Obsession: A History (review)

The subject theme of Obsession: A Modern History is self-explanatory: it deals with the idea that modern social cultural existence is essentially characterized by obsession and asserts that this requires close historical analysis in order to become fully comprehensible. This is perhaps not such a grand claim given the unquestionable contemporary existence of addiction to television shows, devotion to work, or interest in romantic infatuation in our cinema. Yet Lennard J. Davies astutely, and accurately, depicts obsession as being far more than simply an excessive interest, preoccupation, fixation, or hobby. He also clearly defines it as a pathological phenomenon and a highly significant medical category.

Obsessional behavior is defined here as a cultural problematic that essentially commences with modernity. Of course, this is not to claim that such forms of behavior were not in existence before, but that they were generally not seen as being particularly problematic before in the same way that we now perceive obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) to be a significant medico-social phenomena. The aim of the book is to show how we got to this state of affairs. Davis argues that we need to fully understand how certain behaviors come to be linked to a disease, how society at large can influence which behaviors are seen as symptoms at any given time, and how researchers arrive at their own way of organizing knowledge and developing protocols. He therefore shows how obsession became perceived to be an illness from the eighteenth century, as well as how the obsessive study of obsession became a profession itself.

The historical sources used to underscore Davies’ main hypotheses are diverse and carefully chosen, drawing from biography, literature, art, psychology, and the history of scientific research. He begins, for instance, with exploration of the obsessive manners of Lady Macbeth, with her well-known delusions of blood and her need to wash constantly, before taking us through incidents of mass obsession in the cotton mills of industrial Lancashire, mapping a shift from popularly accepted explanation from demonic possession to medical concepts of nervous instability. Here, Davis maps a shift from definitions of madness that appeared to consume the patient in the eighteenth century towards a more fragmented view of mental problems that allowed for what Davis terms ‘partial insanity.’ Hence, unlike earlier periods, a patient might no longer be necessarily completely mad in order to express particular mental conditions. It is within the opening of this conceptual space that Davis locates the rise of obsession as a potential disease entity. To be obsessed is not to be mad, as such, but still acts as an overt display of mental abnormality in an otherwise normal person.

It is within the nineteenth century, it is suggested here, where we can observe the appearance of a recognizable condition of consciousness in which a person is obsessed by an idea, series of thoughts, person, or some other ruling passion. The introduction and dissemination of monomania is discussed utilizing a wide range of medical and cultural sources, detailing Charles Dickens’s accounts of his encounter with monomaniacs during visits to asylums, as well as portraying the protagonists of novels such as Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein as being early examples of fictional characters obsessed with single goals such as the creation of new life. We are then taken through Freudian explanations of obsession, the compulsive writing activities of literary figures such as Zola, and the fixation of nineteenth-century scientists in determining new forms of knowledge. Yet those historians of medicine well-versed in the history of madness might find some of Davis’s historiographical accounts of the shifting conceptualizations of mental illness to be a little distracting from the main argument, although this is perhaps necessary to allow the book to reach a more general audience. Certainly, the descriptions of eighteenth-century concepts of nervousness and the depictions of new diagnostic categories such as hysteria in the following decade can at times seem a little familiar to an academic audience.

Yet where the...