The aesthetic appropriation of psychic states and disorders has a distinguished pedigree. André Breton adopted hysteria in the early days of the Surrealist movement, while his colleague Salvador Dalí preferred paranoia. Anton Ehrenzweig pressed Melanie Klein’s manic and depressive moments of an infant’s life into a theory of creative processes in his influential book, The Hidden Order of Art (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967). Of course, Sigmund Freud himself set the modern trend for this sort of borrowing in his analysis of the psychic energy underlying Leonardo da Vinci’s peculiar genius, but the tradition reaches as far back as ancient Greece. From antiquity to early modern times, melancholia was a term within medical discourse referring to one of the four humors or bodily fluids that were supposed to govern a person’s temperament. Ideally these fluids would be perfectly balanced, but one inevitably predominates. The sanguine humor, produced when blood is the body’s dominant fluid, was regarded as the most favorable: it was associated with air, spring, youth, and cheerfulness. Melancholia, the effect of an excess of black bile, was the worst and was associated with earth, autumn, evening, and late middle age. The melancholic person is surly and miserly;...