Obsessions and Other Rituals

When no fixed ideas and understand the obsessive fears, they are medical or are treated as simple behavioral disorders. In this case, is regardless of what is called "apparent shape", ie, the mode of presentation and content of symptoms, and in doing so, we run the risk of more chronic and even increase the suffering. The Psychoanalysis, paying special attention to the manifest form of the symptoms and its contents and is the first time, which provides that every neurotic symptom, after being processed analytically, has meaning and is closely linked to the subject's psychic life. The symptoms are-as unsuccessful acts and dreams-a sense, an intimate relationship with the history of life of people in which they occur. Obsessional neurosis and hysteria, have been among the forms of neuroses, those who has worked in psychoanalysis, since its inception over a century ago. Especially, the first of these forms, which does not in general, that mysterious area of ​​the psychic to the somatic characteristic of hysteria. Sometimes the most basic actions such as dressing, sleeping, personal hygiene, going to work, become complicated problems hardly solvable.

The representations, impulses and actions that can be considered pathological, as a way of life or justification of conduct, are not combined in the same proportion, of course, in each case and form, as is generally only one of the factors dominates the symptom picture and characterized, and although all cases have common features, each case is unique and singular, and therefore not worth the recipes or advice in bulk. You can find events, impulses that are strange, so foreign to those suffering, can be considered as a normal part of his personality. Someone may feel compelled to perform acts whose execution does not give you any pleasure, but they are inevitable because otherwise, they feel that something very bad for a loved one could happen. If you do not have a certain number of tiles, his father would die. If you do not wash their hands eight times, exactly, can make you sick. Such ideas (obsessions), may lack meaning in themselves, or be indifferent to who are imposed, most often are seemingly meaningless, but they are not to the unconscious. Whatever the presenting feature, are the starting point of intense intellectual activity, sometimes exhausting, often leading to brood incessantly around these ideas, as if it were the most important issues, I say, by the psychic costs involved.

They involve a very specific mental economy. Neurotic impulses the experience, may have a childlike and foolish, and most of the examples, have a fearful content, many times, as an incitement to commit serious crimes, who flees in horror, installing in his mind and life permanent defenses against temptation, through all kinds of prohibitions, waivers and limitations. Such crimes and alleged "wrongdoing" does not arrive, usually not even started and are unknown to the subject; generate unconscious feelings of guilt and in almost all cases, leakage and prudence eventually prevail, but it takes all or most of the vital energy.