Genius and Madness

From Elvis to Picasso and the thorny intersection of "madness" and creativity.

William Todd Schultz is Professor of Psychology at Pacific University in Oregon and edited the Handbook of Psychobiography (Oxford University Press 2005). See full bio

March 12, 2009, Personality

The Nemesis: Everyone's Own Personal Satan

We All Have Our Own Private Dr. Evil

Recently I've been thinking about a concept that really has no precise name, but which I started calling the "Nemesis." I was teaching a class called Autobiography, Fiction, and Self-Invention, and I was struck by the number of people, my students included, whose life story prominently featured an "adversary" figure. This nemesis tends to haunt the person's early childhood. He/She is typically a classmate or a person in the neighborhood. The nemesis incites a lot of fear and anxiety, and a feeling of foreboding. Occasionally he/she is vanquished, but more often than not the nemesis simply eventually disappears or moves or transfers to a different school. Rarely does the nemesis turn into a friend, though of course anything's possible. But the person does struggle against this figure, face the nemesis in battles big and small, sometimes temporarily and briefly winning, sometimes losing dreadfully.

A question is: What's the function of the nemesis in a person's life story? Well, it's hardly a new metaphor. Christ had Satan, Buddha had Devadatta, Popeye had Bluto, Austin Powers had Dr. Evil (and Mini-Me), etc etc. It seems to me that, even if our life in fact lacks a genuine nemesis figure, we more or less invent one. Why? As a means of depicting conflict, as a projected repository for what Jung might have called our "shadow," as the alternate self that we do NOT aspire to, in the sense described by personality researcher Dan Ogilvie (who has written on the topic of the undesired self). We know who we are by knowing who we are not, just as much as knowing what we would like to be and do. Also, by constructing a nemesis, we personify our weaknesses and fears and insecurities in a way that, post hoc, allows us to dramatize them, script them.

So thank you, nemeses, for the small part you played in helping me know who I am.