Monomania and The Female Don Quixote

"How is our diagnosis of others as monomaniacal dependent on the degree to which their organizing principle challenges our personal reality?"


What else lurks behind these solipsistic modes of existence? What explain the common need to hide behind a system or an ideology?
-Pg. 5

My monomaniacs are all melancholics who can only abide the world if it is ruled by an all-consuming, highly abstract and exalted set of principals.
-Pg. 3

While investigating different manifestations of monomania, I discovered that each one of its enactments is part of an abstract, autonomous desire to reorganize the world according to a long-lost model of wholeness.
-Pg 3


First, I would like to challenge the validity of this authors representation of monomania because a number of sweeping generalizations and assertions (from an individual outside observer onto a group) are made without sufficient textual support aside from the arbitrarily sprinkled references to archaic practically obsolete psychological literature (ex. Freud). This representation is derisive, othering, mindlessly supportive of the status quo and blind to not only the experience of monomania but also the notion that these "pathological, perverse, or poorly disguised maneuvers" are variations of intrinsic human processes that allow us to organize and understand our individual and deeply personal experiences.

[On Piet Mondrian's art] ...he chose to strike out against the real with the absolutism of his vertical and horizontal lines. But the real always ended up resurfacing: despite the grids that framed Mondrian's monochromatic tones with ever increasing urgency, despite the "hairshirts and self-chastisements. . . the arbitrary merely form[ed] again."
-Pg. 1

In the ensuing manifestations of the idée fixe (agorophobia, misanthropy, art as substitute for life, hypochondria), the world falls into place because it seems guided by a divine plan, a firm an meaningful teleology. Freud explains these types of rituals in "Obsessive Actions and Religious Practices," in which he finds the latter to be "full of significant and symbolic meaning," he sees the former, divorced from tradition and thoroughly independent from the way society is run, as "the half-comic, half-tragic travesty of a private religion."
-Pg. 3

Mondrian's explanation of his art, quote taken from a letter:
I construct lines and color combinations on a flat surface, in order to express general beauty with the utmost awareness. Nature (or, that which I see) inspires me, puts me, as with any painter, in an emotional state so that an urge comes about to make something, but I want to come as close as possible to the truth and abstract everything from that, until I reach the foundation (still just an external foundation!) of things… I believe it is possible that, through horizontal and vertical lines constructed with awareness, but not with calculation, led by high intuition, and brought to harmony and rhythm, these basic forms of beauty, supplemented if necessary by other direct lines or curves, can become a work of art, as strong as it is true.

Mondrian's art has symbolic meaning to him, it is highly intuitive however this author represents it as arbitrary as if fact. Why do we prioritize the interpretation of the observer? Why is the private religion chastised but the traditional sanctified? The private religion is based on a reality which the outsider does not share or understand thus they label it as arbitrary, but does that really make it so? If so, how many people have to share a belief before is stops being arbitrary? 

Let us compare Mondrian's art to Einstein's theory of relativity. Would we label Einstein as a monomaniac? He devoted his entire life to developing a theory of the universe as ruled by an all-consuming, highly abstract and exalted set of principals. E=mc^2 This theory literally states that energy is the same as mass, the speed of light functions as a constant. Is he not a monomaniac because his unifying principal is true, or rather that we all believe it to be true?  I venture to argue that most people's belief in this theory does not stem from their ability to reiterate the proof that allowed Einstein to arrive at this conclusion. Thus, our belief in this theorem to be true is at least in part due to our indoctrination into scientific materialism. If Mondrian's philosophy of art became foundational for some reason and we all could see what he saw, would he still be a monomaniac?

I do not mean to argue monomania does not exist, however I take affront to the derisive tone the author uses to discuss it the use of abstract artists as exemplars. Perhaps art, especially abstract art, is more than merely the byproduct of "a sterile laboratory" which allows the artist to simultaneously inflict and lick their own wounds. Perhaps, one of the functions of art is to expand that which can be seen, that which is experienced, by creating a new system of organization.