On Obsession, the Post-Modern Disease

In case the suggestively deviant ads for Calvin Klein’s Obsession weren’t proof enough that our culture is fascinated with obsession, Lennard Davis had another image that confirmed it, which he snapped at the airport: the ads for Calvin Klein’s new perfume, Secret Obsession, featuring a brown jewel-like bottle glowing gold in its center.

“As if obsession is not enough,” he joked with the audience at MOCA.

Davis, a University of Illinois at Chicago professor and author of Obsession: A History, explained what exactly obsession is, and why we simultaneously pathologize and desire it.

The official word

Lennard Davis guestsObsessive compulsive disorder is characterized by recurrent and persistent thoughts, and repetitive behaviors, according to The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM IV TR is the latest volume). For a diagnosis of OCD, those thoughts must be intrusive, cause marked distress and have little to do with typical real-life problems. The behavior, too, must not be connected realistically with whatever the behavior is meant to accomplish. Whomever is diagnosed with OCD generally knows that the thoughts come from his own mind, and tries to suppress or ignore them.

Another entry in the DSM IV TR sounds similar in name, but has symptoms that are much broader. A person with what’s called obsessive-compulsive personality disorder, Davis said, shows four of the following traits, some of which might sound familiar: a preoccupation with details; perfectionism; excessive devotion to work; excessive scrupulousness regarding morals or values; an inability to throw things out; reluctance to delegate tasks; being miserly; and stubbornness. Davis said, “You’re probably thinking, that’s me. These are things we do.”

The difference between the two disorders, he said, is the “marked distress” that OCD sufferers feel. Much of that, Davis said, can come from people’s reactions to the symptoms, or how they are regarded culturally. “If you’re religious and you have a thought that has to do with blasphemy,” he said, “you will be very disturbed. You will try not to think about it. And once you try to suppress any thought, it’s impossible. If I say to you don’t think about a pink elephant in the next five minutes,” he said, pausing as the crowd laughed, “you’re already failing.”

Deconstructing the DSM

Diagnosis, Davis argued, can be a social construct. The DSM IV TR notes that the criteria listed for each disorder “enhances agreement among clinicians and investigators.” Davis joked, “We made this so that we could agree with each other instead of coming up with different diagnoses.” But just because it’s a construct doesn’t mean it’s not real, he noted, much like one pivotal social construction – money.

Lennard Davis guestsThe construction can occur because psychiatric disorders aren’t quite like physical diseases, which generally come from a particular pathogen, display specific symptoms, and have certain cures. Psychiatric disorders, Davis argued, are conceptualized as coming from a pool of symptoms from which a handful, however vague, are sufficient for diagnosis. Those diagnoses are made during a brief interaction between individuals and practitioners. And the “symptom pool” isn’t fixed, he said. “People in Italy, they talk about their livers when they’re sick. Oh, my liver hurts, how’s your liver?” Davis joked. “I don’t know anyone in the U.S. who talks about their liver. It’s in [the Italian] symptom pool, it’s not in ours.”

And though the number of symptoms you need to be diagnosed is fixed, Davis said, the fixing is done by committee. “If you throw up twice a week, you don’t have bulimia. If you throw up three times a week, you have it,” he said. “Someone has to make these decisions.”

The devil in you

Before the 18th century, long before the age of psychiatric manuals, there were essentially only a handful of diagnoses, and all of them were characterized by complete insanity. “It was like being pregnant. You can’t be a little pregnant,” Davis said. Those deemed crazy were maniacs, melancholics, idiots, lunatics, or obsessed or possessed. The latter two were both believed to be caused by the devil – obsession meant the devil “has surrounded you and has not broken down the door,” whereas possession meant “the devil has broken in,” a la Linda Blair, as Davis said.

Lennard Davis guestsThe concept of degrees of madness came later, when people began to be diagnosed as hysterics or hypochondriacs, or with “vapours” or spleen problems. “It was the birth of neurosis,” Davis said. To prove how prevalent such partial insanity is now, Davis asked audience members who did not consider themselves neurotic to raise their hands. Only a few went up. The democratization of madness, as Davis called it, and the discovery of nerves and the nervous system meant that society “went nerve crazy.”

Soon, to be nervous was considered synonymous with being smarter and more sensitive. “Almost every famous person in the 19th century wrote their autobiography and put into their autobiography their nervous breakdown,” Davis joked. Famous personalities were often diagnosed with monomania – obsessive focus on one thing. And psychiatry arose around the study of monomania and obsession, including Sigmund Freud and his great case, Rat Man. Davis, also a literature professor, noted that fictional characters of the 19th century, unlike those of the 18th, like Balzac’s Old Goriot to Melville’s Ahab to many a Dickens character, took on obsessive traits.

Counting and curing

Today, we still see, and demand, obsession in our standout personalities: Michael Phelps “spends his entire life with his head under the water,” Axl Rose takes 15 years to finish “Chinese Democracy,” artists like Simon Rodia, Adolf Wolfli, Jay DeFeo, Judith Scott and Mark Lombardi created obsessively. It’s not limited to American society, Davis said in response to an audience question, though there’s no proof it’s a worldwide phenomenon.

In recent decades, OCD transformed from a rare disorder to one of the top four. Within thirty years, it went from affecting one in every 20,000 people to one in every 10. Pharmaceutical companies, Davis noted in Q&A, have tried to create a demand for OCD drugs, not to mention drugs for new diseases like “situational affective disorder, which used to be called shyness,” and what hasn’t been pathologized since long before feminism, premenstrual syndrome. And unfortunately, Davis said, psychiatrists, aren’t very interested in the history of their field. “For science, in general, you’re only interested in now,” he said. “Everything else, in the past, was wrong. But we’re still not sure today about OCD, its causes or its cures.

“What is OCD?” Davis asked. “We don’t know.”

Watch the video here.
See more photos here.
Buy the book here.

*Photos by Aaron Salcido.

×

Send A Letter To the Editors

    Please tell us your thoughts. Include your name and daytime phone number, and a link to the article you’re responding to. We may edit your letter for length and clarity and publish it on our site.

    (Optional) Attach an image to your letter. Jpeg, PNG or GIF accepted, 1MB maximum.