Eknoia

Eknoia, the dominance of one specific affect over all manifestations of personality. This term was proposed by Ziehen. Among Russian psychiatrists, Gannushkin uses it, calling eknoics a group of psychopathic personalities which he defines as fanatics of feeling. He includes in this group many sincere adherents of religious sects who serve as blind instruments for their leaders in carrying out their tasks. These are people who are easily suggestible and quickly fall under the influence of others, with the idea of the cause they serve being pushed to the background and completely replaced by their all-consuming feeling of ecstatic devotion to a particular person and self-sacrifice for goals that are often completely incomprehensible to them. According to Gannushkin, such a replacement of an idea with the corresponding affect is also a characteristic feature of some jealous individuals who are not jealous due to thoughts about the possibility of infidelity, but exclusively under the influence of the persistent, objectless feeling of jealousy that possesses them. Somewhat separate is the group of people for whom such a 'super-valuable' affect is the fear that attaches to everything happening around them ('anxious' psychopaths, or 'phobics,' according to Kan). The variety and diversity of the characterological features of eknoics deprives this group of true internal unity, for which reason psychiatrists rarely use the concept of eknoia.