La Mettrie: medicine, philosophy, and Enlightment

personality of specific individuals-historical, like Swift, Milton, Pope and Savage, and fictional, like the characters ("Dick Linger", "Sober", "Cupidus" and so forth) who populate the Rambler and Idler essays. Unsurprisingly, Johnson's reading of human psychology at large is shown to reflect his own propensities-indeed,.it served as an attempt to resolve the crises afflicting his own intra-psychic life, notably the deep and lasting melancholy that he feared might lead to madness itself. (Gross, it should be added, does not press the rather extreme notion that Johnson came near to true insanity.) This invisible riot of the mind argues, surely correctly, that Johnson was an exceptionally acute psychologist and self-analyst-which is not to deny that he could frequently be wilfully blind-he had, Gross notes, a strong grasp of the human tendency to take refuge in self-delusion. Without dogmatically setting Johnson on the couch, Gross highlights the violently contradictory urges and needs inflaming the passions of one who had struggled so desperately to rise in life ("Slow rises worth by poverty depress'd") only finally to find that success itself was insipid and failed to dispel depression. Because of a profound sense of inadequacy and deep guilt feelings, Johnson was one who could rarely enjoy prosperity, remaining almost pathologically pugnacious. Envy, rage, anxiety and the desire to dominate loom large in Johnson's self-perceptions and in his account of human motivation. He judged mankind to be driven by irresistible subterranean forces, insatiable cravings for gratification. To stave off misery and vacuity, the human imagination lost itself in fantasy worlds, dangerous because they ran riot, out of control, tyrannizing the reason. Johnson espoused something like a Freudian sense of the unconscious, Gross suggests: a perception of mankind as gripped by dark, primitive irrational impulses. This hypothesis is advanced judiciously. Gross is not suggesting that Johnson was some kind of "precursor" of Freud or that Freudian depth psychiatry will completely explicate the author of Rasselas. Rather it is her contention that the key to Johnson's genius-the reason why we remain fascinated by his life and still devour The lives of the poets or The vanity ofhuman wishes-lies in his extraordinarily vivid grasp of, and capacity to empathize with, elemental human feelings and experiences. She is right. Recent scholarship has, quite properly, set Johnson in his religious and ethical contexts. Gross's reading of Johnson as a psychologist restores a neglected aspect of the writer and reminds us, pace …