But he boiled us down to three main types that are still heavily referenced today: erotics, obsessives and narcissists.
"They Whisper" is a dense, obsessive erotic chronicle in an unrestrained prose that frequently turns purple.
Maddening, obsessive erotic passion may have been Porter's great subject, but in movie and stage musicals it was treated lightly, which is how Ms. Clark and Mr. Hyde Pierce played it.
Of her repertoire and style, Van Groll says she's "fascinated by the obsessive, erotic, and somewhat dark role of food in the female consciousness".
Directed by Nagisa Oshima, the film is an explicit, kinkily erotic tale of an obsessive love affair set in the 1930s.
On "Phantom Moon" (79614-2), even more than on his two previous Atlantic albums, Mr. Sheik, 31, emerges as a contemporary descendant of a 19th-century literary type, the dreamy moonstruck man-child on an obsessive quest for erotic and spiritual transcendence.
That might sound obsessive, or borderline erotic, and it is: childhood friendships of the kind I'm describing are like the primordial soup of human relationships, messy and unformed but with the raw parts to make anything that might come after.
But Bantock's harmonic safety transforms obsessive Wagnerian passion into Edwardian erotic discretion.
I don't doubt the sociologists who document the correlation between obsessive consumption of violent or erotic material and acts of violence or sexual abuse.
Solitario de amor (1988; Solitaire of Love) explores an obsessive sexual relationship; Fantasías eróticas (1991; "Erotic Fantasies") also brings to the fore the theme of obsessive sex.
