Monomania


In 19th-century psychiatry, monomania was a form of partial insanity conceived as single psychological obsession in an otherwise sound mind.

Types

Monomania may refer to:
Partial insanity, variations of which enjoyed a long prehistory 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 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.