Monomania

For the Deerhunter album, see Monomania (album).

Théodore Géricault, portrait of a woman suffering from obsessive envy

In 19th-century psychiatry, monomania (from Greek monos, one, and mania, meaning "madness" or "frenzy") was a form of partial insanity conceived as single pathological preoccupation in an otherwise sound mind. Partial insanity, variations of which enjoyed a long pre-history in jurisprudence, was in contrast to the traditional notion of total insanity, exemplified in the diagnosis of mania, as a global condition affecting all aspects of understanding and which reflected the position that the mind or soul was an indivisible entity. Coined by the French psychiatrist Jean-Étienne Dominique Esquirol (1772–1840) around 1810, monomania was a new disease-concept characterised by the presence of an expansive idée fixe in which the mind was diseased and deranged in some facets but otherwise normal in others. Esquirol and his circle delineated three broad categories of monomania coherent with the traditional tripartite classification of the mind into intellectual, emotional and volitional faculties. Emotional monomania is that in which the patient is obsessed with only one emotion or several related to it; intellectual monomania is that which is related to only one kind of delirious idea or ideas. Although monomania was retained as one of seven recognized categories of mental illness in the 1880 US census, its importance as a psychiatric diagnostic category was in decline from the mid-19th century.

Types of monomania

Monomania may refer to:

• de Clerambault's syndrome (erotomania): Delusion that a particular man or woman is in love with the patient. This can occur without reinforcement or even acquaintanceship with the love object.
• Idée fixe: Domination by an overvalued idea, for example, "staying thin" in anorexia nervosa
• Kleptomania: Irresistible urge to steal
• Pyromania: Impulse to deliberately start fires
• Lypemania: Early elaboration later to become modern concept of depression

Monomania in popular culture

In literature and film

Honoré de Balzac describes monomania in Eugénie Grandet:

As if to illustrate an observation which applies equally to misers, ambitious men, and others whose lives are controlled by any dominant idea, his affections had fastened upon one special symbol of his passion. The sight of gold, the possession of gold, had become a monomania.

Additionally, in Balzac's novel Lucien De Rubempre, the title character is referred to as in a hallucinatory state similar to that of a monomaniac.

Monomaniacal fear is explored in great depth in M. E. Braddon's novel, Lady Audley's Secret, through the protagonist Robert Audley, whom the guilty woman accuses of monomania in his relentless attempt to prove her guilt. She describes monomania thus:

What is one of the strangest diagnostics of madness—what is the first appalling sign of mental aberration? The mind becomes stationary; the brain stagnates; the even current of reflection is interrupted; the thinking power of the brain resolves itself into a monotone. As the waters of a tideless pool putrefy by reason of their stagnation, the mind becomes turbid and corrupt through lack of action; and the perpetual reflection upon one subject resolves itself into monomania.

In Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights, Heathcliff is described as a monomaniac, obsessing over his reunion with Cathy in the final chapters of the novel.

In Crime and Punishment, by Fyodor Dostoevsky, the main character, Raskolnikov, is said to be a monomaniac on numerous occasions.

It is said that Flaubert's hatred of the bourgeois and their bêtise (willful idiocy), that began in his childhood, developed into a kind of monomania.

In a 1993 Outside magazine article about Christopher McCandless that he later expanded into the best-selling book, Into the Wild (which was also made into a film), Jon Krakauer summarizes the portrait of Christopher painted by friends, family, and schoolmates thusly: "McCandless could be generous and caring to a fault, but he had a darker side as well, characterized by monomania, impatience, and unwavering self-absorption, qualities that seemed to intensify throughout his college years."

In Moby-Dick by Herman Melville (1851), Captain Ahab is a monomaniac, as shown by his quest to kill Moby Dick. One particular situation where he is shown as a monomaniac is in the crew's first encounter with the whale, stating:

But, as in his narrow-flowing monomania, not one jot of Ahab's broad madness had been left behind; so in that broad madness, not one jot of his great natural intellect had perished. ... so that far from having lost his strength, Ahab, to that one end, did now possess a thousand-fold more potency than ever he had sanely brought to bear upon any reasonable object.

In the original French text of Jules Vernes' Around the World in 80 Days, the main character, Phileas Fogg is viewed by his servant Passepartout as a "monomane" for his fixation with winning his bet to complete his tour of the world in the prescribed 80 days.

The 19th-century writer Edgar Allan Poe would often write tales in which the narrator and protagonist would suffer some form of monomania, becoming excessively fixated on an idea, an urge, an object, or a person, often to the point of mental and/or physical destruction. Poe uses the theme of monomania in:

• "Berenice" (about a madman who gets obsessed with the teeth of his cousin and fiancee Berenice)
• "The Black Cat" (a man fears his cat and kills it, adopts another cat, kills his wife, and is then punished by the cat)
• "The Fall of the House of Usher" (the main character Usher is obsessed with the fear of death)
• "The Masque of the Red Death" (a prince fears a terrible disease but finally gets ill from the red death and dies)
• "The Oval Portrait" (about a painter who is obsessed with painting his wife)
• "The Tell-Tale Heart" (a madman is obsessed with an elderly man's "vulture eye")
• "The Man of the Crowd" (the narrator follows an old man wherever he goes)

In H.G. Wells' The Time Machine, the time traveller states that "To sit among all those unknown things before a puzzle like that is hopeless. That way lies monomania."

In "The Tomb", a 1917 short story by H.P. Lovecraft, the pledge by the character of Jervas Dudley to break into an ancient family crypt is said by a physician to have been "the beginning of a pitiful monomania."

In The Last of Chéri, by Colette, Pal considers Chéri to be a monomaniac.

In The West Wing, incoming White House Chief of Staff Joshua Lyman is described as being monomaniacal in his dedication to public service, as displayed by singularly focusing on his political work at the expense of his personal life and relationships.

In "The Six Napoleons", by Arthur Conan Doyle, where the criminal was thought to be suffering from monomania because he was repeatedly smashing the busts of Napoleon.

In The Count of Monte Cristo, by French author Alexandre Dumas, Abbe Faria is believed to suffer from a monomania regarding the treasure he always spoke of to the persons of Château d'If, the political prison in which he was detained.

See also

• Addictive behaviour
• Idée fixe
• Moral insanity

External links

• Marina Van Zuylen, Monomania: the flight from everyday life in literature and art, Cornell University Press, 2005, ISBN 978-0-8014-4298-8