The Genius Myth: A Curious History of a Dangerous Idea

That fitted with the contemporary ideal of genius: a male body and brain fused with a female level of sensitivity. Around that time, Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams was first published, Pavlov was working with his dogs, and Charles Spearman championed the idea of ‘factor analysis’, a statistical technique he used to search for ‘g’, the mysterious concept of ‘general intelligence’. Studies of personality suggest that many creative people may score highly for mental openness – which, when taken to extremes, can mean a mind that cannot distinguish truth from delusion. ‘How near is madness to genius,’ wrote the French philosopher Denis Diderot. What finally changed these laissez-faire attitudes was the MeToo movement, which made defending predators commercial suicide.