Perhaps, observes James McPherson, McClellan’s career had been too successful. He had never known . . . the despair of defeat or the humiliation of failure. He had never learned the lessons of adversi...
Yet, to the wigwam audience in Decatur, Lincoln presented a strange figure. He didn’t seem euphoric, or triumphant, or even pleased. To the contrary, said a man named Johnson, observing from the conve...
Men are not flattered by being shown that there has been a difference of purpose between the Almighty and them.
Lincoln was raised in the thick of Old School Calvinism. In Kentucky and Indiana, his parents belonged to a fire-breathing sect called Separate Baptism, in which congregants heard—in the tradition of...
Though major depression is often associated with lethargy to the point of being frozen, many people with chronic depression not only work well but devote more energy to their vocation than to any othe...
In the fourth century, John Cassian described a condition among his fellow monks that he called acedia: a weariness or distress of heart . . . akin to dejection that took possession of unhappy souls a...
In the early nineteenth century, a new culture—a new idea about what to hope for—emerged for many Americans, centered around the independent self, under nation and God.
In particular, he named three kinds of troubles that could beset a person with a nervous temperament: poor weather, isolation or idleness, and stressful events.
I close. We are not we must not be aliens or enemies but fellow countrymen and brethren. Although passion has strained our bonds of affection too hardly they must not I am sure they will not be broken...
Creeping fear of madness often accompanies depression. Sufferers wonder if their black moods will ever lift, or if their feelings of alienation from the healthy world will deepen and widen. These fear...
From a young age, Lincoln experienced psychological pain and distress, to the point that he believed himself temperamentally inclined to suffer to an unusual degree. He learned how to articulate his s...
Today, many people not only take the self for granted but struggle mightily to connect it to anything larger. In Lincoln’s time, the idea of the self had the power—tinged with uncertainty, even with d...
ONE OF THE REASONS that depression is so problematic—and deadly, leading to many of the forty thousand suicides in the United States each year—is that people are often loath to admit they are sufferin...
As the psychiatrist Kay Redfield Jamison writes, There is a great deal of evidence to suggest that, compared to ‘normal’ individuals, artists, writers, and creative people in general are both psycholo...
Another well-known study, led by Nancy Andreasen, used structured interviews and matched control groups to examine thirty writers at the prestigious University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Eighty percen...
Yet a period’s character does affect individual character. Psychology, the study of what happens in our minds, is tightly interwoven with culture, the name we give to our beliefs, practices, and socia...
At the same time that self-made entered the nation’s lexicon, so did the notion of abject failure. Once reserved to describe a discrete financial episode—I made a failure, a merchant would say after l...
The American tradition of separation of church and state grew directly from the freethinking of the Founders. After political independence, they considered independence of thought and belief a logical...
And he was moved by the contrast with his own condition. A free man, relatively prosperous, just ending five weeks in luxury’s lap, and he was quite unhappy. The slaves, treated abominably, at least s...
Am loth to close. We are not we must not be aliens or enemies, but fellow countrymen and brethren friends. We must not be enemies. AlThough passion may have has strained, it must not break our bonds o...
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