Armchair Diagnoses II. Psychogenic hypotheses

<jats:title>Abstract</jats:title> <jats:p>Another group of scholars has focused on possible psychological (“psychogenic”) explanations of Darwin’s illness. These can be divided roughly into those involving psychoanalytic explanations, involving speculations about Darwin’s relationships with different family members, and those emphasizing various possible strong stresses that might have triggered his illness. The psychoanalytic ideas enjoyed a large vogue in the early 20th century but are largely deemed today to be unconvincing, as well as lacking evidence, while some of the stress-explanations have somewhat more plausibility, but tend to fail as full explanations. In short, the suggested psychological explanations seem to be as inadequate as the proposed explanations based on possible biological causes.</jats:p>