idée fixe

idée fixe, in music and literature, a recurring theme or character trait that serves as the structural foundation of a work. The term was later used in psychology to refer to an irrational obsession that so dominates an individual’s thoughts as to determine his or her actions. An outgrowth of Romanticism, the concept enjoyed its widest circulation during the 19th and the early 20th century.

The notion of idée fixe arose in France in the early 1800s. In music, it is traceable to the composer Hector Berlioz, who used the term to denote the recurring theme in his Symphonie fantastique: épisode de la vie d’un artiste (1830), a programmatic work depicting the life of an artist; the theme represented the artist’s obsession with his beloved. Unlike most symphonies of the time, whose movements each were built from distinct themes, the Symphonie fantastique was marked by a persistent theme—the idée fixe—that surfaced in various forms in all five movements of the work, although not always as the main theme. The concept of idée fixe recurred in different guises in the work of later composers, most notably as “thematic transformations” in the symphonic poems of Franz Liszt and as leitmotifs in the operas of Richard Wagner.

In literature, the term idée fixe is largely associated with the French novelist Honoré de Balzac, a contemporary of Berlioz. Balzac used the actual term in his short novel Gobseck (1830) to describe the avarice that ruled the life of the protagonist. Indeed, it is the idée fixe of a central character that is the vital, driving force behind many of Balzac’s narratives. The story line of Eugénie Grandet (1833), for instance, is propelled by a father figure’s miserly quest for wealth, and the plot of Le Père Goriot (1835) revolves around a father’s excessive and, ultimately, fatal affection for his daughters.

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Sound Check: Musical Vocabulary Quiz

In the late 19th century French psychologist Pierre Janet appropriated the label idée fixe for use in a clinical context. He applied the term to any inflexible and often irrational belief, such as a phobia, typically linked to a traumatic memory, that slips from conscious control (becomes “dissociated”) and subsequently dominates a person’s mental activity. For example, the eating disorder anorexia nervosa, characterized by self-starvation, would be the outward expression of such an idée fixe. To treat the illness, Janet submitted, psychologists must address not only the patient’s aversion to eating but also the idée fixe and the related traumatic experience that lie at the root of the condition.