For other uses, see Idée fixe

Idee Fixe

- Idée Fixe I:# "Sieroctwo" - 8:48 # "QSS I " - 3:04 # "Larwa " - 7:27 # "Moja piosenka" - 6:49...

An idée fixe is a preoccupation of mind held so firmly as to resist any attempt to modify it, a fixation. The name originates from the French [French : idée, idea + fixe, fixed]. Although not used technically to denote a particular disorder in psychology

Psychology

Psychology is the study of the mind and behavior. Its immediate goal is to understand individuals and groups by both establishing general principles and researching specific cases. For many, the ultimate goal of psychology is to benefit society...

, idée fixe is used often in the description of disorders, and is employed widely in literature and everyday English.

Today's usage

As an everyday term, idée fixe may indicate a mindset akin to prejudice

Prejudice

Prejudice is making a judgment or assumption about someone or something before having enough knowledge to be able to do so with guaranteed accuracy, or "judging a book by its cover"...

 or stereotyping:

Here again cognitive psychologists have done miracles in disclosing the well-nigh unlimited capabilities and eagerness of human beings to ward off contradictions inter alia by closing their eyes to data that are at variance with their assumptions. ... people who accept the stereotype...are forever coming up with evidence to support their idée fixe and seem unable to notice any information which might disturb their belief.

-- H. S. Versnel, Inconsistencies in Greek and Roman Religion

However, idée fixe has also a pathological

Psychopathology

Psychopathology is the study of mental illness, mental distress, and abnormal/maladaptive behavior. The term is most commonly used within psychiatry where pathology refers to disease processes...

 dimension, denoting serious psychological issues, as in this account of Japanese culture for a popular audience:

Although her husband did not reproach her, she became like a woman possessed, continually begging for his forgiveness. This he readily gave, but her guilt — and his imagined umbrage — had become for her an idée fixe. Unable to stomach food, she went into a decline and died soon thereafter.

--Jack Seaward The Japanese

The pathology is what is denoted in psychology and in the law, as in this technical article about anorexia nervosa

Anorexia nervosa

Anorexia nervosa is an eating disorder characterized by refusal to maintain a healthy body weight and an obsessive fear of gaining weight. Although commonly called "anorexia", that term on its own denotes any symptomatic loss of appetite and is not strictly accurate...

:

The idée fixe — staying thin — becomes at its furthest extreme so powerful as to render any other ideas or life projects meaningless. ... "I felt all inner development was ceasing, that all becoming and growing were being choked, because a single idea was filling my entire soul"

--Susan Bordo Toward a new psychology of gender

Idée fixe began as a parent category of obsession, and as a preoccupation of mind the idée fixe resembles today's obsessive-compulsive disorder

Obsessive-compulsive disorder

Obsessive–compulsive disorder is an anxiety disorder characterized by intrusive thoughts that produce uneasiness, apprehension, fear, or worry, by repetitive behaviors aimed at reducing the associated anxiety, or by a combination of such obsessions and compulsions...

: 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 victim recognizes the absurdity of the obsession or compulsion, not necessarily the case with an idée fixe, which normally is 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

Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders

The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders is published by the American Psychiatric Association and provides a common language and standard criteria for the classification of mental disorders...

. Nonetheless, idée fixe is used still as a descriptive term, and appears in dictionaries of psychology.

Background

The term idée fixe was introduced as a medical term around 1812 in connection with monomania. As originally employed in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, idée fixe was "a single pathology of the intellect", distinct from monomania

Monomania

In 19th century psychiatry, monomania is a single pathological preoccupation in an otherwise sound mind. 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...

, a broader term that included idée fixe, but also a wider range of range of pathologies that did not stem from "a single compelling idea or from an emotional excess". 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

Neurosis

Neurosis is a class of functional mental disorders involving distress but neither delusions nor hallucinations, whereby behavior is not outside socially acceptable norms. It is also known as psychoneurosis or neurotic disorder, and thus those suffering from it are said to be neurotic...

 or monomania.:

The meaning of monomania in the technical medical sense in which it was first used, was very close to the popular meaning it would soon acquire. It denoted an idée fixe, a single pathological preoccupation in an otherwise sound mind.

The idea of monomania was developed by Esquirol

Jean-Étienne Dominique Esquirol

Jean-Étienne Dominique Esquirol was a French psychiatrist.Born and raised in Toulouse, Esquirol completed his education at Montpellier...

 as a diagnostic category in his work Des Malades Mentales (1839) and related to the idée fixe by Griesinger

Wilhelm Griesinger

Wilhelm Griesinger was a German neurologist and psychiatrist born in Stuttgart. He studied under Johann Lukas Schönlein at the University of Zurich and physiologist François Magendie in Paris....

 (1845) who viewed "every single idée fixe [as] 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.

Legal implications

During the nineteenth century and early twentieth century, monomania appears in treatises on criminal law:

Monomania is a state of madness, or derangement of the mind, with respect to one subject only. Homicidal mania is an insane impulse to kill; pyromania is an insane impulse to burn buildings; and kleptomania is an insane impulse to steal. A person, therefore, may be insane and irresponsible as to one subject and at the same time sane and responsible to others. He may be punished unless impelled to crime by his monomania. But many courts hold that monomania causing an irresistible impulse to crime is no defense when the offender knew the act was wrong.

The aberrations of pyromania

Pyromania

Pyromania in more extreme circumstances can be an impulse control disorder to deliberately start fires to relieve tension or for gratification or relief. The term pyromania comes from the Greek word πῦρ . Pyromania and pyromaniacs are distinct from arson, the pursuit of personal, monetary or...

 and kleptomania

Kleptomania

Kleptomania is an irresistible urge to steal items of trivial value. People with this disorder are compelled to steal things, generally, but not limited to, objects of little or no significant value, such as pens, paper clips, paper and tape...

 still are recognized as impulse control disorder

Impulse control disorder

Impulse control disorder is a set of psychiatric disorders including intermittent explosive disorder, kleptomania, pathological gambling, pyromania , and three body-focused repetitive or compulsive behaviors of trichotillomania , onychophagia and dermatillomania...

s or conduct disorders, and the notion of irresistible impulse

Irresistible impulse

In criminal law, irresistible impulse is a defense by excuse, in this case some sort of insanity, in which the defendant argues that they should not be held criminally liable for their actions that broke the law, because they could not control those actions....

 still plays a legal role in the insanity defense.

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

Paranoia

Paranoia [] is a thought process believed to be heavily influenced by anxiety or fear, often to the point of irrationality and delusion. Paranoid thinking typically includes persecutory beliefs, or beliefs of conspiracy concerning a perceived threat towards oneself...

.

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.

The extreme case of paranoid psychosis

Psychosis

Psychosis means abnormal condition of the mind, and is a generic psychiatric term for a mental state often described as involving a "loss of contact with reality"...

" ... includes preoccupation with delusional beliefs; believing that people are talking about oneself; believing one is being persecuted or being conspired against; and believing that people or external forces control one's actions."

The legal issues surrounding paranoia include judgment of competence to stand trial, conditions for involuntary hospitalization, involuntary medication, and a focus upon awareness or not of unreality at the moment when the defendant "snapped".

In literature

Idée fixe occurs extensively in literature. Perhaps the most famous example of an idée fixe is in Cervantes

Miguel de Cervantes

Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra was a Spanish novelist, poet, and playwright. His magnum opus, Don Quixote, considered the first modern novel, is a classic of Western literature, and is regarded amongst the best works of fiction ever written...

's 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.

Molière

Molière

Jean-Baptiste Poquelin, known by his stage name Molière, was a French playwright and actor who is considered to be one of the greatest masters of comedy in Western literature...

 also used the idée fixe repeatedly:

Molière's more celebrated comic characters, Arnolphe, Orgon, Alceste, Harpagon, Monsieur Jourdain, Argan: each of them displays to the very end the obsession or idée fixe which colors his outlook on life. It is a characteristic of Molière's heroes that they are never ‘converted’: in every case the dénouement, far from curing them of their folly, merely confirms them in it.

Although Melville

Herman Melville

Herman Melville was an American novelist, short story writer, essayist, and poet. He is best known for his novel Moby-Dick and the posthumous novella Billy Budd....

'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

Moby-Dick

Moby-Dick; or, The Whale, was written by American author Herman Melville and first published in 1851. It is considered by some to be a Great American Novel and a treasure of world literature. The story tells the adventures of wandering sailor Ishmael, and his voyage on the whaleship Pequod,...

, 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

Arthur Conan Doyle

Sir Arthur Ignatius Conan Doyle DL was a Scottish physician and writer, most noted for his stories about the detective Sherlock Holmes, generally considered a milestone in the field of crime fiction, and for the adventures of Professor Challenger...

's Sherlock Holmes

Sherlock Holmes

Sherlock Holmes is a fictional detective created by Scottish author and physician Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. The fantastic London-based "consulting detective", Holmes is famous for his astute logical reasoning, his ability to take almost any disguise, and his use of forensic science skills to solve...

:

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

George W. Bush

George Walker Bush is an American politician who served as the 43rd President of the United States, from 2001 to 2009. Before that, he was the 46th Governor of Texas, having served from 1995 to 2000....

's counter-terrorism chief Richard A. Clarke

Richard A. Clarke

Richard Alan Clarke was a U.S. government employee for 30 years, 1973–2003. He worked for the State Department during the presidency of Ronald Reagan. In 1992, President George H.W. Bush appointed him to chair the Counter-terrorism Security Group and to a seat on the United States National...

:

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

See also

External links