Exhaustion: A History

1. Quoted in Dagmar Heuberger, “Das ist das historische Vorbild für den Rücktritt des Papsts,” Aargauer Zeitung, February 12, 2013, http://www.aargauerzeitung.ch/international/das-ist-das-historische-vorbild-fuer-den-ruecktritt-des-papstes-126050271 (accessed February 17, 2015) (my translation).

2. See, for example, Nick Squires, “Pope’s Final Address: God Was Asleep on My Watch,” Telegraph, February 27, 2013, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/the-pope/9896792/Popes-final-address-God-was-asleep-on-my-watch.html (accessed June 15, 2015).

3. See, for example, Naomi Klein, This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2014).

4. See, for example, Will Steffen et al., “Planetary Boundaries: Guiding Human Development on a Changing Planet,” Science, February 13, 2015, http://dx.doi.org/10.1126/science.1259855 (accessed March 7, 2015).

5. See, for example, Stephen Emmott, Ten Billion (London: Penguin, 2013); and Danny Dorling, Population 10 Billion (London: Constable, 2013).

6. World Health Organization, “Depression,” fact sheet, no. 369, October 2012, http://www.who.int/mediacentre/factsheets/fs369/en/ (accessed January 13, 2015).

7. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), “Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (CFS),” February 14, 2013, http://www.cdc.gov/cfs/causes/risk-groups.html (accessed January 13, 2015).

8. See, for example, Sighard Neckel and Greta Wagner, eds., Leistung und Erschöpfung. Burnout in der Wettbewerbsgesellschaft (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2013); and Wilhelm Schaufeli, Michael P. Leiter, and Christina Maslach, “Burnout: 35 Years of Research and Practice,” Career Development International 14, no. 3 (2009): 206.

9. See, for example, Slavoj Žižek, Living in the End Times (London: Verso, 2011).

10. For a discussion of the different symptoms and definitions of a range of fatigue syndromes, see Johanna Dörr and Ulf Nater, “Erschöpfungssyndrome—Eine Diskussion verschiedener Begriffe, Definitionsansätze und klassifikatorischer Konzepte,” Psychotherapie, Psychosomatic, medizinische Psychologie 63, no. 2 (2013): 69–76.

11. See, for example, George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003). Lakoff and Johnson demonstrate not only that our conceptual system is largely metaphorical in nature but also that concepts structure what we perceive and even how we perceive phenomena, thus substantially shaping our everyday reality. Darian Leader and David Corfield provide some compelling evidence for the power of metaphors to affect the ways in which we experience and interpret bodily symptoms, in Why Do People Get Ill? (London: Hamish Hamilton, 2007).

12. See, for example, Alain Ehrenberg, The Weariness of the Self: Diagnosing the History of Depression in the Contemporary Age, trans. David Homel et al. (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2010).

13. Edward Shorter, From Paralysis to Fatigue: A History of Psychosomatic Illness in the Modern Era (New York: Free Press, 1992), 267–94.

1. There are now various other lines of investigation, of course, such as research on the genetics of depression, hormonal abnormalities, the link between depression and stress, and the use of brain imaging to detect microscopic abnormalities in brain structure and functioning.

2. For more general literature on Galen, see, for example, Christopher Gill, Naturalistic Psychology in Galen and Stoicism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010); Christopher Gill, Tim Whitmarsh, and John Wilkins, eds., Galen and the World of Knowledge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009); and R. J. Hankinson, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Galen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008).

3. For an overview of the historical transformations of the concept and the ways in which the condition was theorized from classical antiquity to the present day, see Jennifer Radden, introduction to The Nature of Melancholy: From Aristotle to Kristeva, ed. Jennifer Radden (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 3–51. See also Matthew Bell, Melancholia: The Western Malady (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014); and Clark Lawlor, From Melancholia to Prozac: A History of Depression (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012).

4. Aristotle, Problems, trans. W. S. Hett (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1957), 2:155.

5. John Cassian, The Monastic Institutes, trans. Edgar C. S. Gibson, in A Select Library of Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers of the Christian Church, ed. Henry Wace and Philip Schaff (New York: Christian Literature, 1894), 2nd ser., 11:183–641; Siegfried Wenzel, The Sin of Sloth: Acedia in Medieval Thought and Literature (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1967); Werner Post, Acedia—Das Laster der Trägheit. Zur Geschichte der siebten Todsünde (Freiburg: Herder, 2011).

6. See, for example, Marsilio Ficino, Three Books on Life: A Critical Edition and Translation with Introduction and Notes, trans. Carol B. Kaske and John R. Clark Medieval & Renaissance Texts & Studies, vol. 57 (Tempe, Ariz.: Medieval & Renaissance Texts & Studies, 1998); Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989); and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, The Sorrows of Young Werther, trans. Michael Hulse (London: Penguin, 1989).

7. Radden, introduction to Radden, Nature of Melancholy, 25; Emil Kraepelin, Manic Depressive Illness, trans. Mary Barclay, ed. George Robinson [from 8th ed. of Textbook of Psychiatry, 1909–1915] (Edinburgh: Livingstone, 1920).

8. Sigmund Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia,” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. and trans. James Strachey (London: Vintage, 2001), 14:243–58; Melanie Klein, Love, Guilt and Reparation and Other Works, 1921–1945 (London: Hogarth Press, 1975).

9. Frederick Goodwin and Kay Renfield Jamison, Manic-Depressive Illness (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990).

10. For a recent biography of Galen, see Susan P. Mattern, The Prince of Medicine: Galen in the Roman Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013).

11. Galen, “The Pulse for Beginners,” in Selected Works, trans. P. N. Singer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 339–41.

12. For an analysis of the symptoms of depression, see Alain Ehrenberg, The Weariness of the Self: Diagnosing the History of Depression in the Contemporary Age, trans. David Homel et al. (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2010); and the discussion of the DSM-V and ICD-10 definitions of depression in chapter 9 of this book. For a discussion of the parallels between ancient melancholia and modern depression, see also Stanley W. Jackson, Melancholia and Depression: From Hippocratic Times to Modern Times (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1990).

13. Galen, On the Affected Parts, ed. and trans. Rudolph E. Siegel (London: Karger, 1976), 92–93.

17. Piereluigi Donini, “Psychology,” in Hankinson, Cambridge Companion to Galen, 185–88.

18. Galen, On the Affected Parts, 93.

19. Galen also discusses this idea in his treatise On the Doctrines of Hippocrates and Plato and in his late pamphlet The Faculties of the Soul Follow the Mixtures of the Body. See Donini, “Psychology,” 184.

20. Galen, “The Soul’s Dependence on the Body,” in Selected Works, 155.

21. In some texts Galen goes even further, suggesting that the soul is in fact identical to the organs in which it is seated and, in particular, that the soul might be identical to the cerebral pneuma. See Donini, “Psychology,” 201.

22. Galen, “Soul’s Dependence on the Body,” 160.

23. See chaps. 2, 4, and 8.

24. Donani, “Psychology,” 196.

25. Apollonius of Rhodes, Jason and the Golden Fleece, trans. Richard Hunter (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 75.

26. Glenn R. Bugh, introduction to The Cambridge Companion to the Hellenistic World, ed. Glenn R. Bugh (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 1–8. For other texts on Apollonius, see Theodore D. Papanghelis and Antonios Rengakos, eds., Brill’s Companion to Apollonius Rhodius, 2nd rev. ed. (Leiden: Brill, 2008).

27. Níta Krevans and Alexander Sens, “Language and Literature,” in Bugh, Cambridge Companion to the Hellenistic World, 201.

28. Apollonius of Rhodes, Jason and the Golden Fleece, 14, 33, 50–51.

30. Ibid., 78, 113, 128–29.

32. Ibid., 136, 51, 31.

34. In 1907, the American psychologist William James wrote a short pamphlet called The Energies of Men, which, just like the Argonautica, illustrates the powerful impact that ideas can have on our physical and mental energy levels.

35. Darian Leader and David Corfield, Why Do People Get Ill? (London: Hamish Hamilton, 2007).

36. Placebo studies, for example, have shown that injections have a higher placebo effect than pills, and that large pills work better than smaller pills, but that very small pills are more effective than average-size ones. All this suggests that belief, suggestion, symbolism, and representation play a significant role in the body’s reaction to certain stimuli. See ibid., 109.

37. Leader and Corfield cite various studies that show that “the fewer one’s social relationships, the shorter one’s life expectancy and the more devastating the impact of infectious diseases. Surprising as it may seem, this is statistically a greater risk factor than smoking or obesity, and even after taking these latter variables into account, it makes someone two and a half times more likely to die than someone of the same age and economic status who has a network of social relations” (ibid., 155).

40. Ibid., 239. Here, Corfield and Leader specifically refer to a study by J. Kiecolt-Glaser et al., “Slowing of Wound Healing by Psychological Stress,” Lancet 346 (1995): 1194–96.

41. Mindfulness meditation, in contrast, has been shown to boost immune response. See Leader and Corfield, Why Do People Get Ill?, 285.

1. The following account of the history of acedia in the Middle Ages is indebted to two excellent studies on the subject: Siegfried Wenzel, The Sin of Sloth: Acedia in Medieval Thought and Literature (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1967); and Werner Post, Acedia—Das Laster der Trägheit. Zur Geschichte der siebten Todsünde (Freiburg: Herder, 2011).

2. For more information on Evagrius Ponticus, see, for example, A. M. Casiday, Evagrius Ponticus: The Early Church Fathers (London: Routledge, 2006); and George Tsakiridis, Evagrius Ponticus and Cognitive Science: A Look at Moral Evil and the Thoughts (Eugene, Ore.: Wipf and Stock, 2010).

3. Andrew Solomon, The Noonday Demon: An Anatomy of Depression (London: Vintage, 2002).

4. Quoted in Wenzel, Sin of Sloth, 5.

7. John Cassian, The Monastic Institutes, trans. Edgar C. S. Gibson, in A Select Library of Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers of the Christian Church, ed. Henry Wace and Philip Schaff (New York: Christian Literature, 1894), 2nd ser., 11: 266.

12. Ibid., 271. See Thessalonians 3:11.

13. Cassian, Monastic Institutes, 271.

14. Ibid., 274, 275.

15. Wenzel, Sin of Sloth, 22.

16. However, the current “Catechism of the Catholic Church” still lists the sins in Latin as superbia, avaritia, invidia, ira, luxuria, gula, and pigritia seu acedia (laziness or acedia).

17. Wenzel, Sin of Sloth, 30–31.

19. Hugh of Saint Victor, On the Sacraments of the Christian Faith (De Sacramentis), trans. Roy J. Deferrari (Cambridge, Mass.: Mediaeval Academy of America, 1951), 375.

22. Quoted in Wenzel, Sin of Sloth, 34.

23. Saint Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae: A Concise Translation, ed. Timothy McDermott (London: Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1989), 365.

28. Rowena Mason, “David Cameron Calls on Obese to Accept Help or Risk Losing Benefits,” Guardian, February 14, 2015, http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2015/feb/14/david-cameron-obese-addicts-accept-help-risk-losing-benefits (accessed February 18, 2015).

29. Geoffrey Chaucer, “The Parson’s Tale,” in The Canterbury Tales, trans. Eugene J. Crook (1993), http://english.fsu.edu/canterbury/parson.html (accessed March 2, 2015) (translation slightly revised).

30. Dante, The Divine Comedy, trans. Allen Mandelbaum (New York: Knopf, 1995), 71, 59, 60, 66; Dante, The Divine Comedy, vol. 1, Inferno, Italian text with translation and comment by John D. Sinclair (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1961), 40.

31. Dante, Divine Comedy, 69.

32. Ibid., 89; Dante, Inferno, 104.

33. Wolf-Günther Klostermann, “Acedia und Schwarze Galle: Bemerkungen zu Dante, Inferno VII, 115ff,” Romanische Forschungen, 76, nos. 1–2 (1964): 183–94.

35. Dante, Divine Comedy, 161; Dante, Inferno, 296.

36. Dante, Divine Comedy, 232; Dante, The Divine Comedy, vol. 2, Purgatorio, Italian text with translation and comment by John D. Sinclair (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1961), 60.

37. Dante, Divine Comedy, 233; Dante, Purgatorio, 60–62.

38. Dante, Divine Comedy, 233–34.

39. See, for example, Jenny Law’s research project “The Active Patient: Energy, Desire and Active Recoveries,” http://theactivepatient.wordpress.com (accessed December 13, 2014).

40. Dante, Divine Comedy, 668–69nn.

41. Ibid., 300–301.

43. Ibid.; Dante, Purgatorio, 236.

44. Guy P. Raffa, The Complete Danteworlds: A Reader’s Guide to the Divine Comedy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 178–79.

45. Dante, Divine Comedy, 272; Dante, Purgatorio, 160.

1. Marsilio Ficino, Three Books on Life: A Critical Edition and Translation with Introduction and Notes, ed. Carol V. Kaske and John R. Clark, Medieval & Renaissance Texts & Studies, vol. 57 (Tempe, Ariz.: Medieval & Renaissance Texts & Studies, 1998), 103, 397.

2. Quoted in Kaske and Clark, introduction to ibid., 20. The general information on Ficino presented in this chapter draws on Kaske and Clark’s detailed introductory survey.

6. Ficino, Three Books on Life, 111.

10. See, for example, Simon Critchley and Jamieson Webster, The Hamlet Doctrine: Knowing Too Much, Doing Nothing (New York: Verso, 2013), 65–66.

11. Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans. John Osborne (London: NLB, 1977), 156.

12. G. F. Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, trans. T. M. Knox (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), 2:1226.

13. Ficino, Three Books on Life, 117–18.

14. Ibid., 123–24, 127, 131.

15. Ibid., 135–37.

17. Kaske and Clark, introduction to Ficino, Three Books on Life, 48–49.

18. Ficino, Three Books on Life, 331, 359.

19. Ibid., 251, 249.

20. Ibid., 251, 255, 253, 367.

21. Ibid., 369, 371.

22. W. G. Sebald, The Rings of Saturn, trans. Michael Hulse (London: Vintage, 2002), 43; W. G. Sebald, Die Ringe des Saturn. Eine englische Wallfahrt (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1997), 58.

23. Sebald, Rings of Saturn, 54.

27. Ibid., 94–95, 150–51.

28. See, for example, Lars von Trier, “Longing for the End of All,” interview with Niels Thorson, http://melancholiathemovie.com (accessed October 30, 2014).

29. Sigmund Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia,” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. and trans. James Strachey (London: Vintage, 2001), 14:243–58.

30. Quoted in Andrew Solomon, The Noonday Demon: An Anatomy of Depression (London: Vintage, 2002), 433–34; Shelley E. Taylor, Positive Illusions: Creative Self-Deception and the Healthy Mind (New York: Basic Books, 1989), 7, 213.

1. I explore the theorization of the so-called perversions in more detail in my previous monograph, Modernism and Perversion: Sexual Deviance in Sexology and Literature, 1850–1930 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011).

2. For an account of sexual perversions in the premodern, presexological era, see, for example, Julie Peakman, “Sexual Perversion in History: An Introduction,” in Sexual Perversions, 1670–1890, ed. Julie Peakman (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 1–49, and other essays in that collection. See also Faramerz Dabhoiwala, The Origins of Sex: A History of the First Sexual Revolution (London: Allen Lane, 2012).

3. Quoted in Patricia Simons, The Sex of Men in Premodern Europe: A Cultural History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 165, 168.

4. Fernanda Alfieri, “Urge Without Desire? Confession Manuals, Moral Casuistry, and the Features of Concupiscencia Between the Fifteenth and Eighteenth Centuries,” in Bodies, Sex and Desire from the Renaissance to the Present Day, ed. Kate Fisher and Sarah Toulalan (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 159.

5. Simons, Sex of Men in Premodern Europe, 165.

6. Marsilio Ficino, Three Books on Life. A Critical Edition and Translation with Introduction and Notes, ed. Carol V. Kaske and John R. Clark, Medieval & Renaissance Texts & Studies, vol. 57 (Tempe, Ariz.: Medieval & Renaissance Texts & Studies, 1998), 124.

7. Saint Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, trans. Thomas Gilby, vol. 43, Temperance (London: Blackfriars in conjunction with Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1968), 2a2ae, ques. 154, art. 11, 245, 249.

8. Thomas W. Laqueur, Solitary Sex: A Cultural History of Masturbation (New York: Zone Books, 2003), 278.

9. Onania; or, the Heinous Sin of Self-Pollution, and All its Frightful Consequences, in Both Sexes, Considered, with Spiritual and Physical Advice to Those Who Have Already Injur’d Themselves by This Abominable Practice. To which is Subjoin’d, A Letter from a Lady to the Author, [very curious] concerning the Use and Abuse of the Marriage-Bed, with the Author’s Answer, 4th ed. (London: N. Crouch, n.d.), 1.

11. Samuel-Auguste Tissot, Onanism: Or, a Treatise upon the Disorders Produced by Masturbation: Or, the Dangerous Effects of Secret and Excessive Venery, trans. A. Hume, based on 3rd rev. ed. (London: Wilkinson, 1767), vii–viii.

12. See, for example, Joachim Radkau, “The Neurasthenic Experience in Imperial Germany: Expeditions into Patient Records and Side-Looks into General History,” in Cultures of Neurasthenia from Beard to the First World War, ed. Marijke Gijswijt-Hofstra and Roy Porter (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2001), 207–8.

13. Sigmund Freud, “On the Grounds for Detaching a Particular Syndrome from Neurasthenia Under the Description ‘Anxiety Neurosis’ (1895 [1894]),” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. and trans. James Strachey (London: Vintage, 2001), 3:85–117.

14. Quoted in ibid., 200.

15. Malcolm Macmillan, Freud Evaluated: The Complete Arc (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1997), 200.

16. Quoted in Max Nordau, Degeneration, trans. George L. Mosse (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1993), 16.

17. Harry Oosterhuis, Stepchildren of Nature: Krafft-Ebing, Psychiatry, and the Making of Sexual Identity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 52–53, 107.

18. Vernon A. Rosario, The Erotic Imagination: French Histories of Perversity (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 88.

20. The authorship of this story is contested. Some argue that it was written by Tieck’s contemporary Ernst Benjamin Salomo Raupach. See, for example, Heide Crawford, “Ernst Benjamin Salomo Raupach’s Vampire Story ‘Wake Not the Dead,’” Journal of Popular Culture 45, no. 6 (2012): 1189–1205.

21. Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, trans. Ben Fowkes (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976), 1:342.

22. Tzvetan Todorov presents this argument in The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre, trans. Richard Howard (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1975), 157–74.

23. Richard Dyer, “Children of the Night: Vampirism as Homosexuality, Homosexuality as Vampirism,” in Sweet Dreams: Sexuality, Gender and Popular Fiction, ed. Susannah Radstone (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1988), 60. On vampirism and homosexuality, see also Christopher Craft, “‘Kiss Me with Those Red Lips:’ Gender and Inversion in Bram Stoker’s Dracula,” Representations 8 (1984): 107–33.

24. J. Sheridan Le Fanu, “Carmilla,” in In a Glass Darkly (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 261–65, 274.

1. Edgar Allan Poe, “The Fall of the House of Usher,” in The Collected Tales and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe (New York: Modern Library, 1992), 235.

2. George Cheyne, The English Malady: or, A Treatise of Nervous Diseases of All Kinds, as Spleen, Vapours, Lowness of Spirits, Hypochondriacal, and Hysterical Distempers, etc., 6th ed. (London: G. Strahan and J. Leake, 1735), 16, 5.

3. Ibid., 7, 8, 15, 17.

6. The rest cure and, particularly, its gender-political dimension are discussed in detail in chap. 7.

7. Tom Lutz, American Nervousness, 1903: An Anecdotal History (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1991), 32.

8. Janet Oppenheim, “Shattered Nerves”: Doctors, Patients, and Depression in Victorian England (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 81.

9. Joachim Radkau, Das Zeitalter der Nervosität. Deutschland zwischen Bismarck und Hitler (Munich: Carl Hanser Verlag, 1998).

10. George M. Beard, A Practical Treatise on Nervous Exhaustion (Neurasthenia): Its Symptoms, Nature, Sequences, Treatment (New York: Wood, 1880); George M. Beard, American Nervousness: Its Causes and Consequences. A Supplement to Nervous Exhaustion (Neurasthenia) (New York: Putnam, 1881).

11. Beard, American Nervousness, vi, 5, 7.

12. Oscar Wilde to Robert Ross, February 1900, in More Letters of Oscar Wilde, ed. Rupert Hart-Davis (London: Murray, 1985), 184.

13. For general discussions of neurasthenia, see, for example, Andreas Killen, Berlin Electropolis: Shock, Nerves, and German Modernity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006); Radkau, Das Zeitalter der Nervosität; Marijke Gijswijt-Hofstra and Roy Porter, eds., Cultures of Neurasthenia from Beard to the First World War (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2001); Volker Roelcke, Krankheit und Kulturkritik. Psychiatrische Gesellschaftsdeutungen im bürgerlichen Zeitalter, 1790–1914 (Frankfurt am Main: Campus, 1999); Simon Wessely, “Neurasthenia and Fatigue Syndromes,” in A History of Clinical Psychiatry: The Origins and History of Psychiatric Disorders, ed. German E. Berrios and Roy Porter (London: Athlone, 1995), 509–32; Tom Lutz, “Neurasthenia and Fatigue Syndromes,” in ibid., 533–44; Edward Shorter, From Paralysis to Fatigue: A History of Psychosomatic Illness in the Modern Era (New York: Free Press, 1992); Lutz, American Nervousness, 1903; Oppenheim, “Shattered Nerves”; F. Gosling, Before Freud: Neurasthenia and the American Medical Community, 1870–1910 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987); and Elaine Showalter, The Female Malady: Women, Madness and English Culture, 1830–1980 (London: Virago, 1987). For reflections on neurasthenia and literature, see Maximilian Bergengruen, Klaus Müller-Wille, and Caroline Pross, eds., Neurasthenie. Die Krankheit der Moderne und die moderne Literatur (Freiburg im Breisgau: Rombach, 2010).

14. Beard, American Nervousness, vi.

15. On the connection among sleep, technology, and brain work in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, see Lee Scrivner’s important study, Becoming Insomniac: How Sleeplessness Alarmed Modernity (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014).

16. Beard, American Nervousness, 91, 26.

18. Oppenheim, “Shattered Nerves,” 85.

19. However, the ways in which neurasthenia was defined and diagnosed differed from country to country. Gijswijt-Hofstra and Porter’s anthology Cultures of Neurasthenia: From Beard to the First World War provides a good comparative overview of the more subtle national differences, which also had repercussions with regard to the race, gender, and class dimensions of the diagnosis. In England and Germany, for example, the diagnosis was soon “democratized” and not just the reserve of middle- and upper-class people.

20. Franz Kafka, The Diaries of Franz Kafka, 1910–1913, ed. Max Brod (London: Secker & Warburg, 1948), 287.

21. Heinrich Mann, “Doktor Biebers Versuchung,” in Haltlos: Sämtliche Erzählungen (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1995), 1:522 (my translation).

22. Wilhelm Erb, Über die wachsende Nervosität unserer Zeit (Heidelberg: Hörning, 1884), 20 (my translation).

23. Karl Kraus, Half-Truths and One-and-a-Half Truths: Selected Aphorisms, trans. Harry Zohn (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 112.

24. Freiherr Richard von Krafft-Ebing, Über Gesunde und Kranke Nerven, 4th rev. and exp. ed. (Tübingen: Verlag der H. Laupp’schen Buchhandlung, 1898), 2–4 (my translation).

25. Ibid., 7–8, 17, 115.

26. Max Nordau, Entartung, 3rd ed., vol. 1 (Berlin: Duncker, 1896).

27. Krafft-Ebing, Über Gesunde und Kranke Nerven, 9.

30. Joris-Karl Huysmans, Against Nature (À rebours), trans. Margaret Mauldon (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 3, 7.

31. Ibid., 22; Joris-Karl Huysmans, À rebours (Paris: Flammarion, 2004), 62.

32. Huysmans, Against Nature, 14; Huysmans, À rebours, 52.

33. Huysmans, Against Nature, 38; Huysmans, À rebours, 82.

34. Huysmans, Against Nature, 20; Huysmans, À rebours, 60.

35. Huysmans, Against Nature, 26.

36. Ibid., 117; Huysmans, À rebours, 175.

37. Huysmans, Against Nature, 118.

39. Ibid., 162–63; Huysmans, À rebours, 228.

40. Huysmans, Against Nature, 91; Huysmans, À rebours, 144.

41. Huysmans, Against Nature, 177.

42. Ibid., 145–46.

43. Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time, trans. C. K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, rev. D. J. Enright, vol. 1, Swann’s Way (London: Vintage, 2002), 43.

44. ICD-10 (Version 2010), http://apps.who.int/classifications/icd10/browse/2010/en#/F48.0 (accessed February 23, 2015).

45. Radkau, Das Zeitalter der Nervosität, 440.

46. Killen, however, challenges this account in his illuminating study Berlin Electropolis. He argues that in Germany it was primarily processes related to the welfare state and, in particular, to social insurance practices that were responsible for the changing attitude toward neurasthenia after the First World War, when the vast number of shell-shocked and neurasthenic veterans was deemed to pose a serious financial threat to the system.

47. Wessely, “Neurasthenia and Fatigue Syndromes,” 509–32; Lutz, “Neurasthenia and Fatigue Syndromes,” 533–44.

48. Chronic fatigue syndrome is discussed in detail in chap. 10.

49. Tsung-Yi Lin, “Neurasthenia Revisited: Its Place in Modern Psychiatry,” Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry 13, no. 2 (1989): 105–29.

50. T. Suzuki, “The Concept of Neurasthenia and Its Treatment in Japan,” Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry 13, no. 2 (1989): 187–202.

1. Ivan Goncharov, Oblomov, trans. Natalie Duddington (New York: Knopf, 1992).

3. Ibid., 196, 205, 207.

4. Ibid., 463, 563, 577.

5. For a detailed discussion of Freud’s theories of exhaustion, and in particular his notion of the death drive, see chap. 8.

6. Anson Rabinbach, The Human Motor: Energy, Fatigue and the Origins of Modernity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 72.

7. Max Weber, Die Protestantische Ethik und der Geist des Kapitalismus, ed. Dirk Kaesler (Munich: Beck, 2004).

8. Joachim Radkau, Max Weber: A Biography, trans. Patrick Camiller (Cambridge: Polity, 2011).

9. Marianne Weber to Helene Weber, 1900, quoted in ibid., 149.

10. Max Weber to Robert Michels, 1908, quoted in ibid., 152.

11. Max Weber to Robert Michels, 1909, quoted in ibid.

13. This parable circulates in different versions on the Internet (it is also sometimes called “The Mexican Fisherman and the Harvard MBA”). Ironically, it often features in investment-banking and entrepreneurial self-help manuals, with a slightly different ending. I have retold it here in my own words.

14. Weber, Die Protestantische Ethik, 146, 157, 181, 194.

15. Ibid., 190–91, 183–84. See also Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, trans. Talcott Parsons and Anthony Giddens, https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/weber/protestant-ethic/index.htm (accessed February 24, 2015) (translation slightly modified).

16. Rabinbach, Human Motor, 58.

17. Thomas Mann, Buddenbrooks. Verfall einer Familie (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 2007), 320 (my translation).

18. Thomas Mann, Buddenbrooks, trans. H. T. Lowe-Porter (London: Vintage, 1999), 496 (translation modified); Mann, Buddenbrooks. Verfall einer Familie, 614–15.

19. Joseph Stiglitz, The Price of Inequality: How Today’s Divided Society Endangers Our Future (New York: Norton, 2012).

20. Thomas Pikkety, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2014).

21. Adair Turner, Economics After the Crisis: Objectives and Means (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2012).

22. Kate Pickett and Richard Wilkinson, The Spirit Level: Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better (London: Penguin, 2009); Richard Layard, Happiness: Lessons from a New Science (London: Penguin, 2005); Bruno S. Frey and Alois Stutzer, Happiness and Economics: How the Economy and Institutions Affect Human Well-Being (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2001).

1. Exodus 20:8–11.

2. Silas Weir Mitchell, Wear and Tear: Or, Hints for the Overworked, 5th rev. ed. (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1887), 12–13.

4. Charlotte Perkins Gilman, “The Yellow Wallpaper,” in The Yellow Wall-Paper and Other Stories, ed. Robert Shulman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 3.

6. For different interpretations of this story, see, for example, Judith Allen, The Feminism of Charlotte Perkins Gilman: Sexualities, Histories, Progressivism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009); and Jeffrey Berman, “The Unrestful Cure: Charlotte Perkins Gilman and ‘The Yellow Wallpaper,’” in The Captive Imagination: A Casebook on The Yellow Wallpaper, ed. Catherine Colden (New York: Feminist Press, 1992), 211–41.

7. Silas Weir Mitchell, Fat and Blood and How to Make Them, ed. Michael S. Kimmel (1882; repr., New York: Altamira Press, 2004), 9, 13, 25.

8. Charlotte Perkins Gilman, The Living of Charlotte Perkins Gilman: An Autobiography (New York: Harper & Row, 1975), 96.

9. Hermione Lee, Virginia Woolf (London: Vintage, 1997), 182–86.

10. Quoted in ibid., 184.

12. Virginia Woolf, On Being Ill, with an introduction by Hermione Lee (Ashfield, Mass.: Paris Press, 2002), xxviii.

13. Mitchell, Wear and Tear, 8, 9, 33, 56.

14. Ibid., 36, 57, 43.

16. Mitchell, Fat and Blood, 32.

17. Lisa Appignanesi, Mad, Bad and Sad: A History of Women and the Mind Doctors from 1800 to the Present (London: Virago, 2008); Elaine Showalter, The Female Malady: Women, Madness and English Culture, 1830–1980 (London: Virago, 1987).

18. Freiherr Richard von Krafft-Ebing, Über Gesunde und Kranke Nerven, 4th rev. and exp. ed. (Tübingen: Verlag der H. Laupp’schen Buchhandlung, 1898), 57–58 (my translation).

19. Quoted in Darwin Correspondence Project, http://www.darwinproject.ac.uk/darwins-letters (accessed February 24, 2015).

20. Brian Dillon, The Hypochondriacs: Nine Tormented Lives (New York: Faber and Faber, 2009), 79–88.

21. Quoted in Darwin Correspondence Project.

22. Alan Derickson, Dangerously Sleepy: Overworked Americans and the Cult of Manly Wakefulness (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014). On the gradual erosion of sleep under the conditions of modernity, see also, for example, Lee Scrivner, Becoming Insomniac: How Sleeplessness Alarmed Modernity (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014); and Roger Ekirch, “The Modernization of Western Sleep: Or, Does Insomnia Have a History?,” Past and Present 226 (2015): 149–92.

23. Quoted in “Why Do We Sleep, Anyway?,” December 8, 2007, http://healthysleep.med.harvard.edu/healthy/matters/benefits-of-sleep/why-do-we-sleep (accessed February 24, 2015).

25. A. Roger Ekirch, At Day’s Close: Night in Times Past (New York: Norton, 2006).

26. Jonathan Crary, 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep (London: Verso, 2013).

1. Sigmund Freud, “On the Grounds for Detaching a Particular Syndrome from Neurasthenia Under the Description ‘Anxiety Neurosis’” (1895 [1894]), in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. and trans. James Strachey (London: Vintage, 2001), 3:85–117.

2. Sigmund Freud, “Sexuality in the Aetiology of the Neuroses” (1898), in ibid., 3:274; Sigmund Freud, “Die Sexualität in der Ätiologie der Neurosen” (1898), in Studienausgabe, Sexualleben, ed. Alexander Mitscherlich, Angela Richards, and James Strachey (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1982), 5:25.

3. Sigmund Freud, “Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis (1916–1917 [1915–1917]): Part III. General Theory of the Neuroses (1917 [1916–1917]). Lecture XXIV: The Common Neurotic State,” in Standard Edition, 16:378–91.

4. Sigmund Freud, “‘Civilized’ Sexual Morality and Modern Nervous Illness” (1908), in Standard Edition, 9:187.

6. Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, in Standard Edition, 21:57–145.

8. Ibid., 89, 115, 87–88, 104.

10. Sigmund Freud, “Instincts and Their Vicissitudes” (1915), in Standard Edition, 14:109–40.

11. Ibid., 121–22; Freud, “Triebe und Triebschicksale” (1915), in Studienausgabe, Psychologie des Unbewußten, 3:85.

12. Freud, “Instincts and Their Vicissitudes,” 123.

13. Sigmund Freud, “Beyond the Pleasure Principle” (1920), in Standard Edition, 18:7, 34, 53, 51.

14. Sigmund Freud, “Jenseits des Lustprinzips” (1920), in Studienausgabe, Psychologie des Unbewußten, 3:239, 240, 237.

15. Sigmund Freud, “The Ego and the Id” (1923), in Standard Edition, 19:25.

16. Freud, “Beyond the Pleasure Principle,” 69.

17. Ibid., 55–56. The parenthetical reference is to Barbara Low, Psycho-Analysis: A Brief Account of the Freudian Theory (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Howe, 1920), 73.

18. Freud, “Beyond the Pleasure Principle,” 40–41; Freud, “Jenseits des Lustprinzips,” 250.

19. Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, 123.

20. For a discussion of the rise of the depression diagnosis, see Alain Ehrenberg, The Weariness of the Self: Diagnosing the History of Depression in the Contemporary Age, trans. David Homel et al. (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2010).

21. Sigmund Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia” (1917 [1915]), in Standard Edition, 14:244.

22. Ibid., 246 (my emphasis).

24. On the idea of giving up as a form of giving in, see Joyce McDougall, Theatres of the Body: A Psychoanalytical Approach to Psychosomatic Illness (London: Free Association Books, 1989).

25. Herman Melville, “Bartleby, the Scrivener,” in Billy Budd, Sailor, and Selected Tales, ed. Robert Milder (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 4, 6, 7, 10.

28. Ibid., 10, 11, 19.

29. Ibid., 22, 33, 32.

31. Pierre Janet, Les obsessions et la psychasthénie (Paris: Félix Alcan, 1903), 1:vii, xiii–ix, 501–2 (my translation).

32. Ibid., 2:viii. He defines the fonctions du réel as “fonctions les plus élevées, qui permettent l’adaptation psychologique de l’être à son milieu physique et surtout à son milieu social” (the highest functions, which permit the human being’s psychological adaptation to its physical and especially its social environment).

33. Ibid., 1:737–38.

34. Quoted in W. S. Taylor, “Pierre Janet: 1859–1947,” American Journal of Psychology 60 (1947): 643.

35. Primo Levi, The Drowned and the Saved, trans. Raymond Rosenthal (New York: Summit Books, 1988), 98.

36. Primo Levi, If This Is a Man/The Truce, trans. Stuart Wolf (London: Everyman’s Library, 2000), 102.

1. Sigmund Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia” (1917 [1915]), in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. and trans. James Strachey (London: Vintage, 2001), 14:246, 244.

3. Alain Ehrenberg, The Weariness of the Self: Diagnosing the History of Depression in the Contemporary Age, trans. David Homel et al. (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2010), 42.

4. See, for example, Edward Shorter, Before Prozac: The Troubled History of Mood Disorders in Psychiatry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008); and Edward Shorter, How Everyone Became Depressed: The Rise and Fall of the Nervous Breakdown (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013).

5. Ehrenberg, Weariness of the Self, 79–83.

6. World Health Organization, “Depression,” fact sheet, no. 369, October 2012, http://www.who.int/mediacentre/factsheets/fs369/en/ (accessed January 9, 2015).

7. Elizabeth Wurtzel, Prozac Nation: Young and Depressed in America. A Memoir (London: Quartet Books, 1995), 263–64.

10. Ibid., 258–59, 286.

12. American Psychiatric Association, Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 5th ed. (Arlington, Va.: APA, 2013), 163, 162, 163–64.

13. World Health Organization, International Statistical Classification of Diseases and Related Health Problems, 10th ed., http://apps.who.int/classifications/apps/icd/icd10online2003/fr-icd.htm?gf30.htm+ (accessed January 9, 2015).

14. Andrew Solomon, The Noonday Demon: An Anatomy of Depression (London: Vintage, 2002), 18–19.

17. Roland Barthes, How to Live Together: Novelistic Simulations of Some Everyday Spaces, trans. Kate Briggs (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012), 21–23.

18. See, for example, Ben Goldacre, Bad Pharma: How Drug Companies Mislead Doctors and Harm Patients (London: Faber and Faber, 2013); Ethan Watters, Crazy Like Us: The Globalization of the American Psyche (New York: Free Press, 2010); Irving Kirsch, The Emperor’s New Drugs: Exploding the Antidepressant Myth (New York: Basic Books, 2010); Darian Leader, The New Black: Mourning, Melancholia and Depression (London: Penguin, 2009); Shorter, Before Prozac; and Allan V. Horwitz and Jerome C. Wakefield, The Loss of Sadness: How Psychiatry Transformed Normal Sorrow into Depressive Disorder (New York: Oxford University Pres, 2007).

19. Ehrenberg, Weariness of the Self, 219 (Ehrenberg’s emphasis).

21. Franz Kafka, Briefe an Milena (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1998), 290–91 (my translation).

22. Ehrenberg, Weariness of the Self, 4, 190.

1. Gary Holmes at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention coined the term “chronic fatigue syndrome” in 1988.

2. For an analysis of the debates concerning the symptoms, epidemiology, and therapeutics of the condition, see Simon Wessely, Matthew Hotopf, and Michael Sharpe, Chronic Fatigue and Its Syndromes, rev. ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999).

3. See Edward Shorter’s argument on the pivotal role of the popular press in the emergence and spread of CFS in From Paralysis to Fatigue: A History of Psychosomatic Illness in the Modern Era (New York: Free Press, 1992), 314–20, as well as Wessely, Hotopf, and Sharpe, Chronic Fatigue and Its Syndromes, 322–48.

4. See, for example, Shorter, From Paralysis to Fatigue; and Richard L. Kradin, Pathologies of the Mind/Body Interface: Exploring the Curious Domain of the Psychosomatic Disorders (New York: Routledge, 2013).

5. Shorter, From Paralysis to Fatigue, 308–9.

7. Two of the most influential patient stories of the 1980s were Sue Finlay, “An Illness Doctors Don’t Recognize,” Observer, June 1, 1986; and Hillary Johnson, “Journey into Fear,” Rolling Stone, July 30, 1987. The Observer received fourteen thousand requests from readers for an ME fact sheet that it offered to supply after the publication of Finlay’s article.

8. Wessely, Hotopf, and Sharpe, Chronic Fatigue and Its Syndromes, 133–34.

9. In the 1990s, Anthony David and Simon Wessely challenged the World Health Organization’s clinical descriptors of CFS (ICD-10), which allowed for its classification either under neurology as “post viral fatigue” or under psychiatry as “neurasthenia.” They argued for its reclassification as a psychiatric condition, causing much outrage among those with the condition. The WHO admitted that it had opted for this solution to recognize the fundamental divide that existed in the medical establishment about the syndrome, so that both camps would be able to use a diagnosis. See Anthony David and Simon Wessely, “Chronic Fatigue, ME and ICD-10,” Lancet 342, no. 8881 (1993): 1247–48; and Wessely, Hotopf, and Sharp, Chronic Fatigue and Its Syndromes, 221.

10. See, for example, Wessely, Hotopf, and Sharp, Chronic Fatigue and Its Syndromes, 416.

11. Stephen T. Holgate, Anthony L. Komaroff, Dennis Mangan, and Simon Wessely, “Chronic Fatigue Syndrome: Understanding a Complex Illness,” Nature 12 (2011): 539–44.

12. Nasim Marie Jafry, The State of Me (London: Friday Project, 2008), 75.

13. Ibid., 470–71, 250.

14. Ibid., 85, 241–42, 244.

15. Ibid., 247–49.

16. Ibid., 153–54.

17. Nasim Marie Jafry, “velo-gubbed-legs,” http://velo-gubbed-legs.blogspot.co.uk/search/label/blinkered%20medics (accessed October 31, 2014).

18. Wessely, Hotopf, and Sharp, Chronic Fatigue and Its Syndromes, 416.

19. Elaine Showalter, Hystories: Hysterical Epidemics and Modern Media (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998).

20. Shorter, From Paralysis to Fatigue, 277, 304–5.

21. Ibid., 305, 307, 317.

22. Ibid., 320, 322–23.

23. ME Association, “What Is ME/CFS?,” http://www.meassociation.org.uk/about/what-is-mecfs/; Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (CFS), http://www.cdc.gov/cfs/causes/risk-groups.html (both accessed January 13, 2015).

24. Wessely, Hotopf, and Sharp, Chronic Fatigue and Its Syndromes, 283.

25. “In Search of a Cause,” Awake, August 1992, quoted in ibid., 333.

26. Wessely, Hotopf, and Sharp, Chronic Fatigue and Its Syndromes, 336.

27. Quoted in ibid., 286.

28. Shorter, From Paralysis to Fatigue, 314.

29. K. Flett, “Why ME?,” Arena, March 1990, quoted in Wessely, Hotopf, and Sharp, Chronic Fatigue and Its Syndromes, 332.

30. Darian Leader and David Corfield, Why Do People Get Ill? (London: Hamish Hamilton, 2007), 42.

31. Wessely, Hotopf, and Sharp, Chronic Fatigue and Its Syndromes, 339–40.

32. Ibid., 227, 289.

33. Ibid., 285–86.

34. Leader and Corfield, Why Do People Get Ill?, 136, 50, 20, 323.

35. Shorter, From Paralysis to Fatigue, 2, x.

1. Anson Rabinbach, The Human Motor: Energy, Fatigue, and the Origins of Modernity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 233.

2. See, for example, World Health Organization, Investing in Mental Health (Geneva: WHO, 2003), http://www.who.int/mental_health/media/investing_mnh.pdf (accessed February 6, 2015). A recent survey estimates that stress-related absenteeism and sick leave cost the British economy £6.5 billion in 2013. See Natasha Shearer, “As Work Related Stress Costs UK Economy Nearly £6.5bn Each Year, What Steps Should Businesses and Employees be Taking?,” Huffington Post, July 5, 2013, http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/natasha-shearer/work-related-stress-business_b_3545476.html (accessed February 6, 2015).

3. Patrick Kury, Der Überforderte Mensch. Eine Wissensgeschichte vom Stress zum Burnout (Frankfurt am Main: Campus, 2012), 271.

6. Walter B. Cannon, The Wisdom of the Body (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner, 1932), 286.

7. Hans Selye, Stress Without Distress (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1975), 27, 29, 28.

10. See also Hans Selye, The Physiology and Pathology of Exposure to Stress: A Treatise Based on the Concepts of the General-Adaptation-Syndrome and the Diseases of Adaptation (Montreal: Acta, 1950), 774, 787.

11. Selye, Stress Without Distress, 40.

12. Selye, Physiology and Pathology of Exposure to Stress, 787.

13. Selye, Stress Without Distress, 40.

15. Hans Selye, The Stress of Life: Revised Edition (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1976), 457–58.

16. Ibid., 460–61.

17. Kury, Der Überforderte Mensch, 89–108, 223–66.

18. Lennart Levi, foreword to Emotional Stress: Physiological and Psychological Reactions. Medical, Industrial and Military Implications, ed. Lennart Levi (Basel: Karger, 1967), 9.

19. Lennart Levi, preface to Society, Stress and Disease, vol. 1, The Psychosocial Environment and Psychosomatic Diseases, ed. Lennart Levi (London: Oxford University Press, 1971), xi.

20. Lennart Levi, “The Human Factor—and the Inhuman,” in ibid., 3.

21. Lennart Levi, preface to Society, Stress and Disease, vol. 4, Working Life (London: Oxford University Press, 1981), xi, xii.

23. Levi, “Human Factor,” 3–4.

24. See, for example, the essays in Sighard Neckel and Greta Wagner, eds., Leistung und Erschöpfung. Burnout in der Wettbewerbsgesellschaft (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2013), especially Neckel and Wagner, “Einleitung: Leistung und Erschöpfung,” 7–26.

25. See, for example, Hartmut Rosa, Social Acceleration: A New Theory of Modernity, trans. Jonathan Trejo-Mathys (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013); and Jonathan Crary, 24/7: Capitalism and the End of Sleep (London: Verso, 2013).

26. See, for example, Ehrenberg, Weariness of the Self; Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello, The New Spirit of Capitalism, trans. Gregory Elliott (London: Verso, 2005); and Richard Sennett, The Corrosion of Character: The Personal Consequences of Work in the New Capitalism (New York: Norton, 1998).

27. On the “subjectivization” of work, see, for example, Ulrich Bröckling, Das unternehmerische Selbst. Soziologie einer Subjektivierungsform (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2007); and G. Günter Voß and Hans J. Pongratz, “Der Arbeitskraftunternehmer. Eine neue Grundform der Ware Arbeitskraft?,” Kölner Zeitschrift für Soziologie und Sozialpsychologie 1 (1998): 131–58.

28. Herbert J. Freudenberg, “Staff Burn-Out,” Journal of Social Issues 30 (1974): 159–64.

29. Wilhelm Schaufeli, “Past Performance and Future Perspectives on Burnout Research,” SA Journal of Industrial Psychology 29, no. 4 (2003): 1–15.

30. Quoted in ibid., 2.

31. Quoted in Wilhelm Schaufeli, Michael P. Leiter, and Christina Maslach, “Burnout: 35 Years of Research and Practice,” Career Development International 14, no. 3 (2009): 206.

33. Jonathon R. B. Halbesleben, preface to Handbook of Stress and Burnout in Health Care, ed. Jonathon R. B. Halbesleben (New York: Nova Science, 2008), viii.

34. Marjan J. Gorgievsky and Stevan E. Hobfoll, “Work Can Burn Us Out or Fire Us Up: Conservation of Resources in Burnout and Engagement,” in ibid., 10.

35. Halbesleben, preface to Halbesleben, Handbook of Stress and Burnout in Health Care, viii, xi.

36. Gorgievsky and Hobfoll, “Work Can Burn Us Out or Fire Us Up,” 9, 11.

37. Sebastian Beck, “Die Müdigkeit der Rastlosen,” in Süddeutsche Zeitung, March 14 and 15, 2009 (my translation).

38. The Austrian writer Kathrin Röggla has written a powerful and deeply unsettling, partly interview-based and partly fictionalized, account of the ways in which “management-speak” and the metaphors that twenty-first-century workers live by not just insidiously shape their conceptual view of the world and themselves but structure every aspect of their lived experiences. See Kathrin Röggla, wir schlafen nicht (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 2006).

39. Kury, Der Überforderte Mensch, 272–73.

40. See, for example, Andrew Procter and Elizabeth Procter, The Essential Guide to Burnout: Overcoming Excess Stress (Oxford: Lion Hudson, 2013).

44. Steve Bagi, Pastorpain: My Journey in Burnout (Palm Beach, Australia: Actuate Consulting, 2008), 18, 8.

45. Donna Andronicus, Coping with Burnout (London: Sheldon Press, 2007), 10, 11.

46. Miriam Meckel, Brief an Mein Leben: Erfahrungen mit einem Burnout (Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 2010), 174, 172, 179–80 (all translations mine).

47. Greta Wagner, conversation with the author, February 4, 2015, Canterbury, England.

48. Meckel, Brief an Mein Leben, 31–33, 69–70.

49. Ibid., 73, 92, 93, 216–17.

50. James J. Bono, “Science, Discourse, and Literature: The Role/Rule of Metaphor in Science,” in Literature and Science: Theory and Practice, ed. Stuart Peterfreund (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1990), 75.

51. Graham Greene, A Burnt-Out Case (London: Vintage, 2004), 8, 42.

53. Ibid., 101, 105.

56. See, for example, Thomas Sprecher, ed., Literatur und Krankheit im Fin-de-Siècle. Thomas Mann im Europäischen Kontext, Die Davoser Literaturtage 2000 (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 2002), especially the essays by Volker Roelcke, “Psychiatrische Kulturkritik um 1900 und Umrisse ihrer Rezeption im Frühwerk Thomas Manns,” 95–113; Helmut Koopmann, “Krankheiten der Jahrhundertwende im Frühwerk Thomas Manns,” 115–30; and Manfred Dierks, “Krankheit und Tod im frühen Werk Thomas Manns,” 11–32. See also Manfred Dierks, “Buddenbrooks als Europäischer Nervenroman,” Thomas Mann Jahrbuch 15 (2002): 135–52; and Joachim Radkau, “Neugier der Nerven. Thomas Mann als Interpret des nervösen Zeitalters,” Thomas Mann Jahrbuch 9 (1996): 29–53.

57. Thomas Mann, Death in Venice and Other Stories, trans. David Luke (London: Vintage, 1998), 197; Thomas Mann, Der Tod in Venedig und andere Erzählungen (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1954), 7.

58. Mann, Death in Venice.

59. Ibid. (translation modified).

61. Ibid., 201 (translation slightly modified).

63. Ibid., 203, 205.

1. Frank Kermode, The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1968), 94–95.

2. Anson Rabinbach, The Human Motor: Energy, Fatigue, and the Origins of Modernity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 62.

4. Will Steffen et al., “Planetary Boundaries: Guiding Human Development on a Changing Planet,” Science, February 13, 2015, http://dx.doi.org/10.1126/science.1259855 (accessed March 7, 2015).

5. See, for example, Bill McKibben, “Global Warming’s Terrifying New Math: Three Simple Numbers That Add Up to Global Catastrophe—and That Make Clear Who the Real Enemy Is,” Rolling Stone, July 19, 2012, http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/global-warmings-terrifying-new-math-20120719 (accessed March 8, 2015).

6. Quoted in Naomi Klein, “Don’t Look Away Now: The Climate Crisis Needs You,” Guardian, March 6, 2015, http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/mar/06/dont-look-away-now-the-climate-crisis-needs-you (accessed March 9, 2015).

7. Kevin Anderson, “To Meet International Commitments on ‘Avoiding Dangerous Climate Change,’ Wealthy Nations Must Reduce Emissions by over 10% Each Year,” Svenska Dagbladet, November 7, 2012, http://kevinanderson.info/blog/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/Opinion-Piece-by-Anderson-for-SvD-Swedish-Daily-Newspaper-Nov-2012.pdf (accessed March 8, 2015).