Obsessional modernity: The "institutionalization of doubt"

Critical Inquiry

Volumn 34, Issue 1, 2007, Pages 106-134

  Fleissner, Jennifer L ^a  

^a INDIANA UNIVERSITY   (United States)

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EID: 51249155822     PISSN: 00931896     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1086/526089     Document Type: Review

References (118)

1. Jacques Derrida, "Cogito and the History of Madness," in Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago, 1978), p. 59.
2. See Jonathan Lethem, Motherless Brooklyn (New York, 1999);
3. Matchstick Men (dir. Ridley Scott, 2003);
4. Aimee Bender, An Invisible Sign of My Own (New York, 2000);
5. Emily Colas, Just Checking: Scenes from the Life of an Obsessive-Compulsive (New York, 1998);
6. Amy Wilensky, Passing for Normal: A Memoir of Compulsion (New York, 1999);
7. Bruce M. Hyman and Cherry Pedrick, The OCD Workbook: Your Guide to Breaking Free from Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (Oakland, Calif., 1999);
8. Edna P. Foa and Reid Wilson, Stop Obsessing! How to Overcome Your Obsessions and Compulsions (New York, 1991);
9. and Lee Baer, Getting Control: Overcoming Your Obsessions and Compulsions (New York, 2000).
10. This list continues to multiply (in obsessional fashion); even more recent examples could include Leonardo DiCaprio's embodiment of Howard Hughes in The Aviator (dir. Martin Scorsese, 2004);
11. the TV show Committed (2005)
12. with its order-fixated hero; and Lowell Handler's book Twitch and Shout: A Touretter's Tale (Minneapolis, 2004), a companion piece to his film about Tourette's.
13. Some famously sinister examples from the cinematic archive include Craig's Wife (dir. Dorothy Arzner, 1936) from the play of the same name
14. and the remake Harriet Craig (dir. Vincent Sherman, 1950)
15. with Rosalind Russell and Joan Crawford, respectively, as the ultimate obsessionally clean and thus emotionally ice-cold housewife and, on the masculine side, Sleeping with the Enemy (dir. Joseph Ruben, 1991), about which few recall the physical abusiveness of Julia Roberts's husband as vividly as his insistence on the perfectly aligned towel rack.
16. (Notably, Craig's Wife appears as a signal example of pop-cultural OCD in Judith L. Rapoport, The Boy Who Couldn't Stop Washing: The Experience and Treatment of Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder [New York, 1989], the first pop-psychology book devoted to the disorder.)
17. In this regard, As Good as It Gets (dir. James L. Brooks, 1997) marks something of a turning point, albeit in a familiar therapeutic direction. Jack Nicholson's compulsive tendencies-including Tourette-like explosions of animus against blacks, gays, Jews, and so on - are posited at the start as, once again, the sign of someone who "do[es]n't love anything" (as well as being, for the first time, explicitly medicated), but the project of the film is then to soften him up (with first a dog and then Helen Hunt).
18. See Myla Goldberg, Bee Season (New York, 2000).
19. Lethem, Motherless Brooklyn, p. 113.
20. Compare Lee Baer, The Imp of the Mind: Exploring the Silent Epidemic of Obsessive Bad Thoughts (New York, 2001)
21. and Ian Osborn, Tormenting Thoughts and Secret Rituals: The Hidden Epidemic of Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (New York, 1998); hereafter abbreviated TT.
22. Michele Tortora Pato and Joseph Zohar, "General Considerations in Diagnosis and Treatment," in Current Treatments of Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder, ed. Pato and Zohar (Washington, D.C., 2001), p. 1.
23. Frank Tallis, Obsessive Compulsive Disorder: A Cognitive and Neuropsychological Perspective (Chichester, England, 1995), p. xi.
24. Quoted in Jerome Groopman, "The Doubting Disease," in The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2001, ed. Edward O. Wilson (New York, 2001), p. 61; hereafter abbreviated "DD."
25. On states versus traits, see Tanya Luhrmann, Of Two Minds: An Anthropologist Looks at American Psychiatry (New York, 2001), p. 47.
26. American Psychiatric Association, Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 4th ed. (Washington, D.C., 1994), p. 418; hereafter abbreviated DSM-IV.
27. See also Tallis, Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, p. 22.
28. Leon Salzman, Treatment of the Obsessive Personality (New York, 1980), p. xii.
29. Anthony Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity (Stanford, Calif., 1990), p. 93; hereafter abbreviated CM.
30. The DSM-IV would again disagree; it states explicitly that obsessions "are not simply excessive worries about real-life problems" (DSM-IV, p. 418).
31. Once more, however, this clear line does not seem to be sustained by the clinical literature. One case study, for example, is said to worry "about national security in the newspaper and about AIDS" (Kim M. Schindler and Pato, "Clomipramine," in Current Treatments of Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder, p. 32);
32. another, while visiting Disneyworld, suddenly thinks, "'What if a disaster were to strike here at Disneyworld?' ... Surely [with all the tourists present] it would be a worldwide catastrophe" (TT, p. 11).
33. As Renata Salecl notes, this latter fear was also a subject of media speculation following 9/11; see Renata Salecl, On Anxiety (London, 2004), p. 8.
34. See Sigmund Freud, "On the Grounds for Detaching a Particular Syndrome from Neurasthenia under the Description 'Anxiety Neurosis'" (1895), The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. and ed. James Strachey, 24 vols. (London, 1953-74), esp. 3:97.
35. Anson Rabinbach, The Human Motor: Energy, Fatigue, and the Origins of Modernity (Berkeley, 1990), p. 153.
36. See also George Frederick Drinka, The Birth of Neurosis: Myth, Malady, and the Victorians (New York, 1984);
37. F. G. Gosling, Before Freud: Neurasthenia and the American Medical Community, 1870-1910 (Urbana, Ill., 1987);
38. and Tom Lutz, American Nervousness, 1903: An Anecdotal History (Ithaca, N.Y., 1991).
39. George M. Beard, American Nervousness: Its Causes and Consequences (1881; New York, 1972), p. vi; hereafter abbreviated AN.
40. Robert M. Pippin, Modernism as a Philosophical Problem: On the Dissatisfactions of European High Culture (Cambridge, 1991), p. 152.
41. Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, "The Concept of Enlightenment," Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. John Cumming (1944; New York, 1982), p. 7.
42. Quoted in Gosling, Before Freud, p. 86.
43. Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, trans. Talcott Parsons (1905; London, 1999), pp. 112, 70, 115, 112, 124.
44. See Mary Elanor Wilkins Freeman, Pembroke (New York, 1894)
45. and G. Stanley Hall, Adolescence: Its Psychology and Its Relations to Physiology, Anthropology, Sociology, Sex, Crime, Religion, and Education, 2 vols. (New York, 1904), 1:286.
46. Slavoj Žižek delineates the Lacanian account of obsessional neurosis (in its distinction from hysteria) in terms that mirror the Weberian slide from Calvinist to capitalist: "Hysteria and its 'dialect' obsessional neurosis differ in terms of the way the subject attempts to justify her/his existence: the hysteric by offering her/himself to the Other, ... the obsessive by striving to comply with the demand of the Other through frenetic activity. Thus the hysteric's answer is love, the obsessive's work" (Slavoj Žižek, "The Undergrowth of Enjoyment: How Popular Culture Can Serve as an Introduction to Lacan," New Formations 9 [Winter 1989]: 28-29).
47. Austin Warren, The New England Conscience (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1966), pp. 15, 7, 5, 21. This same point is occasionally made in the present-day literature on OCD, where religious scruples emerge as a rare case in which asserting the clear senselessness of the patient's beliefs (about such subjects as purity) becomes a more vexed matter.
48. See, for example, Joseph W. Ciarrocchi, The Doubting Disease: Help for Scrupulosity and Religious Compulsions (New York, 1995), esp. pp. 126-27
49. and David Greenberg and Eliezer Witztum, "Treatment of Strictly Religious Patients," in Current Treatments of Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder, pp. 178-80.
50. In each instance, though, the final insistence lies on a clear line distinguishing faith from pathology (despite the fact that John Bunyan is often diagnosed, through a reading of his spiritual autobiography, as an important early case of OCD). This is considerably less the case in Freud, who in "Obsessive Actions and Religious Practices" (1906), noting the similar emphases placed on "conscientiousness," "ritual," and "detail," concludes that we might view religion itself as a "universal obsessive neurosis" (Freud, "Obsessive Actions and Religious Practices," The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, 9:119, 127).
51. See also William James, "Religion and Neurology," The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902; New York, 1961).
52. Fredric Jameson, "The Vanishing Mediator; or, Max Weber as Storyteller" (1973), The Ideologies of Theory: Essays 1971-1986, 2 vols. (Minneapolis, 1988), 2:5-6; hereafter abbreviated " VM."
53. (In France, by contrast, "the loss of energy is seen as the result of what is essentially a political dilemma" ["VM," p. 5].)
54. In addition to Weber, Jameson cites Flaubert, Tennyson, Hardy, Huysmans, Tolstoy, Ibsen, Mallarmé, and even the later Twain; see "VM," p. 5.
55. Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams (1918; New York, 1931), p. 427.
56. René Descartes, The Meditations Concerning First Philosophy, in Philosophical Essays, trans. Laurence J. Lafleur (New York, 1964), pp. 81, 80, 85.
57. For an argument that Cartesianism, despite its differences from empiricism, presupposes the same triumph of modern mathematics that makes a rationalized world possible (by breaking down the boundaries between science and technics), see Jacob Klein, "Modern Rationalism," Lectures and Essays, ed. Robert B. Williamson and Elliot Zuckerman (Annapolis, Md., 1985), esp. pp. 57-60.
58. Adams, The Education of Henry Adams, p. 416.
59. See Legrand Du Saulle, La Folie du doute (avec délire de toucher) (Paris, 1875).
60. Philip Knapp, "The Insanity of Doubt," American Journal of Psychology 3 (Jan. 1890): 5.
61. As Stanley Cavell comments, the Lacanian definition of the obsessional as repeatedly asking, Am I alive or am I dead? operates as nothing so much as a "parody of the cogito argument" (Stanley Cavell, "Postscript (1989): To Whom It May Concern," Critical Inquiry 16 [Winter 1990]: 258).
62. Salzman asserts that obsessionals "will become intensely involved in philosophical considerations of abstract justice, 'truth,' and other issues about which final statements cannot be made" (Salzman, The Obsessive Personality: Origins, Dynamics, and Therapy [New York, 1968], p. 19; hereafter abbreviated OP).
63. Edward Cowles, "Insistent and Fixed Ideas," American Journal of Psychology 1 (Feb. 1888): 229.
64. "Fixed ideas" (the "obsession" in "obsession-compulsion") have a longer nineteenth-century lineage; see Jan Goldstein, "Monomania," Console and Classify: The French Psychiatric Profession in the Nineteenth Century (Chicago, 1987), pp. 152-96.
65. Knapp, "The Insanity of Doubt," p. 5.
66. Eugene Taylor, William James on Exceptional Mental States: The 1896 Lowell Lectures (New York, 1983), pp. 133, 134, 136.
67. See William James, The Principles of Psychology, 2 vols. (1890; New York, 1950), 2:545.
68. See Pierre Janet, Les Obsessions et la psychasthénie, 2 vols. (1903; Paris, 1908); hereafter abbreviated O.
69. As Janet puts it, "Le mot 'incomplétude' est un barbarisme que je prie le lecteur d'excuser, je n'ai pu désigner mieux le fait essentiel dont tous les sujets se plaignent, le caractère inachevé, insuffisant, incomplet qu'ils attribuent à tous leurs phénomènes psychologiques" (O, 1:270).
70. As one might imagine, Freud, though writing at the same time, took these matters in a very different direction. For him, obsessions constituted "instinctual impulses," sexual or violent, that the ego refused to allow to develop into achieved acts. Compulsions, then, functioned as displaced attempts to satisfy the denied impulse. The most thorough account appears in Freud, Inhibitions, Symptoms, and Anxiety (1926), The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, 20:77-175.
71. Or see the earlier discussion in Freud, Notes upon a Case of Obsessional Neurosis (1909), The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, 10:153-320. Unlike Janet, Freud renders anxiety central; the compulsion serves to ward it off, a formulation not dissimilar from the present-day view of rituals as ways of decreasing the anxiety caused by obsessional thoughts. Indeed, the distinction between the purportedly repudiated Freudianism and contemporary neuropsychiatry concerns only the source of the obsessions in question (brain dysfunction versus buried conflicts); the pathway from obsessions to compulsions otherwise appears in nearly identical terms.
72. Graham F. Reed, Obsessional Experience and Compulsive Behaviour: A Cognitive-Structural Approach (London, 1985), pp. 171, 179; hereafter abbreviated OE.
73. Other contemporary Janet boosters include Roger K. Pitman, "Pierre Janet on Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (1903)," Archives of General Psychiatry 44 (Mar. 1987): 226-32
74. and Laura J. Summerfeldt, Veronika Huta, and Richard P. Swinson, "Personality and Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder," in Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder: Theory, Research, and Treatment, ed. Swinson et al. (New York, 1988), pp. 79-119.
75. Summerfeldt, Huta, and Swinson, "Personality and Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder," pp. 80, 81.
76. In its potentially endless spiral, moreover, the action in Janet's account is not simply repeated in a stereotyped manner, as contemporary psychologists tend to insist: "Souvent les malades ne se bornent pas à répéter l'acte, ils cherchent à le perfectionner, à le rendre plus complet. Ils inventent des trucs, des procédés pour faire mieux l'action" (O, 1:140).
77. As Reed expresses it, the obsessional "repeats only in the sense that he renews his journey toward perfection" (OE, p. 166).
78. Surprisingly, however, having cited these paradoxes, Reed goes on to suggest, along much more familiarly one-sided lines, that some obsessionals "suffer stress simply because their jobs are too open-ended.... They are better suited to occupations demanding a close eye for detail, predictability, and clear parameters" (OE, p. 223).
79. On the apparent continuum linking obsessional symptoms to the "impulse control disorders" (TT, p. 207) (including Tourette's) that might otherwise seem their opposite
80. see OE, p. 47
81. and Eric Hollander, Obsessive-Compulsive Related Disorders (Washington, D.C., 1993), p. 3.
82. One study comments that, while "there is little empirical support for the psychoanalytic point of view," it does seem better able than current alternatives to explain seemingly contradictory behaviors such as extreme messiness in an otherwise fanatically neat individual (Paul M. G. Emmelkamp, Phobic and Obsessive-Compulsive Disorders: Theory, Research, and Practice [New York, 1982], p. 181).
83. See Freud, Inhibitions, Symptoms, and Anxiety: "The symptom-formation scores a triumph if it succeeds in combining the prohibition with satisfaction" (20:112).
84. Salzman calls obsessional neurosis "the negative of the creative process" (OP, p. x).
85. The "Obsessive Personality Pattern," a 1960s precursor to the description of OCPD in today's DSM-IV, listed among the personality's features that the individual is "'not imaginative or creative, conservative, formal'" and that her '"interest in fine arts is slight or pretended'" (Emmelkamp, Phobic and Obsessive-Compulsive Disorders, p. 185).
86. Freud, Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis (1916-17 [1915-16]), The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, 16:260.
87. See Lennard J. Davis, "Never Done: Compulsive Writing, Graphomania, Bibliomania," Fictions 4 (2005): 29-44.
88. Émile Zola, The Experimental Novel and Other Essays, trans. Belle M. Sherman (1893; New York, 1964), pp. 8, 29, 54, 26.
89. Philippe Hamon, "The Naturalist Text and the Problem of Reference," in Naturalism in the European Novel: New Critical Perspectives, ed. Brian Nelson (New York, 1992), pp. 30, 38.
90. On exhaustive description, see also Yves Chevrel, "Toward an Aesthetic of the Naturalist Novel," in Naturalism in the European Novel, p. 58
91. and Georg Lukács, "Narrate or Describe?" "Writer and Critic" and Other Essays, trans. and ed. Arthur Kahn (London, 1978), p. 112.
92. Naomi Schor, Reading in Detail: Aesthetics and the Feminine (New York, 1987), pp. 110-11.
93. Schor draws on Hamon, "What Is a Description?" in French Literary Theory Today: A Reader, ed. Tzvetan Todorov (Cambridge, 1982), p. 170.
94. Chevrel, "Toward an Aesthetic of the Naturalist Novel," p. 64.
95. See also Lukács, "Narrate or Describe?" pp. 117-18.
96. I develop this reading of naturalism at greater length in my Women, Compulsion, Modernity: The Moment of American Naturalism (Chicago, 2004).
97. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences, trans. pub. (New York, 1973), p. xviii.
98. Gillian Beer, Darwin's Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot and Nineteenth-Century Fiction (1983; Cambridge, 2000), pp. 13, 49, 58.
99. On cosmic infinity as a consequence (both exhilarating and terrifying) of the Copernican revolution, see Hans Jonas, "Seventeenth Century and After: The Meaning of the Scientific and Technological Revolution," Philosophical Essays: From Ancient Creed to Technological Man (Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1974), pp. 56-58.
100. Beard, for example, after listing two entire pages of neurasthenic symptoms, then notes that he has been critiqued for being insufficiently exhaustive. Seemingly without irony, he responds, "An absolutely exhaustive catalogue of the manifestations of the nervously exhausted state cannot be prepared, since every case differs somewhat from every other case. The above list is not supposed to be complete" (AN, p. 8).
101. Rabinbach, The Human Motor, p. 160.
102. There are significant resonances here with Gilles Deleuze's account of the work of the literary in his critique et clinique project, which also emphasizes literature's ability to offer unparalleled descriptive or "symptomatological" accounts unrestrained by the quest for cause or cure. See Gilles Deleuze, Coldness and Cruelty, in Deleuze and Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, Masochism, trans. Jean McNeil (New York, 1989), pp. 14, 16
103. as well as the essays collected in Deleuze, Essays Critical and Clinical, trans. Daniel W. Smith and Michael A. Greco (Minneapolis, 1997).
104. James, William James on Exceptional Mental States, pp. 139, 163-64.
105. Indeed, Freud in those remarks and James in the citation given here are responding to the same provocation: the theorization of mental "degeneration" in the notorious 1895 text of the same name by Max Nordau. See Max Nordau, Degeneration (New York, 1895).
106. We are, of course, more used to the assertion that today's young children suffer from the opposite problem - from an "attention deficit disorder." Jonathan Crary, in an excellent historicization of the notion of attention as a problem and, hence, a site for disciplinary scrutiny (a development that overlaps strongly with the work on obsessional idées fixes in the late nineteenth century), explains, however, how a desirable attentiveness could also blur into a trancelike state more akin to daydream. See Jonathan Crary, "Modernity and the Problem of Attention," Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle, and Modern Culture (Cambridge, Mass., 1999), esp. pp. 65-66, 77.
107. Jeffrey M. Schwartz and Beverly Beyette, Brain Lock: Free Yourself from Obsessive-Compulsive Behavior: A Four-Step Self-Treatment Method to Change Your Brain Chemistry (New York, 1996), pp. 36, 184; hereafter abbreviated BL.
108. Foa and Wilson, Stop Obsessing! p. 78.
109. Luhrmann, Of Two Minds, pp. 270-71.
110. Wilensky, Passing for Normal, pp. 2, 3.
111. In a defense of psychoanalysis, Elisabeth Roudinesco asserts that the "fundamental aim" of the DSM-IV is "to demonstrate that any disturbances of the soul and the psyche had to be reduced to the equivalent of a motor breakdown" (Elisabeth Roudinesco, Why Psychoanalysis? trans. Rachel Bowlby [New York, 2001], p. 35).
112. Hence, Žižek suggests, "today's form of the obsessive question 'Am I alive or dead?' is 'Am I a machine (does my brain really function as a computer) or a living human being (with a spark of spirit or something else that is not reducible to the computer circuit)?'" (Žiž ek, The Plague of Phantasies [London, 1997], p. 136).
113. Although the input-output model is repeated, this distinction is admitted in TT, p. 42
114. and Foa and Wilson, Stop Obsessing! pp. 10, 47.
115. Horkheimer and Adorno, "The Concept of Enlightenment," p. 7.
116. David Leavitt, "Comforting Lessons in Arranging Life's Details," New York Times, 6 Nov. 2000, p. B2.
117. See also Žižek's characterization of obsessional neurosis as Hegel's "'position of thought toward objectivity'" - the endless postponement of the encounter with the Truth, as it appears in Kant, as "conceal[ing] a foreboding that perhaps this Thing is itself nothing but a lack, an empty place" (Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology [New York, 1989], pp. 191, 93).
118. Pippin, Modernism as a Philosophical Problem, pp. 177-78.