What is monomania ? What was Charlie's monomania and why did he develop one ? And how did it effect their family ?
Answers
Partial insanity, variations of which enjoyed a long pre-history in jurisprudence, was in contrast to the traditional notion of total insanity, exemplified in the diagnosis of mania, as a global condition affecting all aspects of understanding and which reflected the position that the mind or soul was an indivisible entity.[3]:25–6, 31, 39[5]:243 Coined by the French psychiatrist Jean-Étienne Dominique Esquirol (1772–1840) around 1810,[2]:153 monomania was a new disease-concept characterised by the presence of an expansive fixed-idea in which the mind was diseased and deranged in some facets but otherwise normal in others.[2]:157 Esquirol and his circle described three broad categories of monomania consistent with their traditional three-part classification of the mind into intellectual, emotional and volitional faculties.[6]:46 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 or ideas. Although monomania was retained as one of seven recognized categories of mental illness in the 1880 US census,[7] its importance as a psychiatric diagnostic category was in decline from the mid-19th century.
Monomania means a mental condition where someone is intrigued by something, in a way that is not ordinary. In other words, an unhealthy obsession.
Charlie's monomania was a dream where he was in an airplane made out of telephone lines to the moon from his bedroom. He is interrupted by a Santa Clause who was also in a similar plane who said he cannot proceed towards the moon if he was the one who invented the wedding cookies in his hand. Charlie began to talk about the same dream again and again.
His breakdown was because of his wife Dorothy who had a habit of correcting each and every word that he uttered, which made him confused and he began to live his entirely life in shadow. This led to his mental breakdown and he was finally, admitted to a mental asylum.