Monomania

In 19th century psychiatry, monomania (from Greek monos, one, and mania, mania) is a single pathological preoccupation in an otherwise sound mind.^[1] 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. In 1880, monomania was one of the seven recognized categories of mental illness.^[2] After the 1850s monomania faded as a diagnostic category in psychiatry,^[3] and does not appear in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.^[4] However, a number of disorders once classified under monomania survive as impulse control disorders or conduct disorders or delusional disorders.^{[citation needed]}

Types of monomania

Monomania may refer to:^{[citation needed]}

1. 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.
2. Idée fixe: Domination by an overvalued idea, for example, "staying thin" in anorexia nervosa
3. Kleptomania: Irresistible urge to steal
4. Paranoia: Delusions of persecution
5. Pyromania: Impulse to deliberately start fires

In general terms, many of the disorders previously classified as monomania^[5][6] now are identified as varieties of impulse control, conduct, or delusional disorders.^[7]

Monomania in popular culture

In literature and film

Honoré de Balzac describes monomania in Eugenie Grandet:^[8]

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:^[9]

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.^[10]

In Crime and Punishment, by Fyodor Dostoevsky, the main character, Raskolnikov, is said to be a monomaniac on numerous occasions.^[11]

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.^[12]

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."^[13]

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:^[14]

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.

The 19th century writer Edgar Allan Poe would often write tales in which the narrator and protagonist would suffer some form of monomania^{[citation needed]}, 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:

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

In H.G. Wells' The Time Machine, the time traveler states that "To sit among all those unknown things before a puzzle like that is hopeless. That way lies monomania."^[15]

Onstage

The eponymous protagonist of the musical, Johnny Johnson, is eventually diagnosed with peace monomania.^{[citation needed]}

See also

• Idée fixe (psychology)
• Moral insanity
• Psychology of Addictive Behaviors

References

1. ^ Jan E. Goldstein (2002). Console and Classify: The French Psychiatric Profession in the Nineteenth Century. University of Chicago Press. p. 155. ISBN 0226301613. http://books.google.com/books?id=WiqKcO5OawgC&pg=PA155. 
2. ^ Diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders: DSM-IV-TR (4rth ed.). American Psychiatric Society. 2000. p. xxv. ISBN 0890420254. http://books.google.com/books?id=3SQrtpnHb9MC&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q=monomania&f=false. 
3. ^ Berrios's note states: "Monomania was a diagnosis invented by Esquirol which achieved certain popularity, particularly in forensic psychiatry. It was never fully accepted by those not belonging to Esquirol's school and after severe attack during the 1950s, it gradually disappeared." The reference to the 1950s is a typographical error and it should read the 1850s. This is evident from a reading of the section of Berrios's text which this note informs, the secondary and primary sources that Berrios uses to support this detail and other secondary and primary literature on the topic. For instance, at an earlier point in Berrios's text he writes: "...Esquirol's 'monomania' did not fare well ... and was killed in 1854 at a meeting of the Société Médico-Psychologique ..." Berrios, German E. (1996). The history of mental symptoms: descriptive psychopathology since the nineteenth century. Cambridge University Press. pp. 426, 447, 453 n. 50. ISBN 0521437369. http://books.google.com/books?id=XSD_ucVR3E8C&pg=PA453. 
4. ^ "cited work". Diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders: DSM-IV-TR. 2000. ISBN 0890420254. http://books.google.com/books?id=3SQrtpnHb9MC&printsec=frontcover. 
5. ^ Charles K Mills (1885). "Lectures on insanity; Lecture V: Monomania". In Joseph F Edwards, D G Brinton, Samuel Worcester Butler. Medical and surgical reporter: a weekly journal. 53. Philadelphia Press. pp. 202 ff. http://books.google.com/books?id=AiugAAAAMAAJ&pg=PA202. 
6. ^ Isidore Bernadotte Lyon (1889). "Partial intellectual or ideational mania or monomania". A text book of medical jurisprudence for India. Thacker, Spink. pp. 402 ff. http://books.google.com/books?id=yy06AAAAQAAJ&pg=PA402. 
7. ^ For example, see the historical evolution of paranoia in Alistair Munro (1999). "The derivation of current concepts regarding delusional disorders". Delusional disorder: paranoia and related illnesses. Cambridge University Press. pp. 8 ff. ISBN 052158180X. http://books.google.com/books?id=T-OPpp0haNIC&pg=PA8. 
8. ^ Honoré de Balzac (2008). Eugenie Grandet (Reprint ed.). Wilder Books. p. 130. ISBN 1604593121. http://books.google.com/books?id=29PKkTbwaVgC&pg=PA130. 
9. ^ Mary Elizabeth Braddon (1862). Lady Audley's secret (8th ed.). Oxford University. p. 269. http://books.google.com/books?id=UOYBAAAAQAAJ&pg=PA269. 
10. ^ Graeme Tytler (1992). "Heathcliff's Monomania: An Anachronism in Wuthering Heights". Bronte Society Transactions 20 (6): 331.  and Graeme Tytler (2005). "The parameters of reason in Wuthering Heights". Brontë Studies 30 (November). http://www.fortbend.k12.tx.us/campuses/documents/teacher/2009%5Cteacher_20090122_1215.pdf. 
11. ^ Fyodor Dostoyevsky (1886). Crime and Punishment. Vizetelly & Co.. http://books.google.com/books?id=aCgVAAAAYAAJ&dq=monomaniac+OR+monomania&q=monomania+OR+monomaniac#v=snippet&q=monomania%20OR%20monomaniac&f=false. 
12. ^ Edmond Gosse (1910). "Flaubert". In Hugh Chisholm. The encyclopædia britannica: a dictionary of arts, sciences, literature and general information, Volume 10 (11th ed.). University of Cambridge. p. 483. http://books.google.com/books?id=lU8EAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA483. 
13. ^ Krakauer, Jon (January 1993). Death of an Innocent: How Christopher McCandless lost his way in the wilds. Outside. 
14. ^ Herman Melville (2008). Moby-Dick - Or, the Whale - Volume I (Abridged ed.). Jesson Press. p. 231. ISBN 1409764850. http://books.google.com/books?id=pKd62MhrOTEC&pg=PA231. 
15. ^ H.G. Wells (1895). War of the Worlds. http://etext.virginia.edu/etcbin/toccer-new2?id=WelTime.sgm&images=images/modeng&data=/texts/english/modeng/parsed&tag=public&part=all. 

External links

• Marina Van Zuylen, Monomania: the flight from everyday life in literature and art, Cornell University Press, 2005, ISBN 9780801442988