Graphomania (fromAncient Greek:γρᾰ́φειν,gráphein,lit. 'to write';[1] andμᾰνῐ́ᾱ,maníā,lit. 'madness, frenzy'),[2] also known asscribomania, is anobsessiveimpulse towrite.[3][4] When used in a specific psychiatric context, it labels a morbid mental condition which results in writing rambling and confused statements, often degenerating into a meaningless succession of words or even nonsense then calledgraphorrhea[5] (seehypergraphia). The term "graphomania" was used in the early 19th century byEsquirol and later byEugen Bleuler, becoming more or less common.[6] Graphomania is related totypomania, which is obsessiveness with seeing one's name in publication or with writing for being published, excessive symbolism or typology.[7]
Outside the psychiatric definitions of graphomania and related conditions, the word is used more broadly to label the urge and need to write excessively, professionally or not.Max Nordau, in his attack of what he saw asdegenerate art, frequently used the term "graphomania" to label the production of the artists he condemned (most notablyRichard Wagner[8] or the Frenchsymbolist poets[8]).
InThe Book of Laughter and Forgetting (1979),Milan Kundera explains proliferation of non-professional writing as follows:
Graphomania inevitably takes on epidemic proportions when a society develops to the point of creating three basic conditions:
- An elevated level of general well-being, which allows people to devote themselves to useless activities;
- A high degree of social atomization and, as a consequence, a general isolation of individuals;
- The absence of dramatic social changes in the nation's internal life. (From this point of view, it seems to me symptomatic that in France, where practically nothing happens, the percentage of writers is twenty-one times higher than in Israel).
Czesław Miłosz—winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1980—used the term "graphomania" in a context much different than Kundera's. InThe Captive Mind (1951), Miłosz wrote that the typical writer in theEastern Bloc who accepted socialist realism "believes that the by-ways of 'philosophizing' lead to a greater or lesser degree of graphomania. Anyone gripped in the claws of dialectics [the philosophy of dialectical materialism] is forced to admit that the thinking of private philosophers, unsupported by citations [failing to regurgigate Stalinist propaganda], is sheer nonsense."[9]
Entopic graphomania is a surrealist drawing exercise designed to highlight patterns and meaning in pieces of paper, including newspapers, blank pieces of copy paper, and pages of a book.[10] The process consists of closely examining a page for distinguishing features (folds, creases, blank spaces) and marking them with a writing utensil. These marks are then connected by any type of line (squiggly, straight, dotted, etc.).