Obsession: A History by Lennard J. Davis.
University of Chicago Press, 2008
Admit it: at some point in your life, you’ve been completely obsessed. Obsessed with a particular project perhaps, or a great author, or that hot senior who smiled at you once when you were a freshman. Obsession is common and typically harmless, often a powerful motivator and a source of artistic inspiration. Yet its extremes are also feared and reviled, because they form the foundation for obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), a disease that has apparently exploded in prevalence in recent decades. How exactly can we reconcile two conflicting notions of the same phenomenon?
Perhaps we can’t—but we can glean some insight by taking a closer look at society’s complex history with obsession, Lennard J. Davis posits in his new book. Since the 18th century our understanding of obsession has evolved from believing it to be an incurable “madness,” thought to afflict a small number of people who were typically poor, to a potentially curable disease afflicting many, including the upper classes.
http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=mind-reviews-dec-08&page=2
A must read for 2009!
