Monomania
In 19th century psychiatry, monomania (from Greek monos, one, and mania, mania) 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 effecting all aspects of understanding and which reflected the position that the mind or soul was an indivisible entity. Coined by the French alienist 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. In 1880, monomania was one of the seven recognized categories of mental illness. After the 1850s monomania faded as a diagnostic category in psychiatry, and does not appear in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.
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Famous quotes containing the word monomania:
“Bourgeois society is infected by monomania: the monomania of accounting. For it, the only thing that has value is what can be counted in francs and centimes. It never hesitates to sacrifice human life to figures which look well on paper, such as national budgets or industrial balance sheets.”
—Simone Weil (1909–1943)