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OBSESSION

THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS

Contents

Introduction: Obsession in Our Time................................................................11 Origins of Obsession.............................................................................312 The Emergence of Obsession.......................................................................673 Specialization as Monomania......................................................................814 Never Done: Compulsive Writing, Graphomania, Bibliomania.........................................1055 Freud and Obsession as the Gateway to Psychoanalysis.............................................1256 Obsessive Sex and Love...........................................................................1457 Obsession and Visual Art.........................................................................1878 OCD: Now and Forever.............................................................................2099 Conclusion: So What? So What? So What? So What? and Other Obsessive Thoughts.....................235Acknowledgments....................................................................................245Notes..............................................................................................247Index..............................................................................................277

Chapter One

Obsession often involves a battle of selves in which a compulsive self struggles with an observing self. So it is apt that the earliest use of the word "obsession" has to do with war. In Latin obsessio and possessio were two aspects of besieging a city. Possideo, -ere and obsideo, -ere are two phases in the assault. If you've obsessed a city, you've surrounded it, but the citadel remains intact; while if you possess the city, the walls have been breached and you've conquered the citadel and its citizens.

Given the battle metaphor, the term then came to be used in describing demonic possession. The devil is seen as the attacker and the victim as the city, with the citadel representing the soul. These terms were used in this sense since the third and fourth centuries, and the difference between possession and obsession seems to have been well understood at the time: the distinction was that in the case of possession the victim was unaware of the fact that she or he had been possessed by the devil because the devil had entered that person and had complete control over the soul. In the case of obsession that person was aware of being besieged by the devil since the demon did not have complete control, had not entered the city of the soul, and the victim could therefore attempt to resist. The key for us in this discussion is that obsession means that the person is aware of the symptoms and possible cause of his or her behavior. This ability to know that certain behaviors are not controllable, but somehow are also not coming from within one's own desire or will, characterizes the disease of obsession.

This linguistic usage will not change substantially until the middle of the nineteenth century, when we see the word being used in a distinctly psychiatric sense. Therefore, we will wait until that historical moment before pinpointing the emergence of obsession as a known category involving doing or thinking one thing too much, being aware of that activity, but being unable to stop it. For now, we will need to observe how the space was cleared for this concept of mental "illness."

How the religious explanation for obsessive behavior was displaced by a medical one involves a complex set of transformations. First, demonology had to be disconnected from physical maladies. Second, mental states had to be separated from physical states. Third, the nervous system had to be discovered. And fourth, a notion of partial insanity had to be developed that would allow for one to be "crazy" while at the same time being aware of being "crazy." This latter step would involve the democratization of madness, the turning of a kind of partial madness into a consumer object that would define, in a sense, what it meant to be human.

DEMONIC OBSESSION IN SHAKESPEARE

To follow the first step of the emergence of obsession, we need to see the course by which demonology was removed from the available explanatory system. For a good example of how Renaissance culture accepted the demonic possession / obsession model, we need look no further than Shakespeare's Twelfth Night. Malvolio is deemed a lunatic after he is tricked into believing that Olivia is in love with him. He is falsely and maliciously led to believe that she particularly wishes him to wear yellow stockings held up by cross- garters and to smile all the time as proof that he is in love with her. Naturally, his doing these ridiculous things causes Olivia, who is not in on the joke, to believe Malvolio is mad, as his enemies tell her. "He's coming, madam, but in very strange manner. He is sure possessed, madam." Sir Toby Belch says of Malvolio, "If all the devils of hell be drawn in little, and Legion himself possessed him, yet I'll speak to him." Of Malvolio, Maria says, "Lo, how hollow the fiend speaks within him." And Sir Toby advises Malvolio to "defy the devil. Consider he's an enemy to mankind." Later, when Malvolio is locked up in a dark room, the clown pretends to be a curate, Sir Topas, who has come to exorcise him.

Shakespeare could play on his audience's understanding that demonic possession was the cause of madness. The devil is seen as the cause of Malvolio's obsessive behavior, and the cure involves an act of renouncing the devil, prayer, and ultimately exorcism or divine intervention. The audience is also counted on to know that the gem topaz, which name the clown adopts in his false personality as a cleric, is a supposed cure for lunacy. Here we might assume that most people in the audience would "know" that madness and possession were linked.

Of course, Malvolio isn't mad, really; he is only tricked into acting that way. But Lady Macbeth is perhaps closer to our notion of the obsessive than is Malvolio. Her madness might, in a post- Freudian era, be justly called obsessive- compulsive, with her delusions of blood and her need to wash constantly. While the doctor observes that her "heart is sorely charged," he emphasizes that what we are regarding is not a disease that a doctor can cure. "This disease is beyond my practice...."

More needs she the divine than the physician. God. God forgive us all. Look after her. (5.1.54, 69-70)

Obsession here is in the province of the clerical, and its treatment involves exorcism, not therapy. Indeed, major works on melancholy, for example, tended to be written by divines rather than physicians until the eighteenth century. So the demonic possession model continues.

DEMONS OUT; NERVES IN

The idea of the nonmedical, otherworldly origin of obsession seems to come to an end in the eighteenth century, and is signaled by a 1736 act of Parliament that abrogates all laws against "conjurations, inchantments, and witchcraft" that had been the grounds on which exorcism of the insane had been prosecuted. The Protestants banned the idea of possession because the Catholic Church was seen as having the inside track on exorcisms, and banning the idea of possession was in...