"At Harvard in the 1890's Professor William James had in his classes a rather wonky, stubby talkative Jewish girl from California. She was late for classes, didn't seem to understand what was going on, misspelled, knew no Latin -- that sort of typicall mess, the girl who couldn't get it together, a 'typical neurotic' as we might say today. But William James let her turn in a blank exam paper, and gave her a high mark for the course, helped her through to medical studies at Johns Hopkins. He saw something unique in this pupil. She was Gertrude Stein...

In a Southern small town a man named Phil Stone, who had some literary education at Yale, took under his wing as coach and mentor, a short, wiry, heavily drinking, hihgly pretentious lad of the town. This young fellow wrote poems, pretended to be British, carried a walking stick and wore special clothes -- all in smalltown Mississippi during the First World War. Phil Stone listened to the boy, whom we might call today a 'typical puer' and perceived his uniqueness. THe man went on to become the William Faulkner who was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1949...

In the year 1831 one of those marvellous old-fashioned scientific expeditions was to set forth; a schoolmaster named John Henslow suggested that one of his former pupils be appointed naturalist. The lad was then 22; he had been rather dull at school, hopeless in maths, although a keen collector of beetles from the countryside; he was hardly different from the others of his type and class: hunting and shooting, popular member of the Glutton Club aimed for the clergy. He had a 'typical family complex' as we might say today, soft in the mother and dominated by a 300-pound father. But Henslow saw something and persuaded the parties involved, including the pupil named Charles Darwin, that he make the journey." from Egalitarian Typologies versus the Perception of the Unique by James Hillman