MONOMANIA

Monomania

In 19th-century psychiatry, monomania 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 affecting all aspects of understanding and which reflected the position that the mind or soul was an indivisible entity. Coined by the French psychiatrist Jean-Étienne Dominique Esquirol around 1810, monomania was a new disease-concept characterised by the presence of an expansive idée fixe in which the mind was ...

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monomania

Noun

  1. Excessive interest or concentration on a singular object or subject.
    It was apparent to all but himself that what was once idle curiosity had become a monomania.
  2. A pathological obsession with one person, thing or idea.


The above text is a snippet from Wiktionary: monomania
and as such is available under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

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