Curiosity Or Obsession

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 only a phenomenon of modern existence: it is a medical category—both a pathology and a goal. Behind this paradox lies a fascinating history, which Lennard J. Davis tells in Obsession. Beginning with the roots of the disease in demonic possession and its secular successors, Davis traces the evolution of obsessive behavior from a social and religious fact of life into a medical and psychiatric problem. From obsessive aspects of professional specialization to obsessive compulsive disorder and nymphomania, no variety of obsession eludes Davis’s graceful analysis.

Most of us have, at one time, been obsessed with something, but how did obsession become a mental illness? This book examines literary, medical, and philosophical texts to argue that what we call obsession became a disease in the Romantic era and reflects the era’s anxieties. Using a number of literary texts, some well-known (like Mary Shelley’s 1818 Frankenstein and Edgar Allan Poe’s 1843 “The Tell Tale Heart”) and some not (like Charlotte Dacre’s 1811 The Passions and Charles Brockden Brown’s 1787 Edgar Huntly), the book looks at “vigilia”, an overly intense curiosity, “intellectual monomania”, an obsession with study, “nymphomania” and “erotomania”, gendered forms of desire, “revolutiana”, an obsession with sublime violence and military service, and “ideality,” an obsession with an idea. The coda argues that traces of these Romantic constructs can be seen in popular accounts of obsession today.

The frontiers of religion and science have always been pushed forward by curious and obsessed individuals, like: the monk who kept banned books in a secret library under the nose of the pope; the explorers who searched for the lost tribes of Israel but found a new continent instead; the eccentric doctor and a mad monk who intuited scientific truths well before future generations would prove their theories correct; the archaeologists who discovered the goddess just in time for feminism; the utopians who never quite found what they were looking for; and a current flock of priests and nuns who go wherever knowledge takes them. It is a delicious quirk of history that individuals dismissed by their contemporaries as eccentrics and troublemakers are often those with the most impact on the world. Curious Obsessions in the History of Science and Spirituality is a captivating look at the famous and the forgotten who emerged in times of extreme change and social disruption to change science and spirituality for ever. During our current Covid19 pandemic, this collection is highly relevant to a world still seeking novel answers to the human condition and also drawn to old theories long ago debunked.

Explores the link between intense childhood experiences, persistent behaviors and chronic addiction; outlines a novel treatment methodology. Elegant and heart-wrenching.

This collection of essays explores curiosity from many philosophical perspectives of relevance to various fields and disciplines such as educational studies, epistemology, political philosophy and history of thought. It advances and enriches scholarly research on curiosity while critiquing current approaches to the epistemic desire to know. Its interest in contemporary accounts of curiosity does not entail neglect of the conceptual history of this notion from antiquity to the present. Its focus on cultural and scientific appreciations of curiosity is global rather than local and inclusive of standpoints beyond established divisions such as the “modern versus postmodern” or the “analytic versus continental”. The book offers fresh and unique engagements with what motivates us to ask questions and how this motivation operates from an ethical, cultural and political point of view.

In this striking social history, Barbara M. Benedict draws on the texts of the early modern period to discover the era's attitudes toward curiosity, a trait we learn was often depicted as an unsavory form of transgression or cultural ambition.

With his colleagues at the People’s Law Office (PLO), Taylor has argued landmark civil rights cases that have exposed corruption and cover-up within the Chicago Police Department (CPD) and throughout the city’s political machine, from aldermen to the mayor’s office. [TAYLOR’s BOOK] takes the reader from the 1969 murders of Black Panther Party chairman Fred Hampton and Panther Mark Clark—and the historic, thirteen-year trial that followed—through the dogged pursuit of chief detective Jon Burge, the leader of a torture ring within the CPD that used barbaric methods, including electric shock, to elicit false confessions from suspects. Taylor and the PLO gathered evidence from multiple cases to bring suit against the CPD, breaking the department’s “code of silence” that had enabled decades of cover-up. The legal precedents they set have since been adopted in human rights legislation around the world.

A young woman loses her way in life by being unable to control what she feels are curiosities. Her friends think it's more obsessions than curiosities. Her friends try to help her although it is difficult at times. When she eventually gets help from professionals, they help her see the light.