Obsession: A History (review)

As Lennard Davis wryly observes near the start of this book, we are obsessed with obsession. It is no longer enough, it seems, for the obsessive individual to be a figure who floats around the outer edges of society, misunderstood and strange, but generally tolerated; rather we now work as a culture that wants our central players obsessed. Commitment to a cause (of whatever kind) is never really taken seriously unless there is a degree of obsession involved—we would mistrust a ‘genius’ unless we could detect those unmistakable signs of obsessive behaviour: long hours of work, or dedicated practice, or single-minded vision. These are now more requirements than oddities when it comes to, say, measuring success or achievement. Might we not (to take two examples unmentioned in Davis’s very wide-ranging study) think that films such as Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now or Werner Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo are better than they might have been precisely because we believe the two directors to have been somehow obsessed during their respective productions? If so, and to continue the filmmaking example, where does that leave a ‘moderately’ obsessive figure such as Peter Jackson, who might be no autocrat like Coppola or Herzog, but still obsessively pieced together a painstakingly accurate version of early 1930s Manhattan, so that the background city during the final scenes of King Kong was correct down to the level of each individual building? Obsession, it seems clear, comes in different sizes, but its presence is a requirement in the production of the exceptional.

The result, as Davis notes, is that obsession occupies an odd status, seen (as with a concomitant notion, like ‘worry’) as being both possibly healthy and yet clearly possessing the potential to be unhealthy. Jackson’s obsession might be seen as wonderful attention to detail, whereas Coppola or Herzog verge on breaking through boundaries of ‘acceptable’ behaviour towards something more threatening and disturbing. Davis observes how obsession always operates in relation to an idea of what is constituted as normal, and so our modern obsession with its various forms needs to be placed in the context not just of what we choose to frame as acceptable today, but the ways in which ideas about obsessive behaviours, manias, nerves, passions, and the like have been constituted in the past. Part of the considerable achievement of this book is that, with all of the material from which it might draw, it manages to organise a historical line that can move its arguments from demonic possession to OCD, and still keep the overarching thesis in play. That thesis itself will be familiar to those who have read Davis’s previous work on the notion of the biocultural, the David Morris term he has adopted for the nexus at which medicine, society, culture, and narrative all meet. As he writes, “The goal of a biocultural project is to redeploy culture into the sciences and medicine so that a new synergy and wholeness can illuminate these complex projects” (12).

Obsession is exactly this kind of project. Davis moves through the centuries, finding the origins of obsession in the move from a religious to a scientific mode of thinking, and from the idea of ‘whole’ madness (which might explain possession or melancholic states of ‘temperament’) to the notion of ‘partial’ insanity (which allows for new ideas of rationality and specialisation). By the early nineteenth century, ‘monomania’, or the belief that the mind could be dominated by a single train of thought, was well established as a social fact. The mad were no longer only to be found behind bars in institutions; rather, as Davis writes, they were now “found everywhere—in the home, the workplace, and even in the supervising office of the asylum. To be obsessive was to be human” (100). In a nice phrase he notes that such an extended notion of madness allows for a “kind of portal into modernity” (81), and it is the specialization of the modern that Davis...