ible urge to write. Thus he confided to his nephew Henrik Lund that “as
soon as [I] have pen in hand on a blank sheet of paper, I run the risk of
writing on and on.” And he announced to his cousin Julie Thomsen quite
openly that “The truth is that I am really in love with the company of my
pen. Someone might say, ‘That is a poor object on which to cast your
love.’ Perhaps! It’s not exactly as though I were always pleased with it.
Sometimes I hurl it far away in indignation. Oh, but this very indignation
makes it clear to me, once again, that I am indeed in love with it.” Simi-
larly, Kierkegaard told of how he could sit (one is tempted to say, like a
genuine “premise author”) totally lost in his own “indolent productivity,
in which I produced and produced (and in one sense splendidly) but never
deigned to think about publishing.”
Clearly, Adler and Kierkegaard shared a number of the same artistic expe-
riences. Did they share the same medical fate?
Graphomania
Approximately 400B.C., the father of medicine, Hippocrates of Cos, and a
number of his colleagues wrote the bookOn the Holy Sickness. The title
itself contains a polemic against the view of the disease that was then current,
namely that it was divine because it was so alien, doing to human beings
what only the gods were capable of doing. Terrified observers noted how
the sickness, when it raged, could seize a person and cast him to the ground,
overcome with convulsions. They therefore labeled the disease with a word
for this seizure: epilepsy.
Hippocrates and his followers did not have much patience with the meta-
physical explanation, maintaining instead that epilepsy was caused by too
much phlegm or mucus in the brain. They were wrong on this point, and
their explanation was in a way no less naive than the one they rejected, but
their contribution was to point out the brain as the seat of the illness.
The neurophysiological explanation did not find much support for many
centuries, however, and the disease continued to be regarded as mysterious
and connected with demons. During the Middle Ages, epilepsy was viewed
as supernatural possession, either divine or satanic, but particularly the latter,
and in fact epilepsy was among the plagues that Luther called down on the
Catholic Church. It was only late in the Renaissance, which of course in
many respects harked back to classical antiquity, that the Hippocratic diag-
nosis again attracted medical attention and the disease was to some extent
demythologized. Today it is primarily, if not exclusively, regarded as a neu-
rophysiological dysfunction, but the disease has not entirely lost its old