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Sammanfattning

X : Psychopathography is a specific kind of biography focusing on psychological and psychopathological aspects of the personality and their significance for creative activity, especially in famous persons. Psychopathography evolved as a discipline from the 1830's onwards, as a product of psychiatry emerging as a science, reflecting its reductionist and nosological approach. An illustration of this method is the analysis of the author E.T.A. Hoffmann, a prototypical representative of the German romanticism at the beginning of the century. Hoffmann himself expresses, in allegorical terms, the menacing, irrational and unconscious domains of the human soul. Romanticism may be seen as a forerunner of the psychoanalytic movement. Confronted with modernism in art, pathographic considerations were to a large extent based upon the object of art itself, often with arrogant and repudiating conclusions concerning the artist. Classical psychoanalysis has had a marked tendency to deduce a great deal about the personality of the artist or the writer solely from analysis of a picture or written text. The pathographic approach of the first century of scientific psychiatry has had a renaissance over the last 15-20 years: The ever increasing interest in affective syndromes has entailed a tendency to trace and identify affective pathology in artists and writers, deceased or alive, often emphasizing the affective dynamics of the creative process, aspects also noted by the classical pathographers. More recent studies of the creative personality may also present improved instruments for the study of the creative process.

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