In 19th-century
psychiatry
Psychiatry is the medical specialty devoted to the diagnosis, treatment, and prevention of deleterious mental disorder, mental conditions. These include matters related to cognition, perceptions, Mood (psychology), mood, emotion, and behavior.
...
, monomania (from Greek , "one", and , meaning "madness" or "frenzy") was a form of partial insanity conceived as single psychological obsession in an otherwise sound mind.
Types
Monomania may refer to:
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Erotomania
Erotomania, also known as de Clérambault's syndrome, is a relatively uncommon paranoia, paranoid condition that is characterized by an individual's delusions of another person being infatuation, infatuated with them. It is listed in the DSM-5 as ...
(also known as
De Clérambault's syndrome): Delusion that a particular person is in love with the patient. This can occur without reinforcement or even acquaintanceship with the love object.
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Idée fixe: Domination by an overvalued idea, for example, "staying thin" in
anorexia nervosa
Anorexia nervosa (AN), often referred to simply as anorexia, is an eating disorder characterized by Calorie restriction, food restriction, body image disturbance, fear of gaining weight, and an overpowering desire to be thin.
Individuals wit ...
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Kleptomania
Kleptomania is the inability to resist the urge to steal items, usually for reasons other than personal use or financial gain. First described in 1816, kleptomania is classified in psychiatry as an impulse-control disorder. Some of the main ch ...
: Irresistible urge to steal
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Pyromania
Pyromania is an impulse-control disorder in which individuals repeatedly fail to resist impulses to deliberately start fires, to relieve some tension or for instant gratification. The term ''pyromania'' comes from the Greek word (''pyr'', 'f ...
: Impulse to deliberately start fires
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Lypemania: Early elaboration later to become modern concept of
depression
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Narcissism
Narcissism is a self-centered personality style characterized as having an excessive preoccupation with oneself and one's own needs, often at the expense of others. Narcissism, named after the Greek mythological figure ''Narcissus'', has evolv ...
: Pursuit of gratification from one's own attributes
* Homicidal monomania: According to
Étienne-Jean Georget
Étienne-Jean Georget (2 April 1795 – 14 May 1828) was a French psychiatrist. He is known for writing on monomania. He is also the pioneer of forensic psychiatry, and was the first psychiatrist to discuss the defence of insanity to criminal cha ...
, an abrupt "lesion of the will" capable of driving an otherwise sane person to murder
History
Partial insanity, variations of which enjoyed a long prehistory in
jurisprudence
Jurisprudence, also known as theory of law or philosophy of law, is the examination in a general perspective of what law is and what it ought to be. It investigates issues such as the definition of law; legal validity; legal norms and values ...
, 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
A psychiatrist is a physician who specializes in psychiatry. Psychiatrists are physicians who evaluate patients to determine whether their symptoms are the result of a physical illness, a combination of physical and mental ailments or strictly ...
Jean-Étienne Dominique Esquirol
Jean-Étienne Dominique Esquirol (3 February 1772 – 12 December 1840) was a French psychiatrist.
Early life and education
Born and raised in Toulouse, Esquirol completed his education at Montpellier. He came to Paris in 1799 where he worked a ...
(1772–1840) around 1810,
monomania was a new disease-concept characterised by the presence of an expansive
fixed idea, in which the mind was diseased and deranged in some facets but otherwise normal.
Esquirol and his circle described three broad categories of monomania, consistent with their three-part 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 1850s on.
[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'' ..." ]
See also
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Autism
Autism, also known as autism spectrum disorder (ASD), is a neurodevelopmental disorder characterized by differences or difficulties in social communication and interaction, a preference for predictability and routine, sensory processing d ...
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Addictive behaviour
An addictive behavior is a behavior, or a stimulus related to a behavior (e.g., sex or food), that is both rewarding and reinforcing, and is associated with the development of an addiction. There are two main forms of addiction: substance use d ...
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Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder
Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) is a neurodevelopmental disorder characterised by symptoms of inattention, hyperactivity, impulsivity, and emotional dysregulation that are excessive and pervasive, impairing in multiple con ...
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Idée fixe (psychology)
In psychology, an ''idée fixe'' (; ) is a preoccupation of mind believed to be firmly resistant to any attempt to modify it, a fixation.
Background
According to intellectual historian Jan E. Goldstein, the initial introduction of ''idée fi ...
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Obsessive–compulsive disorder
Obsessive–compulsive disorder (OCD) is a mental disorder in which an individual has intrusive thoughts (an ''obsession'') and feels the need to perform certain routines (''Compulsive behavior, compulsions'') repeatedly to relieve the dis ...
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Moral insanity
Moral insanity referred to a type of mental disorder consisting of abnormal emotions and behaviours in the apparent absence of intellectual impairments, delusions, or hallucinations. It was an accepted diagnosis in Europe and America through the s ...
References
External links
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Obsolete terms for mental disorders
Mania