Obsession: A History

by Lennard J. Davis

Book Overview

We live in an age of obsession. Not only are we hopelessly devoted to our work, strangely addicted to our favorite television shows, and desperately impassioned about our cars, we admire obsession in others: we demand that lovers be infatuated with one another in films, we respond to the passion of single-minded musicians, we cheer on driven athletes. To be obsessive is to be American; to be obsessive is to be modern.

But obsession is not...

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0226137821
• ISBN13: 9780226137827
• Release Date: November 2008
• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Length: 296 Pages
• Weight: 1.35 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.0" x 6.5" x 9.2"

Customer Reviews

A Winner

Davis combines interests in English, Human Development, Disability, and Medical Education. A versatile scholar concerned with the practical and the theoretical, he begins with a gripping story of his own boyhood compulsions. Then he shows how society both aggravates and aggrandizes obsessiveness, notably in sex education, science, and psychoanalysis. He uses examples from literature, history, art and medicine: Galton, Dickens, Freud, Marie Stopes and many more. He uses the term "biocultural narrative" to break through the separation between historical context and the latest fads, and between categorical disease and the experience of illness. This is profound, brilliant, and engaging. A retired psychiatrist and historian of psychotherapy, I applaud the author's ability to join medicine and psychology with their historical and social contexts. He writes well, too.