Between the second half of the XVIII to the beginning of XIX, France and Europe experienced a period of exalted personality cyclothymic especially through the cult of sensibility that seems outdated today, "unhealthy" (Kramer in "Listening to Prozac").
Diderot and Rousseau had opted for a philosophy of truth and sensitivity close to nature as Seneca the thought: "Incidentally, I agree with all the Stoics, I give my consent to Nature, not not deviate from it, tune in its law and example, that is wisdom. A happy life is one that accords with their nature (...). Definition of true happiness (a happy life, III, 3)
Rousseau said, "Be just and you are happy," "I do not draw these principles to the high philosophy, but I find them deep in my heart."
nature for Rousseau is a guarantee of authenticity and simplicity. "Let maxim that the first movements of nature are always right there is no original perversity in the human heart. It is not there one vice of which we can not say how and where he entered "(Emile, II).
In The Reveries of the Solitary Walker (SECOND RIDE), Rousseau begins his narrative in this way: 
(...) These hours of solitude and meditation are the only of the day when I am fully myself and me without diversion, without obstacle, and where I can truly say be what nature intended. "
(...) These hours of solitude and meditation are the only of the day when I am fully myself and me without diversion, without obstacle, and where I can truly say be what nature intended. " In Confessions and La Nouvelle Heloise, Rousseau has every opportunity to unburden himself and unleash its sensitivity "feminine" as he says.
Goethe, with the bust of Rousseau on his desk a few years later wrote that romanticism was the disease because for him, aspecrt morbid and narcissistic romanticism was in contradiction with a classical ideal which makes do was more: think of the morbidity of the young Goethe's Werther !
In France, Vauvenargues appears as a figure of pre-romanticism (the heart and sesnibilité occupy a central place in his philosophy) as well as the brilliant Chamfort. L'Abbé Prévost
and his character Desgrieux struggle between reason and emotions in a chaotic and bipolar space where the hero is aware of his disqualification but incapable of reasoning.
I can not resist to quote Diderot who launches into a perfect description of the cyclothymic constitution that Gaston and Pierre Deny Kahn would not disown:
"Blessed is he who has received from nature a sensitive soul and mobile! It carries the source a multitude of delicious moments that others ignore. All men grieve, but he alone knows to complain and cry (...). It's his heart that links his ideas. He who has the spirit, that genius does not hear. It is an organ that they lack. The language of the heart is a thousand times more diverse than that of the mind, and it is impossible to give the rules of his dialectic. "
Letter to Sophie Volland.
sensitivity, as the only meaning we have given so far this term, is, in my opinion, this provision companion weak bodies, continued mobility of the diaphragm, the vivacity of imagination, the delicacy of nerves, which is inclined to sympathize, to shiver, to admire, to fear, to be troubled, crying, to faint, to rescue, to flee, screaming, mad, to exaggerate, to despise, to disdain, to have no clear idea of truth, goodness and beauty, to be unfair to be mad. Multiply the faint of heart, and you multiply the same proportion of good and bad deeds of all kinds, praise and blame outraged.
(paradox of the actor).
The degenerate artist by Max Nordau is as follows: " He is very proud to be an instrument that vibrates so strongly, and he boasts of his whole being felt torn inside, his soul resolved, and experience to the fingertips pleasure of beauty, where the Philistine remains completely cold. His excitability seemed superior, he believes have a particular understanding is lacking in other mortals, and he willingly despise the vulgar whose senses are dulled and closed. The unfortunate not suspect that he is proud of a disease and boasts of a mental disorder. "
Compare it extracted "positivist" alleging the book, "Degeneration" (a term taken over by the Nazis a bit with the same purpose Nordau that) with the section of Diderot (paradox of the actor)!
We see through these texts that the issue rarely addressed by physicians and therapists is the "Goodness of fit". Kramer explains that a capitalist society views these traits as depressive or cyclothymic or sickly. But would have thought of Rousseau, Diderot and Goethe?
Jamison explains in Touch With Fire (p.5): "A Common Assumption, for instance, Is That Within artistic circles madness Somehow IS normal.
She tells a detail the biography of the poet Robert Lowell began a manic episode. His wife worried but these academic colleagues and friends were Cicinnati he behaved like a poet when his wife saw him sick. While she was concerned and referred to the symptoms, they replied that this was the foolishness to them that it was "further proof of the genius of Lowell.
As I wrote, cyclothymia was the norm and it may still be in certain places or environments.
