Monomania
| Monomania | |
|---|---|
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| Théodore Géricault, portrait of a woman with obsessive envy | |
| Classification and external resources | |
| ICD-10 | Xxx.x |
| ICD-9-CM | xxx |
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.
Monomania may refer to:
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:
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