Italian psychiatrist Cesare Lombroso, "Genius and insanity": a summary of the book and reader reviews

Lombroso was born on November 6, 1835 in Verona, Kingdom of Lombardy-Venice, into a wealthy Jewish family. His father, Aronne Lombroso, was a merchant from Verona, and his mother was Zeffora (or Zephyr) Levi from Chieri near Turin. Lombroso came from a family of rabbis, which led him to study a wide range of topics at the university. Despite conducting religious studies at the university, Lombroso ultimately decided to continue his studies in medicine, which he successfully graduated from the University of Turin.

short biography

After graduating from university, military service and leaving the army, Lombroso led a psychiatric hospital in Pesaro. Lombroso married a woman named Nina de Benedetti on April 10, 1870. They had five children, one of whom was a daughter named Gina, who continued to edit Lombroso’s work after his death. Later, Lombroso was influenced by his son-in-law Guglielmo Ferrero, who led him to believe that not all crime comes from innate factors and that social factors also play a significant role in the process of becoming a criminal.

The future author of "Genius and Madness" - Lombroso, studied literature, linguistics and archeology at the universities of Padua, Vienna and Paris, but changed his plans and became an army surgeon in 1859. In 1866 he was appointed lecturer in Pavia, and in 1878 he became a professor of forensic medicine in Turin. In the same year, the creator of Genius and Insanity, C. Lombroso wrote his most important and influential work, L'uomo delinquente, which has passed through five editions in Italian and has been published in different European languages. However, only in 1900 his work was published in English. Lombroso later became a professor of psychiatry (1896) and criminal anthropology (1906) at the same university. He died in Turin in 1909.

The concept of criminal atavism

The general theory of Lombroso suggested that repeat offenders differ from attackers in numerous physical anomalies. He suggested that the criminals are a return to the primitive type of man, characterized by physical characteristics resembling monkeys, lower primates and early humans, and to some extent preserved, according to him, in modern "savages". The behavior of these biological “kickbacks” will inevitably contradict the rules and expectations of a modern civilized society.

Years after anthropometric studies of criminals, crazy and normal people, Lombroso became convinced that a “natural criminal” (reo nato is a term given by Ferry) can be identified anatomically thanks to such features as a sloping forehead, ears of an unusual size, facial asymmetry, prognathism, asymmetrical skulls and other “physical stigmata”. He believed that specific criminals, such as thieves, rapists and murderers, could have special characteristics. Lombroso also argued that criminals had less sensitivity to pain and touch, more keen eyesight, a lack of moral feeling (including remorse), more vanity, impulsiveness, revenge and cruelty.

Outlaws and everyone else

In addition to the type of “innate criminal”, Lombroso also described “criminoids” or random criminals, intruders, “moral idiots” and “criminal epileptics”. He acknowledged the smaller role of organic factors in many familiar criminals and mentioned a delicate balance between predisposing factors (organic, genetic) and accelerating factors such as the environment, positive opportunities, or poverty.

Crimes and Women

In The Crime Woman, presented in an English translation by Nicole Han Rafter and Mary Gibson, Lombroso used his theory of atavism to explain the felony of women. In the text, Lombroso sets out a comparative analysis of “normal women” opposed to “criminal women,” such as thieves and prostitutes. However, Lombroso's "stubborn beliefs" about women represented a "insoluble problem" for this theory. The creator of the concept of genius and insanity, Lombroso was convinced that women are inferior to men in everything, including the tendency to commit crimes.

Scientific methods

Lombroso’s research methods were clinical and descriptive, with accurate skull measurement details and other anthropometric findings. He did not deal with rigorous statistical comparisons of criminals and non-criminals. Despite the fact that he later learned about the psychological and sociological factors in the etiology of crime, he remained convinced of the superiority of his criminal anthropometry. After his death, the skull and brain were measured by his own theories by a colleague, as he requested in his will. His head was kept in a bank and is still on display with his collection at the Museum of Psychiatry and Criminology in Turin.

Lombroso’s theories were rejected throughout Europe, especially in the medical schools associated with Alexander Lacassagne in France, but not in the United States, where sociological research on crime and the perpetrator predominated. It is believed that his ideas about physical differentiation between criminals and non-criminals were seriously disputed by Charles Goering (The English Convict, 1913), who carefully analyzed and found insignificant statistical differences.

Cesare Lombroso, "Genius and Madness" - summary

Cesare Lombroso, in addition to his contribution to criminology and the introduction of the concept of “degeneration”, believed that genius is closely connected with madness. In his attempts to develop these concepts, the author of the concept of genius and insanity, Lombroso went to Moscow and met with Leo Tolstoy, hoping to find out and provide evidence of his theory of genius. And he succeeded, as the subsequent history of his famous and scandalous work shows.

Lombroso’s psychiatrist’s book Genius and Madness was published in 1889 and claimed that artistic genius was a form of hereditary madness. To confirm this claim, he began to collect a large collection of "psychiatric art." He published an article on this subject in 1880, in which he identified thirteen characteristics of the "art of the insane." Although the criteria are generally considered obsolete today, his work inspired later authors on this subject, in particular, Hans Princeshorn.

Communication with the scientific world

The book "Genius and Insanity" by the Italian psychiatrist C. Lombroso inspired the work of Maxim Nordau, as evidenced by his dedication to the concept of degeneration, and he considered Lombroso himself to be his "dear and honored teacher." In his study of geniuses descending into madness, Lombroso said that he can only find six people who did not have symptoms of “degeneration” or madness: Galileo, Da Vinci, Voltaire, Machiavelli, Michelangelo and Darwin. On the other hand, Lombroso claimed that people like Shakespeare, Plato, Aristotle, Mozart and Dante all showed "degenerate symptoms of insanity."

Symptoms of degeneration in geniuses

To determine which geniuses were “degenerate” or insane, Lombroso assessed each genius for whether it showed “degeneration symptoms” that included prematureness, longevity, versatility, and inspiration. Lombroso supplemented these personal observations with measurements, including facial angles, “abnormalities” in bone structure and volumes of brain fluid. Measurements of skulls taken included those of Kant, Volta, Foscolo and Fusinieri. Lombroso’s approach to using skull measurements inspired the phrenology research of German physician Franz Josef Gall.

Genius and physiology

The author of Genius and Insanity, Lombroso linked genius to various health disorders, listing the signs of degeneration in the second chapter of his work, some of which include various physiological abnormalities such as excessive pallor. Lombroso listed the following geniuses as “painful and weak in childhood”: Demosthenes, Bacon, Descartes, Newton, Locke, Adam Smith, Boyle, Flaxman, Nelson, Haller, Corner and Pascal. Other physical afflictions associated with degeneration, according to Lombroso, included rickets, exhaustion, infertility, leftuvannost, unconsciousness, stupidity, somnambulism, dwarfism or disproportionality of the body and amnesia. In his explanation of the connection between genius and insanity, Lombroso quotes Ibsen, George Eliot, Browning, Louis Blanc, Swinburne and others. Lombroso further cited some character traits as markers of degeneration: “love for special words” and “feeling of inspiration”.

Criticism

The methods and explanations in the book of psychiatrist Lombroso "Genius and insanity" were refuted and criticized by the American Journal of Psychiatry. In a review of the book, they stated: "There is a hypothesis that claims to be the result of rigorous scientific research and reluctant conviction, backed up by obvious truths, distortions, and assumptions." Lombroso’s work has also been criticized by Italian anthropologist Giuseppe Sergi, who, in his review of “Genius and Insanity,” concludes that all theories trying to explain the nature of geniuses are based on observation and subjective assumptions.

Despite criticism of the scientific community, success was nevertheless ensured by Lombroso's book "Genius and Insanity" - reviews of it are still enthusiastic, because the reading public, as you know, loves unusual and exotic theories.