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In Victorian society, admiration for the ‘creative genius’ abounded. It was based on stereotypical notions of the Romantic artist, who, ‘by the neat and necessarily contradictory logic of aesthetic elevation and social exclusion, [was] both a great genius and greatly misunderstood’.1 In Germany the propensity to idealise the artist as a creative genius was further propelled by intellectuals’ and writers’ contribution to imagining the German nation throughout the nineteenth century, and by the tendency of literary works to aestheticise and idealise bourgeois life. By the late nineteenth century, this Romantic image of genius began to transform, despite much resistance from parts of the German public. For over two decades from the late 1890s onwards – roughly until the First World War – psychiatrists, psychoanalysts and the reading public were particularly captivated by the mental health and sex life of German creative writers, artists and intellectuals. For the sake of simplicity, all such individuals are throughout this chapter collectively referred to as creative artists. Both psychiatric discourse and the more conservative strand of psychoanalytic discourse provided a powerful new lens through which to interpret biographies of exceptional human beings. Artist pathographies, or psychiatric case studies of creative artists, expanded the case study genre towards biography and presented readers with new insights into the private lives of particular creative artists. Sigmund Freud and his pupil Otto Rank brought contrasting approaches to enquiring into aspects of artistic personality, creativity and oeuvre, partly in an attempt to curb the idealising tendencies of the German reading public. The differing biographical and artistic studies reproduce what Christian von Zimmermann has identified as the two main biographical narratives characteristic of modernity, namely anthropologisation and idealisation, that is, either an attempt to underline similarities between exceptional and average human beings, or an admiring elevation of biographical subjects that emphasises their status as exceptional individuals.2 As discussed in Chapter 1, in the instance of

Fin-de-siècle investigations of the ‘creative genius’ in psychiatry and psychoanalysis