The issue of creative personality traits, pertaining to author psychology, has a long tradition in research, extending even into prescientific times. This tradition began in antiquity and set out from an idea, which offers some consolation to those who count as normal namely that creative individuals have to pay somehow for their gift of being a genius. Initially such a price to be paid was a physical deficiency, for instance he blindness of the prophetic eye in the imagination of ancient Greece (cf. Welleck and Warren 1963:66). In more recent times, this hypothesis of substitution has remained quite successful, especially in combination with ideas pertaining to the aesthetics of genius, as the postulate of a link between genius and mental illness was initially understood as a form of epilepsia in this context, all other endogenic and exogenic variants of psychosis were later on included as well. Evidence for this was gathered mainly from pathograhic biographies of great artists.
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