Damage: Chapters 1-14

So far, just after reading the first fourteen chapters of this book, I am already anxious to keep reading and to find out what happens next!  This book is definitely suspenseful in the sense that I want to find out how far this affair goes and if anyone finds out.  In the beginning of the book, the narrator speaks a lot about his family and how he grew up.  He explains how his father is a very successful and wealthy man, and how he would make decisions based on what he believed his father wanted.  He went to school for medicine, following his father’s footsteps and became a doctor.  He even exclaims that his life thus far had been a great and successful one, but whose life was it really? 

The narrator goes on and speaks about his beautiful wife that he meets, Ingrid, and the two kids they have, Martyn and Sally.  He exclaims that it seems as if he has the perfect life and what more could he ask for.  He has a wonderful family, a wife and children that love him dearly, he is financially stable, and everything seems like it couldn’t be better.  Even though he was explaining these things, I feel like the way he said it made it seem like he felt that his life was almost too perfect and something had to be missing.

Getting to the good part, his son Martyn, who had been somewhat of a player and got a lot of girls due to his good looks, ends up meeting a woman who is eight years older than him, Anna.  Unlike all the other girls in his life that were just “mess-arounds”, he feels something more with Anna. From the beginning, Ingrid didn’t like Anna and felt like she just wasn’t the right woman for her son, and no later her instincts proved to be right.  Not only was she wrong for his son, but she was wrong for her whole family.  The narrator and Anna seem to have an instant attraction to one another when they meet at a party, and before you know it, they are having an affair behind the family’s back.  He claims to feel like once he met Anna, he finally found out who he was, basically now he feels whole.  Not only is he betraying his son, but his wife also.

After finding out about Anna’s background and how she feels she has been “damaged” because of her past experiences, I am even more shocked on how this affair is taking place.  She seems to not care about whose life she interferes with in order to obtain what she wants.  She even exclaims that she is damaged and gives him a warning that damaged people are “dangerous”.  This kind of bothered me because it seems as if she has the attitude that since she is already damaged, she has no pity on others lives who she might damage herself because no matter what, people will learn to survive like she did and life will go on.  I am anxious to read how this book will proceed and how it all ends.

Lolita

This reading was somewhat kind of disturbing to read because all I could think of was how a grown man could actually be sexually attracted to very young girls between the ages of eight and fourteen.  Humbert, the narrator of this excerpt, is basically obsessed with these young girls and refers to them as “nymphets”.   Humbert believes that this obsession with young girls had started off with Annabel, which was basically his first love. 

Throughout the reading, Humbert describes some of his sexual relations he had with other girls, and it was disgusting to know that he was only attracted to young girls, and if they started to show signs of being a woman, he was no longer attracted to them.  For example, he had tried to be a normal man by marrying an older woman, Valeria.  At first he was attracted to her because of her child-like attributes, but soon grew tired of her. 

Towards the end of the reading, Humbert meets twelve-year-old Dolores, who he calls Lolita.  He had just moved to New York and needed a place to stay.  Unaware of Humbert’s ways of liking young girls, Lolita’s mother allows Humbert to stay with them, and Humbert feels extremely attracted to Lolita.  It was very disturbing reading the part where Humbert explains how he starts to tease Lolita and touch her in certain ways that would seem normal to Lolita, but aroused him. He describes reaching an orgasm while she is next to him laying her legs on his lap.  As a young girl, Lolita had no idea what Humbert was doing and it disgusted me to know that Humbert had gotten aroused by this twelve-year-old girl.  At the end of the reading, Humbert learns that Lolita will be going away to summer camp and is greatly distressed.  

Love and Limerence

In this reading, the idea of the experience of “limerence” is explained in great detail.  Limerence is described as the experience in falling in love.  Limerence is also more than just sexual attraction.  Instead of just longing for sex, limerence is the idea of wanting reciprocation, as described in the text.  Limerence is similar to the idea of love at first sight, or  “a love potion, a dart from Cupid’s bow, the enchantment cast by a sorcerer.” It is unknown why limerence sparks at a certain time with a certain, it just happens.   As described by some of the interviewees, the sudden interest in someone is almost uncontrollable and you feel an instant attraction toward that person from maybe just a simple glance or smile.  It happens so suddenly, and this limerence sneaks up on you before you even realize it.

            Further into the reading, the “LO” (limerent object) is described.  The LO is the person that is being fell in love with.  Once a person finds him or herself experiencing this idea of limerence, the LO is all they can think about.  Everything about the LO seems perfect, and their flaws are no longer relevant in your eyes.  Certain aspects of the LO interest you immediately like their hair or the way they smile or their humor.  As described in the passage,  “the characteristics of the LO’s attractive characteristics are exaggerated and unattractive characteristics given little or no attention.”  Basically the positive aspects of the LO are enhanced and their negative aspects are basically invisible. 

            Limerence is also perceived as a condition of cognitive obsession.  The LO is constantly intruding into the other person’s mind and like an obsession is it is hard to think about anything else.  The person under the experience of limerence is constantly thinking about and rehearsing their next move with the LO and repeatedly planning what they are going to do next.  The passage gives an example of this from the famous movie “Rocky” when Sylvestor Stallone rehearses what he is going to say to Adrienne, or in this case, his LO.

The Possession

This book is about a woman that is trying to move on from a relationship that she herself broke off, but once she learns that her ex has found a new lover, moving on was way harder than she could’ve imagined.  Instead of trying to move on, she is consumed by the thought of the “other woman” and wants to find out as much as she can about her.  It is normal for people to be jealous about your ex finding someone new to replace you quickly, or even feeling hurt because the person that you love seemed to move on without a care in the world.  It seemed at first that the woman was just a bit jealous of the other girl, but while reading on, I soon learned that it is something much more than just jealousy.  She had tried to find out exactly who this other woman was through her ex, but when he failed to provide her with the answers she was looking for, she turned to other resources.  She would use any bit of information she knew about the other woman and actually try to find out who she was through the Internet.  In a way she had become obsessed with this other woman as Ernaux explained, “The search for the name of the other woman became an obsession, a need to be satisfied by any means necessary” (23).   The woman had been so consumed with wanting to uncover the identity of the other woman.  Like the author explains, “I was being inhabited by a woman I had never seen” (15).  Toward the end of the book, the woman expresses that she wants to tell her ex about the feelings that she still has and that she wants him back, but of course never does so.  Eventually, it came to a point where she had to finally move on, and finding information about the other woman was no longer of any importance.  Breaking off a  relationship with someone that you dearly love is hard as it is, and finding out that your ex so quickly moved on can be even harder.

Davis Chapter 3: Specialization in Monomania

In this chapter, Davis discusses how specialization had become an obsession.  Specialization was basically when a person focuses on a particular thing or subject.  For example like we discussed in class, someone can specialize not only in cancer but also in brain cancer, and that is there specialization.  Davis feels that specialization can lead to obsession because a person specializing in one thing rather than several things could get so consumed in his work and in that one subject that eventually that is all he thinks about.  Davis gives and example of specialization as an obsession of Sir Francis Galton, the “founder of eugenics”.  Galton had been obsessed with science and it had gotten severe to the point where he would have nervous breakdowns.  The example that was really interesting to me was when Davis explained how Galton actually “decided to measure human boredom by counting the number of times a group of people fidgeted”.   Although this obsession must seem extremely crazy, many of the things Galton developed and created wouldn’t have come about if he wasn’t obsessed in the first place.

 Finally, towards the end, Davis explains how eventually obsession seemed to have taken a turn and actually seemed normal in society and had been accepted.

Chapter 2: The Emergence of Obsession

In this chapter, Davis talks about monomania and how it was originally the first diagnosis defining what we refer today to as obsession.  Several people had their own definition of monomania, but generally speaking “monomania” basically meant a disease involving a preoccupation with a certain thought or idea, and being able to think with reason, but unable to stop your train of thought.  Also, similar with the notion of partial insanity, monomania was believed to affect only one or several parts of the brain or “faculties” while the remainder of the brain was in a state of perfect health.  Davis explains that monomania had seemed to replace the “quartet” and was seen as a disease of civilization.  It had become very popular, and I was surprised that monomania was frequently used as a defense for people who had made very serious crimes like murder

Chapter 1: Origins of Obsessions

In this chapter, Davis explains in detail the origins of obsessions, and how obsession was defined many years ago. Several steps had to come before the idea of obsessions in order for the emergence of obsession to be established.   Some of these steps included the idea of obsession being a demonic possession, the idea that obsession had to deal with nerves, the idea of partial insanity, and many more steps finally leading up to obsession.

 Davis gives facts relating all the way back to the Renaissance time when people considered obsession as demonic possession.  Davis explains the idea of the demonic possession model and how people believed that the devil was the cause of a person’s obsession.  In this idea, the only way to relieve a person from their obsession is through exorcism.  After the idea of demonic possession, the next explanation of obsessions and mental illness was the nervous system.  I was amazed that people actually believed that the cause of mental illness was nerves, and that the only solution was the applications of electric shocks!

Partial insanity, during the eighteenth century, was also a topic Davis spoke about, and I could actually see the relation it had towards obsession.  As Davis explains, partial insanity meant being “strongly affected by a mental problem but also clearly aware of the symptoms…the person might be said to articulate the conditions but powerless to resist.”  I see where this relates to obsession because when a person has an obsession, they know that they have a problem, but they cannot control or stop their thoughts.   Some diseases that people believed had the quality of partial insanity were hysteria, hypochondria, vapors, and spleen.  Davis refers to these conditions as “the quartet”.  Another topic I thought to be crazy was the idea of the “organ theory”, and how people actually believed that vapors from specific organs of the body affected other organs like the brain.

Even though we may look at these concepts as completely weird and useless, these concepts and others had to happen in order for the true meaning of obsession to come about and to understand it better.