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In psychology, an idée fixe is a preoccupation of mind believed to be firmly resistant to any attempt to modify it, a fixation. The name originates from the French idée , "idea" and fixe , "fixed."

Background

According to intellectual historian Jan E. Goldstein, the initial introduction of idée fixe as a medical term occurred around 1812 in connection with monomania. The French psychiatrist Jean-Étienne Dominique Esquirol considered an idée fixe – in other words an unhealthy fixation on a single object – to be the principal symptom of monomania. The term idée fixe had already seeped from psychiatric discourse into literary language before Hector Berlioz employed it in a musical context in his programmatic Symphonie fantastique (subtitled Episode in the Life of an Artist...) of 1830 to denote a recurring melodic theme that references the composer's own romantic obsession (or erotomania) with the actress Harriet Smithson. Especially around the 1820s and 1830s, the concepts of idée fixe and monomania became firmly associated with the Romantic movement in literature, and fixated protagonists feature in a variety of contemporary novels and plays, ranging from the serious to the almost humorous.

As originally employed in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, idée fixe described a more specific condition with respect to monomania (a term denoting a wider range of pathologies that did not stem only from a single fixation). A second difference is that the victim of idée fixe was understood to be unaware of the unreality of their frame of mind, while the victim of monomania might be aware. At that time, idée fixe was discussed as a form of neurosis or monomania. According to Goldstein, the original medical diagnosis of monomania "denoted an idée fixe, a single pathological preoccupation in an otherwise sound mind."

The idea of monomania as a diagnostic category was further developed by Esquirol in his work Des Malades Mentales (1839) and was coupled to the idée fixe by Wilhelm Griesinger (1845) who viewed "every single idée fixe the expression of a deeply deranged psychic individuality and probably an indicator of an incipient form of mania".

The "pathologicalization" of political convictions was used to discredit political anarchists. The further historical evolution of idée fixe was much entangled with the introduction of psychologists into legal matters such as the insanity defense, and is found in a number of texts.

Development of the concept

The concept of idées fixes has been expanded and refined by Emil Kraepelin (1904), Carl Wernicke (1906), and Karl Jaspers (1963), evolving into a concept of overvalued ideas. An overvalued idea is a false or exaggerated and sustained belief that is maintained with much less than delusional intensity (i.e., the individual is able to acknowledge the possibility that the ideas may not be true).

Modern usage

In most contexts, idée fixe refers to an obsession or a passion one fixates on. However, the term also has a pathological dimension, denoting serious psychological issues. The pathology is what is denoted in psychology and law.

Idée fixe began as a parent category of obsession, and as a preoccupation of mind the idée fixe resembles today's obsessive–compulsive disorder (OCD). Although the afflicted person can think, reason and act like other people, they are unable to stop a particular train of thought or action. However, in obsessive–compulsive disorder, the person recognizes the absurdity of their obsession or compulsion, which may not be the case with an idée fixe (normally being a delusion). Today, the term idée fixe does not denote a specific disorder in psychology, and does not appear as a technical designation in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM). It is still used as a descriptive term, appearing in dictionaries of psychology.

In literature

An example of an idée fixe is in Miguel de Cervantes' Don Quixote:

Don Quixote reveals his kinship to the most commonly encountered of Cervantes's character types: the head-in-clouds fantasist, obsessed by his idée fixe.

— Anthony J Close, Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote

Although Herman Melville's Captain Ahab may come to mind as another famous example of idée fixe, and it is sometimes referred to this way, more often Ahab's obsession is referred to as monomania (the more inclusive term), and Melville himself does that. It would seem from the description of Ahab's possession that idée fixe applies quite accurately, as the following description suggests:

"Not one jot of his great natural intellect had perished." ... "Yielding up all his thoughts and fancies to his one supreme purpose", Ahab has let his mind's guiding and directing power be usurped by the "sheer inveteracy" of a will driven by "one unachieved revengeful desire"

— Quotes from Moby-Dick, pp. 990, 1007, Thomas Cooley, The ivory leg in the ebony cabinet: madness, race, and gender in Victorian America

However, what makes monomania the better term is that "Captain Ahab ... has an inkling of his true state of mind: 'my means are sane, my motive and my object mad.'"

The words idée fixe also occur explicitly: for example, in Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes:

There is the condition which the modern French psychologists have called the 'idée fixe', which may be trifling in character, and accompanied by complete sanity in every other way. A man might form such an idée fixe... and under its influence be capable of any fantastic outrage.

— Arthur Conan Doyle, The return of Sherlock Holmes

and in Abraham B. Yehoshua's novel about the Mani family through six generations:

...I had begun to despair of his accursed idée fixe which devoured every other idée that it encountered...

— Abraham B. Yehoshua, Mr. Mani

and in the account of the war on terror by George Bush's counter-terrorism chief Richard A. Clarke:

Iraq was portrayed as the most dangerous thing in national security. It was an idée fixe, a rigid belief, received wisdom, a decision already made and one that no fact or event could derail.

— Richard A Clarke, Against All Enemies: Inside America's War on Terror

Legal implications

Possibly the best example of the role of idée fixe in an insanity defense today is its use in identifying paranoid personality disorder.

A frequent manifestation of ... paranoid personality is the presence of an overvalued idea ... a fixed idea (idée fixe) ... which might seem reasonable both to the patient and to other people. However, it comes to dominate completely the person's thinking and life. ... It is quite distinct phenomenologically from both delusion and obsessional idea.

— Femi Oyebode, The expression of disordered personality

See also

• Affect heuristic – Mental shortcut based on emotion
• Belief perseverance – Maintaining a belief despite new information that firmly contradicts it
• Cognitive bias – Systematic pattern of deviation from norm or rationality in judgment
• Confirmation bias – Bias confirming existing attitudes
• Delusional disorder – Mental illness featuring beliefs with inadequate grounding
• Fixation (psychology) – Concept in psychology
• Moral insanity – Obsolete term for type of mental disorder
• Obsessive–compulsive disorder – Mental and behavioral disorder
• Personality disorder – Maladaptive patterns of behavior
• Psychosis – Abnormal condition of the mind
• Thought disorder – Disorder of thought form, content or stream
• Weak central coherence theory – psychological abilityPages displaying wikidata descriptions as a fallback

References

1. ^ Jan Ellen Goldstein (2002). Console and Classify: The French Psychiatric Profession in the Nineteenth Century. University of Chicago Press. p. 155. ISBN 0-226-30161-3. Idée fixe was also originally a medical term, probably coined by the phrenologists Gall and Spurzheim in connection with Esquirol's delineation of monomania; see their Anatomie et physiologie du système nerveux en général et du cerveau en particulier, Vol. 2 (Paris: F. Schoell, 1812), p. 192. It also was transferred to nonmedical culture, most notably by the composer Hector Berlioz...
2. ^ Brittan, Francesca (2006). "Berlioz and the Pathological Fantastic: Melancholy, Monomania, and Romantic Autobiography". 19th-Century Music. 29 (3): 211–239. doi:10.1525/ncm.2006.29.3.211.
3. In music, the term idée fixe refers to a compositional device similar to that of a leitmotif. See: Gorlinski, Virginia (2012). "Idée fixe - music". Encyclopedia Britannica. Retrieved 6 May 2023.
4. ^ Michael Clark, Catherine Crawford (1994). Legal medicine in history. Cambridge University Press. pp. 214 ff. ISBN 0-521-39514-3.
5. ^ Alan Felthous, Henning Sass (2008). International Handbook on Psychopathic Disorders and the Law. John Wiley & Sons. p. 11. ISBN 978-0-470-06638-6.
6. Ann-Louise Shapiro (1996). Breaking the Codes: Female Criminality in Fin-de-Siècle Paris. Stanford University Press. p. 100. ISBN 0-8047-2693-0.
7. Daniel Hack Tuke (1892). A Dictionary of Psychological Medicine: Giving the Definition, Etymology and Synonyms of the Terms Used in Medical Psychology with the Symptoms, Treatment, and Pathology of Insanity and the Law of Lunacy in Great Britain and Ireland, Volume 2. J. & A. Churchill. p. 678. Some of the French alienists extend the use of the term to actual delusion (idée fixe), as for instance, ideas of persecution. but it is to be hoped that will be carefully restricted to that intellectual tyranny which the individual deplores and is not deluded by.
8. "Névroses et Idées Fixes". Mind, Volume 9. Oxford University Press. 1900. pp. 94ff.
9. ^ Lennard J. Davis (2008). Obsession: a history. University of Chicago Press. p. 69 ff. ISBN 978-0-226-13782-7.
10. Dorothea E. von Mücke (2003). The Seduction of the Occult and the Rise of the Fantastic Tale. Stanford University Press. pp. 114 ff. ISBN 0-8047-3860-2.
11. McKenna, P. J. (1984). "Disorders with overvalued ideas". British Journal of Psychiatry. 145 (6): 579–585. doi:10.1192/bjp.145.6.579. ISSN 0007-1250. PMID 6391600. S2CID 21865644.
12. American Psychiatric Association (2013). Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition (DSM-5). Arlington, VA: American Psychiatric Publishing. pp. 826. doi:10.1176/appi.books.9780890425596. ISBN 978-0-89042-554-1.
13. G. E. Berrios (1996). "Note 63; page 153". The history of mental symptoms: descriptive psychopathology since the nineteenth century. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-43736-9.
14. Ian Jakes (1996). "The distinction between obsessional and psychotic thinking". Theoretical Approaches to Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder. Cambridge University Press. p. 6. ISBN 0-521-46058-1.
15. Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders: DSM-IV-TR (4th ed.). American Psychiatric Society. 2000. ISBN 0-89042-025-4.
16. ^ Femi Oyebode (2008). "Chapter 21: The expression of disordered personality". Sims' Symptoms in the Mind: An Introduction to Descriptive Psychopathology (Updated 4th ed.). Saunders Ltd. p. 404. ISBN 978-0-7020-2885-4.
17. For example, Raymond J. Corsini (2002). The dictionary of psychology. Psychology Press. p. 467. ISBN 1-58391-328-9.
18. Farrell, John (2006). Paranoia and Modernity: Cervantes to Rousseau. Cornell University Press. p. 48. ISBN 0-8014-4410-1.
19. Anthony J. Close (1990). Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote. Cambridge University Press. p. 106. ISBN 0-521-31345-7.
20. Van Zuylen, Marina (2005). Monomania: The Flight from Everyday Life in Literature and Art. New York City: Cornell University Press. pp. 10, 38, 64, 68. ISBN 0801442982.
21. ^ Cooley, Thomas (2001). The ivory leg in the ebony cabinet: madness, race, and gender in Victorian America. Amherst, Massachusetts: University of Massachusetts Press. p. 42. ISBN 1-55849-284-4. Page numbers refer to Herman Melville (1983). G Thomas Tanselle (ed.). Moby-Dick, or the Whale (Reprint of the 1851 Northwestern-Newberry ed.). Library of America. ISBN 0-940450-09-7.
22. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (2003). "The return of Sherlock Holmes". In Kyle Freeman (ed.). The Complete Sherlock Holmes, Volume 1 Barnes & Noble Classics. Spark Educational Publishing. p. 128. ISBN 1-59308-040-9.
23. Abraham B. Yehoshua (1993). Mr. Mani (Hillel Halkin translation ed.). Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. p. 338. ISBN 0-15-662769-8.
24. Richard A Clarke (2004). Against All Enemies: Inside America's War on Terror. Free Press. p. 265. ISBN 0-7432-6045-7.

Further reading

• Glen Fisher (1997). Mindsets: The Role of Culture and Perception in International Relations (2nd ed.). Intercultural Press. p. 22. ISBN 1-877864-54-4.
• Susan Bordo (1996). "Anorexia nervosa: psychopathology as the crystallization of culture". In Mary M. Gergen, Sara N. Davis (ed.). Toward a New Psychology of Gender. Routledge. p. 441. ISBN 0-415-91308-X.
• William Driver Howarth (1982). Molière, a Playwright and His Audience. Cambridge University Press. p. 99. ISBN 0-521-28679-4.
• Jack Seward (1992). The Japanese: The Often Misunderstood, Sometimes Surprising, and Always Fascinating Culture and Lifestyles of Japan. McGraw-Hill Professional. p. 226. ISBN 0-8442-8393-2.

External links

• The dictionary definition of idée fixe at Wiktionary

• Delusional disorders
• History of psychology
• Obsessive–compulsive disorder
• Paranoia
• Psychological concepts
• Psychosis