Figure 3. Moreau de Tours’s tree of pathologies. From his Psychologie morbide (1859).
Genius, Neurosis, and Family Trees
Moreau de Tours
Poetry is a disease of the brain.
—Vigny, Chatterton
The pathologizing of genius continued in the work of Jacques-Joseph Moreau—known as “Moreau de Tours”—who adopted the eloquent term “morbid psychology” for his particular branch of mental medicine and defined genius as a form of neurosis. His book on the subject, Psychologie morbide: dans ses rapports avec la philosophie de l’histoire, ou de l’influence des névropathies sur le dynamisme intellectuel (Morbid psychology: In its relations to the philosophy of history or the influence of neuropathy on intellectual dynamism), published in 1859, examines the general phenomenon of “neuropathy” rather than confining itself to the study of individual cases as Lélut had done. But the underlying assumptions and approach remain the same, and Moreau follows Lélut in asserting the physiological basis of mental malfunction when he insists that “it is essential … to explore man in his entrails and to abandon visions of pure reason in the regions of the absolute.”1 The mind exists in inseparable conjunction with the body, and genius is inherently pathological, placed within a configuration of mental debility that extends from imbecility to delirium. Moreau also develops the principles of medical observation outlined by Lélut, where the neutral, observing medical mind is constructed in opposition to the excitable and involuntarily productive mind, which, according to Moreau, is found as commonly in genius as in other forms of insanity.
HEREDITARY PATHOLOGY
Moreau’s pathologizing of genius extends beyond the single phenomenon of hallucinations as he establishes a “consanguinuity” between all types of disturbances of the mind that can be attributed to a single “primordial lesion.” While this lesion is never given a precise anatomical location, Moreau presents disruption of the nervous system as the consequence of a “predisposition” that many carry within themselves. It can manifest in a variety of forms that include rickets and scrofula as well as delirium and imbecility: “By virtue of their common origin, and certain physical and moral characteristics, people afflicted with insanity, idiocy, scrofula or rickets, should be regarded as children belonging to the same family, and different branches on the same tree trunk.” Moreover, each condition contains the others in latent form, so that “organic causes or dispositions are, most often, concealed beneath very misleading appearances.” This means that “insanity and idiocy, which is to say the expression of the gravest disturbances of moral life, contain the potential for the most transcendent intellectual qualities and for genius, just as the womb contains the embryo, and vice versa.”2 Insanity may have the potential for genius, but the reverse is equally true.
Moreau’s reference to a tree is no rhetorical coincidence, and on the last page of his book he includes a diagram representing a kind of family tree of pathologies, with a “Hereditary idiosyncratic nervous condition” forming the base of its trunk, off which there grow various branches such as “Rickets,” “Spontaneous phrenopathy due to intoxication,” and “Exceptional intelligence,” each of them adorned in turn with leaves bearing the names of conditions such as the “Otitis” or the “Hyperesthesia,” which are attached to the branch named “Disturbances of general and particular sensitivity” (see Figure 3). The notion of a family tree is relevant here, not just because it graphically supports the principle of organic links between the various conditions it maps, but more importantly because the interconnection between these conditions is presented by Moreau as the consequence of heredity. If there are “lesions” within a single individual that predispose to various forms of morbidity, families also distribute such pathological conditions around their members and across the generations. Readers of Zola will be familiar with these ideas that derive from Prosper Lucas’s Traité philosophique et physiologique de l’hérédité naturelle (Philosophical and physiological treatise on natural heredity, 1847) and Bénédict-Auguste Morel’s Traité des dégénérescences physiques, intellectuelles et morales de l’espèce humaine (Treatise on the physical, intellectual and moral degeneracy of the human race, 1857), which dominated much thinking in the latter part of the nineteenth century.
Lombroso picked up this strand with considerable enthusiasm and followed Moreau in providing thumbnail family pathologies to back up his claims in The Man of Genius. Part III of Moreau’s Psychologie morbide is entirely devoted to “Biographical Facts” and contains an eclectic list of figures going from Socrates and Pausanius, via Charlemagne and Frederick the Great, to the artist David and the sculptor François Rude, with anecdotes illustrating their own pathologies or those of family members. Hegel’s sister was insane and believed she was a parcel who would be sealed and sent away; she trembled at the sight of strangers, and finally drowned herself. Auguste Comte, who was without doubt “one of the most vigorous and remarkable geniuses of our time,” suffered from an attack of mental illness (aliénation mentale) for a year in 1826.3 And there are many more examples in the same vein.
While the alienist can confidently distinguish between, say, “idiopathic” and “symptomatic” versions of acute delirium (two conditions that figure in the tree diagram), the pathologies themselves are alarmingly labile and take very different forms as they travel between brother and sister or from parent to child. Furthermore, as the case of Comte suggests, they can also metamorphose within a single individual who could go from being a genius to an imbecile within a single lifetime—or even, as Moreau says, from one moment to the next. Being dependent upon the material substratum that is “a semi-morbid state of the brain,” the man of genius is always potentially a mixed being, as liable to produce unequivocally pathological thoughts as he is to come up with the most “sublime conceptions.” And it is on this basis that Moreau concludes by making his provocative claim that genius, “which is to say the highest expression, the nec plus ultra of intellectual activity is merely a neurosis.”4 Predispositions, heredity, and this semi-morbid condition of the brain all contribute to Moreau’s picture of genius as congenitally compromised, inextricably connected to pathology or poised to revert to it.
There is one particular factor that genius and mental illness have in common and that makes for the almost inevitable exchange between the two: excitement. This phenomenon deserves separate attention because of the importance Moreau gives it in his discussion of the activities and products of the mind of the artist and the mentally ill. It is a commonplace of nineteenth-century medical thinking that artists, writers, and intellectuals have a nervous temperament. (The English expression “highly strung” captures the condition very well.) Some accounts are more essentialist than others and treat this nervousness as the defining attribute of the man of letters, whereas, according to other approaches, it is an effect of the manner in which the man of letters lives his life. But either way, there is broad consensus about the nervous and oversensitive character of intellectuals and artists that applies a fortiori to genius.
Moreau differs from other commentators in both the scope and the intensity he attributes to this sensitivity, and he presents it as a hyperactivation of the nervous system that predisposes equally to insanity as to genius. It goes by many names in his study, most of them graphically physiological: “a state of erethism and general orgasm of the nervous system … which tends to be concentrated in the encephalos.” Some terms are even more scientific in character, such as “neurotic diathesis” (diathèse névrosique), and the condition that is described variously as “an excess of life,” “mental over-activity,” or “a state of intellectual over-excitement” is also more technically termed “the state of intellectual hyperesthesia that accompanies all mental illness at its onset.”5 The exuberance of the overexcited nervous system is matched in Moreau’s description by a proliferation of the terms he finds to name it, and their quasi-physiological and scientific flavor may be read as an index of the significance that excitement has in his thinking.
Many of the examples of this excessive mental activity are associated with directly pathological conditions: acute and chronic delirium, imbecility, rickets, scrofula, epilepsy, hysteria, raving madness (folie furieuse), or stupor, but “intellectual hyperesthesia” also characterizes the operation of the superior mind. In his description of “the working methods of most men of genius” Moreau portrays the mind of the man of genius as abnormally overactive, and his working practices as being “most often strange, peculiar, beyond the habits of the common run of men, habits in which one may discover the original imprint and something like the vestiges of a prior morbid condition (vestigia ruris).”6
This morbidity is spelled out in so many words, but its features are those of the sort of mental excesses that Moreau ascribes to the insane: “work in the case of superior men … is the result of impulse, an instinctive need, a sort of appetite of the intellect” in which “the head is in a manifest state of oestuation, and one can sense that it is in labor and about to give birth to powerful and elevated ideas; an impetuous current of arterial blood, saturated with oxygen, calories and electricity, supplies it with extraordinary heat.”7 According to the Oxford English Dictionary, “estuation” is a (rare) term derived from the Latin aestuare whose figurative meaning is feverish disturbance but whose literal sense is boiling or overheating. Moreau seems to have confused its etymology with the frenzy of reproductive estrus (etym. oestrus), but the conflation of the two ideas vividly conveys the pitch of excitement reached by creative genius.
The estuating heat associated with the rush of arterial blood recalls the temperature of Aristotle’s black bile that characterizes the man of exception, but the key features of Moreau’s excitement are not heat as such, so much as the excess and the agitation that genius shares with insanity. The exaggerated sensitivity generated by excitement will overflow at the least pretext, and needs only “the slightest spark to create an explosion and break out into all types of functional disturbance of thought and movement.” This comes from a description of the effects of excitement in insanity, but genius manifests in a strikingly similar way, its nature being to “catch fire at the least encounter, the most trivial-seeming pretext, such as a falling apple or a lamp swinging to and fro, etc.”8
In addition to this proclivity to excess and overflow, insanity and genius share a disorderly, erratic mode of operation. Moreau cites Julien-Joseph Virey (one of the contributing authors to the Dictionnaire des sciences médicales, from which I have already quoted) to assert that “the fragile, delicate, vulnerable bodies of hypochondriacs, hysterical women and all those who are subject to irregular nervous emotions, live entirely in bursts and jolts.” He ascribes a similar condition to literary genius, which suffers “sublime surges, abrupt transitions, monstrous juxtapositions, the most eloquent disorder of furious and raving passions.” The source of this disorder is the “maniacal excitement” whose unpredictability affects genius of all kinds:
those audacious minds given over to the whims of an active and powerful imagination, and filled with conviction, enthusiasm and persistence, [are] precisely those to which we owe the most curious discoveries, the most original and novel thoughts; those that, in their haphazard trajectory through the domains of philosophy, science and letters, encounter the largest number of those great truths or startling paradoxes which, through the floods of light with which they suddenly illuminated things, or through the false glimmers that they spread, abruptly change the course of general ideas, undermine and shake human institutions right down to their centuries-old foundations.
Extreme in all things, minds of this kind proceed only by fits and starts; their disorderly activity is revealed only through blinding flashes, which are immediately followed by deep darkness.9 There are echoes of Lélut here in the mention of an imagination whose activity is liable to produce false illumination, but Moreau’s argument is concerned less with imagination as such than with excitement and its wayward operations, since it is on this ground that genius and insanity are conflated.
The mind of the man of genius is also overwhelmingly—if intermittently—productive, in ways that once again are shared with the insane. The image of this productivity has echoes of Plato’s model of inspiration, and the man of genius is portrayed by Moreau as utterly lacking in control or self-possession when in its grip. The illuminations of Newton and Galileo may have been the products of genius, but it took the accident of a falling apple or a swinging lamp to bring them about. Inspiration, says Moreau, is spontaneous and unwilled, it is “an appreciation of truth without the intervention of the will or of the personality.” The man of genius is a passive vehicle for thoughts that take form in him without his active involvement and of which he is most often unaware: “thoughts are never bolder or more energetic, intellectual combinations never vaster and more rapid than when the faculties are more independent of the self, and when they are more inclined to escape inner consciousness.”10 Insanity is visited in a similar manner upon its victims, who in any case may well be future or one-time men of genius. The madman is at the mercy of his heredity and of the predisposition that he can neither choose nor reject.
Artistic masterpieces are spontaneous products that emerge when the artist is in a state of “intellectual rapture transmitted by means of material symbols.” Exactly the same mechanism is shown to be at work in the case of a young woman in Moreau’s cave, and whose condition is characterized by a state of poetic frenzy. Although genius for Moreau is implicitly gendered male, not all his lunatics are men, and although some mental diseases were frequently gendered—most notably the hysteria associated exclusively with women—such “graphomania,” originally identified by Esquirol, was found in patients of both sexes. Following a disappointment in love, Mademoiselle X*** had developed the habit of writing verse on a variety of topics. Like a poet in the grip of the muse, she was prolific and her pen could barely keep pace with her thoughts: “Mademoiselle seemed to write more at the dictation of some mysterious being than at her own instigation; as she said herself, she was barely conscious of what she was doing.”11 The writing was not, in the judgment of Dr. Moreau, devoid of literary qualities, but these qualities do no more than tally with the compulsive, barely conscious condition that supposedly drives many recognized poetic geniuses. When deprived of paper, “Mademoiselle” would use any substitute she could lay her hands on, and when even these were not to be had, she took to answering the doctor’s questions in verse before she eventually collapsed into a state of complete mental and physical apathy. The difference between insanity and genius hangs by a hair, both being equally subject to spontaneous impulse and equally lacking in conscious control.
Whereas spontaneity and uncontrolled productivity are the chief characteristics of both genius and insanity in Moreau’s account, the medical man is portrayed as being as self-possessed as he is observant. Pinel had already claimed that “the lunatic [is] incapable of any self-awareness,” a limitation that was the counterpart of the hallucinator’s lack of relation to the external world. Commenting on Moreau de Tours’s ideas, the writer and critic Émile Deschanel describes the madman as “a stranger to himself” and the Latin gloss that he adds—alienatus a se—underscores the implications of the French term “aliéné” (lunatic). Likewise, as Moreau himself says, for the man of genius, “work is never better than when it is the least free, and when it is executed without the direct involvement of the will, and almost without the self being aware of it.”12 In both genius and insanity, then, the subject is at odds with or, rather, at some remove from himself.
In combination the results are disastrous, as Lélut had already indicated when he maintains that Socrates, “the greatest mind of antiquity,” was incapable of seeing “what he was in reality and allowed himself to become insane without sensing that this was happening to him.”13 Moreau suggests that the self-coincidence that is self-scrutiny is hard for anyone to achieve, even for those who are sound of mind, and that the wisdom and penetration we bring to bear on the external world often prove to be lacking when we turn our attention to ourselves. He himself, however, claims to possess just this attribute that, he argues, he owes to his medical expertise and that endows him with superior insight into mental disturbance.
His experience of hashish was the occasion for this self-scrutiny. He first encountered the drug in the Near East where as a young doctor he accompanied a patient for therapeutic purposes. Later, between 1844 and 1849, as a founder member of the Club des Hashischins, he participated alongside Baudelaire, Gautier, Nerval, and others in the fantasias that were held in the Hôtel Pimodan on the Île Saint-Louis in Paris. Hashish gave Moreau the opportunity to experience madness—albeit what he calls an artificial madness—firsthand. Hashish leads the mind to clothe sensations in material form and to project them onto external reality in ways that parallel the hallucinations of delirium. Moreau was thus “initiated into the mysteries of insanity” and allowed to discover the otherwise hidden source of the many disorders that go under the name of madness. But whereas the genuinely insane have no self-awareness, and whereas the observing medical man is normally obliged to rely on the potentially misleading procedures of reasoning and induction, Moreau was able to apply the professional habit of medical observation to himself. His account of the relation between hashish and insanity consists of “simple and obvious facts established by inner observation” of his own sensations and perceptions under the influence of temporary and artificially induced insanity. Moreau’s boast at the start of Du hachisch et de l’aliénation mentale (On hashish and insanity) is that “[p]ersonal experience is the criterium of truth here.”14
This unique medical authority is based on “reflection,” which he defines as “the power that the mind has to turn in on itself, so to speak, that mirror of sorts in which it can contemplate itself at will, and which provides it with a faithful account of its innermost movements.” Such self-scrutiny is no Romantic pretext for self-absorption but a guarantee of the accuracy of the observations of the insane. Where his colleagues can only surmise, Moreau knows from his own experience what his patients are undergoing, and, on the basis of the physical symptoms they present, he is able to make informed judgments about their underlying causes. This requires professional expertise as well as firsthand experience, since the physician is confronted by “mysteries of the intelligence … that morbid psychology alone can penetrate.”15 The aim of Moreau’s study is as much as anything else to establish the epistemological credentials of the discipline of morbid psychology, in whose eyes those of genius appear merely as a variant of the pathologies of mental functioning.
THE MEDICAL DAGUERREOTYPE
Accurate observation provides the diagnostician with the information he needs and is the principal index of professional expertise. Moreau notes the importance of “what we learn from the close, accurate and we might call truly medical observation of insanity.” In this connection he describes at some length the case of a young man in the grip of extreme mental disturbance where what is reported is not just the agitation, the volubility, and the physical distress of the patient as he leaps about the furniture or collapses into apathy, but Moreau’s own presence on the scene. This is discreetly alluded to as he records his attendance, one day at a time: September 1855, 20 December, and, as the crisis mounts, 1, 3, 4, 6, and 7 March, when “[the patient] has several scares in my presence.”16
Mostly, however, Moreau’s part in the picture has to be inferred from the impersonal forms he seems to favor: “several terrors that it was possible to abort [qu’on peut faire avorter], and finally another that it was not possible to halt [qu’on ne peut arrêter].” More common still are formulations that exclude all agency except those of the symptoms themselves, so that the entry for 6 March reads simply, “Spasmodic and painful contraction of the toes on both feet, and occlusion of the left eye, which is intermittently very painful. Several terrors.” Moreau sums all this up by saying, “These phenomena are observed [s’observent] more or less constantly,” cumulatively yielding a proof “perfectly designed to open the least perspicacious eyes.”17 It is as if the scenes played out before the observing physician provided their own self-evident truth about their underlying basis in a single “morbid cause.”
In the conclusion to the second part of the book Moreau reiterates the argument for seeing the “intellectual supremacy” of genius as part of a spectrum of mental disorder. He contrasts the scientific evidence with the idealized view of genius that bears no relation to reality, and he argues for the need to “record the moral and intellectual physiognomy of these great individuals as if in a daguerreotype.”18 The connotations of the daguerreotype are telling: medical observation is a matter of registering with impartial objectivity and total accuracy the facts of the pathology that the doctor has before him. This contrasts with the overflowing productivity of both insanity and genius. The doctor unobtrusively registers and records, whereas the lunatic and the genius uncontrollably produce.
But there is more to this opposition, since a different temporality is associated with each mode: if the productivity of insanity and genius is discontinuous and erratic, the comparison with the daguerreotype and its long exposure times defines medical practice in terms of constancy and sustained duration. The flashes and explosions, the abrupt shifts and leaps of the pathological or creative mind are the reverse of the steady progress of medical knowledge as Moreau describes it in the rest of the passage: “If we wish to remain in the domain of truth and concrete evidence …, we need as a first priority to base our assessment on the scientific data that we have just outlined, following up the hereditary facts, weighing their influence on the physical and moral constitution of individuals, not losing sight of the organic origins of their good or bad qualities, or of the countless particularities that reveal this supra-nervous origin: then, and only then, shall we have before our eyes the complete man, natural and not fictional, a man who is truly man.”19 The scientific data accrue in what is evidently a continuous process as the doctor traces the etiology back to its origins, and refuses to be distracted from his attention to organic conditions. The thoroughness and the persistence with which the doctor pursues his enquiry will eventually have their reward in the form of a total picture of its object. The time of medical science brings greater gains than the fireworks that genius shares with insanity.
Moreover, medical knowledge is itself a cumulative and collective enterprise, and for this reason too, the time of medical science can be only continuous and progressive. The practitioners of mental medicine were very conscious of belonging to a developing profession that—despite some ups and downs—was acquiring ever greater status and recognition over the course of the century.20 Whereas the genius is a lone operator, the medical psychologist acknowledges his place in a scientific discipline on which he draws and to which he hopes to contribute. Moreau may seek to distinguish himself from his colleagues through his claims to self-scrutiny, but he nonetheless gives ample due to predecessors in the specialty that goes by the name of “morbid psychology.”
He refers on several occasions to Lélut (footnoting his own review of Le Démon de Socrate), as he does to Esquirol, he mentions Pinel and Réveillé-Parise, cites authorities such as Broussais’s De l’irritation et de la folie (1839), and is particularly fulsome in his acknowledgment of the “most remarkable book” by Prosper Lucas. In addition, he refers copiously to recent medical literature on heredity and a range of conditions such as epilepsy, suicide, rickets, and so on. The footnotes testify to the extent of Moreau’s acquaintance with work in his area of medical expertise, which is noteworthy in view of his statement that he has written his book as much for the general public as for his specialist colleagues. In other words, Moreau is presenting himself as a participant in an evolving professional enterprise. Medical time is a continuously progressing time, and its difference from the disrupted, chaotic time of insanity or genius plays a large part in the way in which medical knowledge is constituted, and positively distinguished, even from works of genius.