychologist they are interesting because of the insights they give us into the nature of insanity, some currently popular conceptions of which have, in our view, become grossly oversimplified. Indeed, if we were to try to convey a single message with the book, it would be this: that the individuals we discuss (among many others we might have chosen) should give pause for thought to anybody who too readily dismisses as ‘merely mad’ those, however uncelebrated, whom psychiatry has diagnosed as psychotic. In other words, tragic though insanity is, we believe our conclusions here signal some hope for those who are likely to suffer it, rather than the total despair with which it is now usually associated.

Being given the opportunity to write this Preface unencumbered by my co-authors has one advantage: it allows me to place on record my personal appreciation of them. When I entered our collaboration, I felt as though I was drifting in a sea of ignorance about their subject matter, a sensation heightened by an awareness of their own encyclopaedic knowledge of it. As time went on, the sea became deeper and wider and I was saved from drowning only by their lessons in how to remain afloat. Their tuition in English Literature, always gentle and never mocking of their uncultured colleague, was an educative experience I value greatly. Beyond that, however, I also wish to thank them as friends for their warmth, hospitality and determined encouragement to continue when they detected in me some moment of doubt.

I would also like to thank The Nuffield Foundation for a grant that enabled me to be freed of my tutorial duties for one term at Magdalen College in order to start work on the book.

Gordon Claridge

If we saved Dr Claridge from drowning (an idea deriving more from his innate modesty than from reality), he saved us from high-flying, always the occupational disease of the literary critic. He caught hold of our airy assumptions that a knowledge of literature included a knowledge of psychology (and more or less everything else) and tethered them to the firm ground of his own discipline.

Ruth Pryor

Gwen Watkins

Oxford

1

Great Wits and Madness

Among its several distinguishing features the human mind has two that most clearly define its uniqueness. One is the capacity to take great leaps of imagination; the other is its susceptibility to the wild aberrations of insane thought. The possibility of an inextricable connection between these qualities has long been debated, with sharp differences of opinion. For some the conjunction has seemed obvious, for others itself a sign of fancy stretched beyond the bounds of credibility. On the face of it the latter view certainly seems the more rational, since the two states in question appear to contain elements that are inherently irreconcilable. One, with its morbid traits of personalised delusion, chaotic thinking, and bizarre affect, is so self-destructive that it frequently reduces the sufferer to psychological incompetence. The other demands talents beyond – in the case of the most creative far beyond – the average, the ability to have insights or craft exquisite objects which, by common consent, we judge of great scientific value or aesthetic worth. Contrasted in this way it seems improbable that madness and creativity could spring from the same source.

Yet from the earliest times it has been suggested that in the insane there is indeed a hint of genius and, by the same token, that originality demands a degree of lunacy. ‘Nullum magnum ingenium sine mixtura dementiae’ (no great imaginative power without a dash of madness), wrote Seneca. He was quoting Aristotle, who had drawn the same conclusion three centuries before, and Plato’s view of the poet as one possessed by a ‘divine madness’. Ever since, numerous writers have paraphrased these sentiments, either in their fiction or through their own self-scrutiny. For Shakespeare, as for Plato, the poet and the lunatic (and indeed the lover) were considered ‘of imagination all compact’. ‘How near is madness to genius’, said Diderot; while Dr Johnson, confessing that he himself had often been nearly insane, commented that ‘all power of fancy over reason is a degree of madness’. Swift put it more pungently, enumerating the brilliant thinkers who would ‘in this our undistinguished age incur manifest danger of Phlebotomy, and Whips, and Chains, and Dark Chambers, and Straw’. Even Wordsworth, seemingly the most sober of men, was driven to write:

We poets in our youth begin in gladness

But thereof come in the end despondency and madness.

Judged on purely intuitive grounds, therefore, an association between creativity and madness can, with equal certainty, be enthusiastically embraced or vigorously rejected, depending upon one’s perspective. Which of these apparently contradictory views is nearer to the truth? Is a trace of insanity a necessary prerequisite for originality? Or is the idea merely a piece of folklore belief, sustained over the centuries by an inexact understanding of the quality of lunacy and destined to go the way of other popular myths, such as phrenology, astrology, and Mesmerism?

We should state at the outset that it is not the purpose, nor within the scope, of this book to try to answer such questions in their entirety. This is partly because, for reasons to be discussed later, we shall be confining ourselves to a certain class of creative person, viz authors: it would therefore be presumptuous of us to extrapolate from our conclusions to other forms of originality. Our scope is also even further limited by the set of authors on whom we have chosen to concentrate. They were selected because it is clear that, judged by current psychiatric criteria, they all did suffer from episodes of psychosis – to introduce a technical term to be defined more precisely as we proceed through this and the following chapter, but which for the moment can be taken as synonymous with the layperson’s conception of mental illness as it occurs in its most disintegrative form and which especially refers to serious disorders, like schizophrenia. Being both eminent authors and psychotic persons our sample is scarcely representative, either of writers or of the mentally ill and therefore cannot, by itself, stand as evidence for the supposed connection between creativity and insanity.

Our interest in these authors, and our reason for choosing them in particular, were also dictated by the fact that their writings contain abundant evidence of their psychological disorder, which they themselves often described in great detail. The main intention of our book, therefore, is to re-examine their lives and works in a manner not previously attempted, combining the expertise of the literary critic and the professional psychologist, in order to show how their creativity and their tendency to psychosis shaped and influenced each other. We should stress that we shall not be attempting either complete biographies or conventional literary criticism of our chosen authors, most, if not all, of whom have already received considerable attention from both those points of view. Instead our aim is to show how, through joint literary and psychological analysis, new insights can be achieved into the artistic and personal qualities of the authors in question. This will prove to be true, not only in considering the authors individually, but also in demonstrating some common patterns of behaviour, personality, and creative expression among writers subject to pathological mental states.

Despite focusing on some rather special examples where creativity and psychosis co-existed in the same individuals, our analysis will inevitably lead us to consider whether in these particular persons their tendency to madness and their capacity for unusual originality of thought were indeed, in some fundamental sense, intimately connected. This, in turn, will cause us to address the broader issue of whether there is, in a more general sense, a genuine, causal association between insanity and at least some forms of creativity; and, if that is so, what it can tell us about the underlying qualities of psychosis and of the creative process.

As a background, we shall start by considering the evidence and arguments in the creativity/madness debate. This discussion will be spread over two chapters and it should be noted here that, for clarity of presentation, it will sometimes be necessary to introduce very briefly in this chapter certain ideas which will then be discussed more fully in the next. For, as we shall see, the topic we are about to review has many different strands, having been the subject of extensive and increasingly systematic enquiry from several different points of view that have taken it well beyond the realm of intuitive speculation from which it began. For that reason it will be useful to summarise the main themes that will run through our account. This will provide some guidelines for those readers unfamiliar with the area and also help to clear away in advance some misconceptions which, even among those knowledgeable of it, have sometimes obscured the debate.

The first point to be made echoes a remark in the opening paragraph of this chapter; namely that effective creative production and an ongoing state of serious mental illness seem quite incompatible. We cannot emphasise too strongly here that we would not disagree with that conclusion. As we shall see in more detail in the next chapter, there are many features of such conditions that make them quite obviously inimical to the creative act. These include not only chaotic disruption of thinking (and perception) upon which originality ultimately depends; but also disturbances of mood, motor response, and volition that secondarily prevent the individual from organising his or her mental processes into the orderly sequence required for creative work. Or, as Sylvia Plath, one of the writers to be considered in this book, put it, with more feeling:

When you are insane you are busy being insane – all the time ... When I was crazy that was all I was.[38]

We can therefore anticipate – and this brings us to our second theme – that the answers we seek actually lie elsewhere than in a simple equation between creative and mad thought. That is to say, if creativity and psychosis are found to be connected then this is more likely to be revealed, not as a function of the psychotic state itself, but in more subtle ways – for example, through certain modes or forms of thinking and perception which the tendencies to psychosis and creativity might prove to have in common. Some space will be devoted later to this question, drawing on various lines of research and some current theories about the causes and underlying mechanisms of psychosis. Suffice it to say here that the centrepiece of that part of our discussion will be the idea that normality and psychosis are essentially continuous with each other and that healthy varieties in thinking style and the disposition to psychotic breakdown substantially overlap, indeed may be identic al. Viewed in this way some part, at least, of the supposed connection between creativity and madness will then be seen to be entirely comprehensible. In particular it will help to resolve the deep paradox that has already surfaced in this book and will continue to do so: how it is that the same features of individuality can be expressed in such totally disparate forms.

Our third theme will, however, sound several notes of caution. One will be a reminder that, even if the above conclusions are correct, it does not follow that creativity and psychosis (or the tendency to it) are entirely synonymous. The ability to formulate original thoughts, as well as the opportunity to put these into effect, both demand several other qualities, personal as well as situational, that may be partially or completely independent of those that might be ascribable to ‘psychotic’ modes of thinking. In other words, in considering a possible connection between the creative and the mad it is the differences, as well as the similarities, between them that need to be understood. Furthermore, we also need to keep in sight the fact that ‘creativity’ is itself an ambiguous concept, having been given various meanings and judged according to differing criteria depending on the context in which it has been studied. How far, for example, is it simply a sign of high intelligence? And is mere eminence a good yardstick? It is unlikely that a single explanation can fully account for a human activity that has been defined in such varied ways. Even if an agreed definition can be arrived at and some core features identified, it need not be the case that all forms of creative expression demand precisely the same set of mental operations or depend equally upon the same intellectual qualities.

Finally, although covered in more detail in the next chapter, a brief word needs to be inserted here about some psychiatric terminology that will be encountered in what follows. This is necessary in order to clarify certain observations that some authors have made about the precise aspects or forms of psychosis to which creativity might be especially connected. As intimated earlier, the general term ‘psychosis’ refers to serious disruption of the person’s mental and emotional life. As used here, it is also confined to a type of disorder that is normally described as ‘functional’. That is to say, it has no obvious or gross organic cause, such as a brain lesion, a fact which sets it apart from the truly neurological conditions – like, for example, Alzheimer’s disease or epilepsy. But even functional psychosis can vary in symptomatology and psychiatrists generally distinguish between two main forms. In one – schizophrenia – the emphasis is on bizarreness of thinking, hallucinations, and impaired social behaviour. In the other – affective disorder – the predominant feature, as the name implies, is profound emotional change: either serious depression, or more classically, the wild mood swings of manic-depressive psychosis. Although psychiatrists have traditionally preferred to regard these two varieties of psychosis as distinctly separable ‘diseases’, it now seems more probable – as we shall have occasion to state several times in this book – that that is not so. For one thing, each can occur in a mild or ‘borderline’ form. Furthermore, the symptoms of even full-blown affective psychosis and schizophrenia overlap considerably, suggesting that they simply represent different ways in which a common tendency to insanity can manifest itself. However, for the purpose of discussion in this chapter it will be more appropriate to preserve the distinction between them.

Bearing these points in mind, let us now start to consider the question of creativity and madness in more detail. A complete review of what is now a vast, varied – and sometimes idiosyncratic – literature would take us well beyond our available space and our aim here will be to summarise the main approaches to the topic, in order to try to disentangle some arguments in the debate and draw some general conclusions from it. In doing so we shall concentrate in this chapter on lines of research that address the general issue of whether psychosis and creativity are in fact connected. Then, in the next chapter, after elaborating further on the features of psychosis itself, we shall return to examine how explanations of it might also give an account of certain aspects of the creative process.

The oldest, and what might be termed the ‘classic’, approach to the systematic study of creativity and madness is biographical. Traceable to the early part of the nineteenth century, this consisted of retrospective psychiatric analyses of famous historical figures who, because of their accomplishments, can be judged outstandingly creative. The seminal work of such type was that carried out by the Italian psychiatrist, Lombroso, who set out to demonstrate the pathological nature of genius, quoting examples as varied as Julius Caesar, Mohammed, Newton, Rousseau, and Schopenhauer.[22] Writing, as he did, in an era before medicine had even begun to construct its modern classification of psychiatric disorder, Lombroso included among his subjects many who would now be considered to have suffered from brain diseases of organic origin (Julius Caesar, for example, was epileptic). In contemporary terms, therefore, his diagnoses were too inexact to stand as definitive evidence for (or against) a connection between creativity and madness, as we would now construe it. Added to which Lombroso – more famous for his theory about the physiognomic stigmata of criminality – interpreted his observations on genius in a similarly negative fashion, viewing social deviance and the propensity to creativity as alternative expressions of biological degeneracy.

These early pathographic analyses nevertheless started a wave of interest in the topic and subsequently stimulated many other medical writers to apply their diagnostic acumen to the problem. Although mostly not accepting Lombroso’s explanation of it, they were virtually unanimous in their opinion that genius is indeed often accompanied by madness, even allowing for cases that could be ascribed to gross disease of the nervous system. Thus, Becker, in his historical survey of the numerous monographs published on the subject in the hundred years up to 1950, notes that the vast majority had reached that conclusion; though he also comments on the many different interpretations that were placed on the evidence.[7] These range from the notion that creativeness reflects the same warring psychological tendencies that are responsible for insanity to the intriguing, though question-begging, idea that some mad people are simply labelled as geniuses because of their apparently mystical and divinely inspired qualities of thought.

A notable exception to this consensus in the early literature that madness and creativeness are frequently connected is a study carried out at the beginning of the century by Havelock Ellis.[15] He conducted a survey of ‘British genius’, examining the psychological, physical, and other characteristics of 1020 eminent people listed in the Dictionary of National Biography. Ellis found only a moderate rate (about 4 per cent) of frank insanity among his subjects; a figure, incidentally, that included some examples of brain disease. Bowerman, in a less well-known but identical investigation of American geniuses, reported the same result.[9]

Two points need to be made about these studies, however. First, although rejecting the explanation of creativity that prevailed among medical writers at that time, both Ellis and Bowerman did consider that there was some connection with psychological morbidity, in a more general sense. ‘The prevailing temperament of men of genius’, Ellis said (and Bowerman agreed with him), ‘is one of great nervous sensitivity and irritability’, a tendency to melancholy, and what he called a ‘germinal nervous instability’.

The second point to note about the Ellis and Bowerman surveys is that neither was concerned with cases of really outstanding creativity, of the kind that have been the subject of individual biographical analyses. The persons surveyed were certainly eminent, but mostly people (even politicians!) whose achievements were rarely so enduring as to place them in the class apart to which we would assign the truly original thinkers in history. It could be argued that if a connection with florid madness is to be revealed in biographical data this is most likely to be found in a conjunction among extreme cases: the very creative on whom most of the detailed accounts have concentrated. More recent reviewers of the biographical evidence about the latter have certainly continued to comment on the remarkable frequency with which serious mental disorder occurs among outstandingly creative people. For example, Prentky, in his book Creativity and Psychopathology, tabulates the probable psychiatric diagnoses that could be applied to certain eminent writers, artists, scientists and composers.[29] Among writers alone – and even excluding those discussed in the present volume – he concludes that all of the following were either schizophrenic or suffered from an affective psychosis: Strindberg, Baudelaire, Kant, Swift, Shelley, Johnson, Hölderlin, Donizetti, Conrad, Kafka, Coleridge, Schopenhauer, Barrie, Schiller, Crane, Chatterton, Rousseau, Tasso, Maupassant, Balzac, and Boswell. In addition, Prentky notes, there were many others who showed signs of ‘borderline psychosis’.

A similar exercise has been undertaken by Karlsson whose work we shall refer to again because of the interesting comments he has made about his observations from a genetics viewpoint.[20] To the list of writers who developed psychoses Karlsson adds, among others, Hugo, Scott, Tolstoi, Pope, and Poe and puts the overall incidence of such disorders among the individuals he surveyed at around 30 per cent; a staggeringly high figure, given that, taken together, non-organic forms of psychosis are usually quoted as carrying a lifetime risk of about 5 per cent.

Of course, from a strictly scientific viewpoint these individual biographical studies can be criticised on the grounds that they are biased towards rather special cases; added to which, as Becker points out, such accounts were usually written by clinicians whose professional interest in the abnormal inevitably caused them to focus on signs of pathology. In contrast, some contemporary clinicians who have discussed the topic have been much less enthusiastic about connecting creativity to psychosis. This is especially true of certain psychiatric writers who, drawing on the concepts of psychodynamic psychology, have devoted considerable attention to the nature of the creative process and, in the course of doing so, have expressed an opinion about the idea. Mostly they have been ambivalent, admitting on the one hand that both creativity and psychosis probably share similar underlying psychic mechanisms – unconscious motivation, involvement of ‘primary process’ thinking (fantasy), ideational styles and so on; yet, on the other hand, unwilling to bring the two states together in any causal sense. Thus, Storr acknowledges that a certain kind of original genius is inseparable from the schizoid (i.e. schizophrenic-like) personality structure, quoting Kafka, among writers, as a particular example.[36] However, he draws back from incorporating this into a general theory about creativity, preferring instead to emphasise the more superficial differences between the psychotic and the creative person: that the former is overwhelmed by and the latter in control of his or her ‘original’ thoughts.

Rothenberg, another psychiatrist to consider the question, reacts with similar equivocation.[33] He vacillates between describing the connection between creativity and psychosis as ‘folkloristic’ and ‘clearly exaggerated’, and confessing to be puzzled that it has been documented so often. Finally, he comes to the conclusion that psychopathology plays no causative role in creativity, except in the choice of subject matter, and that where it does exist it stems from social causes; for example the stress that the person of original mind experiences in being at odds with society. Somewhat like Storr he suggests that it is only in overcoming such psychopathology that effective creating can occur – an uncontroversial conclusion but one that scarcely illuminates our understanding.

Arieti, an expert on both creativity and schizophrenia – and therefore the most qualified among these contemporary psychiatric writers to comment – is equally disappointing in the light he throws on the issue.[5] Admittedly he is more explicit than the other two in detailing traits, such as unusual forms of thinking, which seem responsible for both psychotic symptomatology and creative production. He even underlines the similarity by noting that such traits can be either adaptive or detrimental – i.e. lead to illness – depending on whether or not they are modified by other, more positive, qualities. However, he then fails to follow through his rather important point to the logical conclusion of considering how it might at least explain those many instances where outstanding originality and insanity have been found to co-exist. In fact Arieti’s coverage of the latter is very cursory and he swiftly shifts to a discussion of examples of, to use Pickering’s term, ‘creative malady’; such as Proust’s asthma and Darwin’s psychosomatic palpitations – examples that are interesting in themselves but largely irrelevant to the creativity/psychosis debate.[28]

In short, although all three of these psychiatric authors offer some fascinating insights into the depth psychology of creativity, we find little in their writings that helps to resolve the question of its possible connection with psychosis. When the issue is addressed it is skirted around, it seems to us, by the unwillingness of all three of the authors concerned – understandable perhaps because of their daily closeness to the victims of mental illness – to see beyond the pathology of the psychotic state itself; their failure to appreciate our – or rather Sylvia Plath’s – point made earlier: that when insane the psychotic individual is too preoccupied struggling against overpersonalised or idiosyncratic thoughts to create effectively. Consequently, they never really probe the significance of what those two activities might have in common. As for the results from individual biographical studies, they seem most comfortable with an explanation that simply appeals to the idea of ‘special cases’.

An even more negative view of such studies has been taken in academic psychology. Indeed, in some quarters the whole subject matter of creativity and psychosis has been ignored completely. For example, a quite recent book of advanced readings, entitled The Nature of

Creativity, edited by a very prominent cognitive psychologist, and intended for researchers in the area, makes absolutely no reference to the topic![35] Where interest has been shown it has tended to be critical of the idea of connecting creativity to madness. The reason for this can be traced historically to the fact that research on creativity in academic psychology has formed a quite separate strand of enquiry from that originating in the early pathographic analyses carried out by medical writers. In contrast to the latter, academic psychologists have concentrated more on creativity as a normal cognitive trait and with problems like its psychometric measurement, development, and correlations with other – mostly ‘desirable’ – characteristics. This work has its origins in the early intelligence test movement and, later, in a specific concern with creativeness as a possibly separable aspect of intellectual functioning. Much of that research has, in turn, been inspired by an attempt, especially among American psychologists, to understand and predict ‘giftedness’: as such, in seeking reasons for differences in creativity, their preference has naturally been to look for evidence of the latter’s association with excellence, superiority, and health rather than with maladjustment or psychological deviance. The pioneering example here is a mammoth longitudinal study undertaken and described in a six volume work by Terman and his colleagues who, beginning in 1921, selected a large group of so-called gifted children and then followed their progress over a period of thirty-five years. We shall refer again to this investigation but there is one aspect of it which it is appropriate to comment upon at this point.

In what was in effect a digression from the main study, Cox, a colleague of Terman, conducted a ‘historiometric’ analysis of the mental traits of 301 carefully selected individuals, living between 1450 and 1850, who could be recognised as of outstanding genius.[13] In addition to retrospective estimates of IQ, Cox also constructed ‘psychographic’ profiles of character