OBSESSION,
Book release and conversation with Lennard Davis

What is the difference between a dangerous obsession and what passes in our culture as habit and ritual?

"...a beautifully wrought interdisciplinary history of 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 part of modern existence: it is a medical category. Behind this paradox lies a fascinating history, which Lennard 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 sex and nymphomania, no variety of obsession eludes Davis’s graceful analysis. Davis investigates the huge increase (estimates suggest up to 600-fold) in diagnosis of obsessive-compulsive disorder over the past thirty years. Surveying the many ways in which doctors today treat OCD, he points out the limitations of and contradictions within the biological definitions of the disease.

Impassioned, witty, and learned, Obsession is for anyone—from compulsive hand washers to professional psychologists—who has been fascinated by, struggled with, or cultivated obsession.

Lennard J. Davis is professor in the Departments of English, Disability and Human Development, and Medical Education at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He is the author of The Disability Studies Reader, My Sense of Silence: Memoirs of a Childhood with Deafness, and Enforcing Normalcy: Disability, Deafness, and the Body, among other books.