“…In this true context (the history of how melancholy has been thought of in the West, from the Greeks to the present) an event occurs that shows the obstacles and limits that critical thinking about melancholy encounters: while from the Greeks until the Renaissance melancholy was granted to be the "state of mind", The "way of being" typical of the great men, from the eighteenth century this conception falls progressively as the idea is imposed that genius is the pathological trait of the nervous excitability of the person 9 , 10 .…”