Obsessiveness


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Obsessiveness

Ahab, Captain
obsessed with whale. [Am. Lit.: Moby Dick]
Allmers, Mrs.
obsessed with crippled son. [Nor. Lit.: Little Eyolf]
Bounderby, Josiah
single-minded success addict. [Br. Lit.: Hard Times]
Cardillac
goldsmith who murders to regain what he created. [Ger. Opera: Hindemith, Cardillac, Westerman, 487]
Chillingworth, Roger
“very principle of his life [was] the systematic exercise of revenge.” [Am. Lit.: The Scarlet Letter]
Craig, Harriet
wrapped up in caring for her immaculate home, to the exclusion of all human relationships. [Am. Drama: Craig’s Wife in Hart, 191]
Defarge, Madame
“everlastingly knitting” before the guillotine as heads fell. [Br. Lit.: A Tale of Two Cities]
Dick, Mr.
compulsively thinks, talks, and writes about King Charles’s head. [Br. Lit.: Dickens David Copperfield in Brewer Dictionary, 520]
Herman
only goal in life becomes winning at cards. [Russ. Opera: Tchaikovsky, Queen of Spades, Westerman, 401]
Javert
personification of law’s inexorableness; relentlessly tracks down Valjean. [Fr. Lit.: Les Miserables]
Melford, Lydia
could not think of anything but lover Wilson. [Br. Lit.: Humphry Clinker, Magill I, 394–397]
Nemo, Captain
mysterious submarine captain who attempts vengeance against society. [Fr. Lit.: Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea]
Séchard, David
neglects his business in unremitting effort to perfect a paper-making process. [Fr. Lit.: Balzac Lost Illusions in Magill II, 595]
Tiberius
determined at any cost to become Emperor. [Br. Lit.: I, Claudius]
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References in periodicals archive ?
"The night this attack happened a crime of jealous rage was underpinned by his obsessiveness of her, his unwillingness to let her go, his wounded vanity.
Hairdresser's fate now in hands of jury; Deliberations in murder bid case
(3,7,11,19) To our knowledge, however, levetiracetam has not been reported to have an association with symptoms of obsessiveness or stereotypy.
A case of obsessiveness induced by levetiracetam in a patient with epilepsy, intellectual disability and pervasive developmental disorder
Perhaps this obsessiveness got the better of her when she gave up drawing for painting in 1983.
Vija Celmins
There is something of AP's obsessiveness about him which is OK but carries with it the risks that made Richard Dunwoody such a wracked soul - the failure to understand that, while being a jump jockey was the most important thing in the world, it wasn't the ONLY thing in the world.
Racing: Learn how to chill, Paddy
One reason so much overlap exists between anorexia and MDD is that starvation produces a host of psychiatric conditions in the body, such as mood lability, irritability, anxiety, apathy, obsessiveness, poor concentration, social withdrawal, and decreased libido.
Depression rates high in patients with eating disorders
Tuttle says that she first met Wolfe at a party hosted by Jelliffe, and she discusses his size (overestimating it), his shyness, his stuttering (which she considered to be "part of his charm"), his obsessiveness about writing, and his excessive eating and drinking.
A nonagenarian's memories of Wolfe
Szasz's debating partners include psychiatrists, psychologists, bioethicists, and legal scholars, most of whom seem to have reservations about psychiatry's tendency to treat every facet of human behavior--happiness and sadness, energy and lethargy, neatness and sloppiness, shyness and boldness, inattentiveness and obsessiveness, thievery and honesty, promiscuity and celibacy, thinness and fatness--as a symptom of mental illness.
Thomas Szasz takes on his critics: is mental illness an insane idea?
I find the obsessiveness Pipe has displayed in abundance over the last couple of weeks distasteful, to say the least.
Letter: Battle showed Pipe in worst light
Likewise, in David Cannadine's essay on Lord Jenkins as 'writer and biographer' there is reference to his disdain of 'scholarly obsessiveness' and to his various books.
Roy Jenkins by his admirers
The regime has so far maintained its governing system with total isolation unprecedented in world history, in part by cunningly and ruthlessly indoctrinating its people Cumings vividly captures the doctrine of juche or self-reliance whose insane obsessiveness breeds the pathological isolationism we see.
Pacific hieroglyphic: what the Bush administration doesn't know about North Korea
There remains as well a certain obsessiveness about problematizing every step in the analysis rather than just getting on with the story.
Der zerstuckte Corper: Zur Sozialgeschichte der anatomischen Sektionen in der fruhen Neuzeit (1650-1800)
The so-called Krugman Truth Squad, led by wannabe Ayatollah Andy Sullivan, succeeds in nothing so much as embarrassing itself with its small-minded obsessiveness about matters that the Princeton by way of Yale, MIT and Stanford economist clearly understands better than they do.
The new know-nothingism

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