Sixteenth International Conference on New Directions in the Humanities

Abstract

In this paper, I argue for temporal continuity and disciplinary connection between sectors of literature and psychology, specifically in the development of word-association testing from 1910 through the 1960s. Among the battery of exercises devised to calculate a standard of genius that surmounted all regional and cultural differences, these tests were intended to define and detect general laws of creativity. Psychometric testing did not mark a departure from the treatment of genius prevalent in the nineteenth century; however, it perpetuated the link between genius and madness through the theory of “psychosotism,” as Sarnoff and Martha Mednick’s Remote Association Test (designed in the 1960s) shows, and through the acknowledgment of creativity as verbal play. Tests intended to ground creativity in a nomothetic psychological standard rested, furthermore, in an aesthetic derived from the poetic practices of Symbolist, Imagist, and other literary experiments then in critical ascendancy. In addition to the Mednicks’ analysis, I discuss Carl Jung’s “Studies in Word-Association” (1904; English trans., 1918) and its adaptation by Grace Helen Kent and A.J. Rosanoff in 1910, for a study of patients and employees at Kings’ Park State Hospital in New York.