Quotes About Obsessional

Most importantly, the very inception of the treatment itself necessarily induces a change in the patient's conscious attitude to his illness...that he does not listen carefully enough to what he obsessional ideas are saying to him, or does not grasp the real intention of his obsessional impulse.

In his fight against the powers of the surrounding world his first weapon was magic, the first forerunner of our modern technology. We suppose that this confidence in magic is derived from the over-estimation of the individual's own intellectual operations, from the belief in the 'omnipotence of thoughts', which, incidentally, we come across again in our obsessional neurotics.

An anticathexis of this kind is clearly seen in obsessional neurosis. It appears there in the form of an alteration of the ego, as a reaction-formation in the ego, and is effected by the reinforcement of the attitude which is the opposite of the instinctual trend that has to be repressed—as, for instance, in pity, conscientiousness and cleanliness.

In phobias of animals the danger seems to be still felt entirely as an external one, just as it has undergone an external displacement in the symptom. In obsessional neuroses the danger is much more internalized. That portion of anxiety in regard to the super-ego which constitutes social anxiety still represents an internal substitute for an external danger, while the other portion — moral anxiety — is already completely endo-psychic.

All we need to do is to make a slight modification in our description of their determinant of anxiety, in the sense that it is no longer a matter of feeling the want of, or actually losing the object itself, but of losing the object's love. [...] it appears probable that, as a determinant of anxiety, loss of love plays much the same part in hysteria as the threat of castration does in phobias and fear of the super-ego in obsessional neurosis.

When incessant grieving occurs, it is usually out of the person's attempt to handle anger by crying and feeling bad and having obsessional thoughts.

Because people with autism are also strongly obsessional, meaning that they pursue their current interest to extraordinary detail and lengths and in great depth, they can develop 'tunnel vision' that prevents them from seeing the bigger picture, including the repercussions of their current actions.

Readers of the book, paradoxically, will have a different kind of surprise in store for them: What many "Vertigo" aficionados will find perplexing are the systematic, businesslike, matter of fact circumstances under which this odd, obsessional, very un-matter-of-fact film was created.

When does it cease to be something beautiful, a faithful aspect of the heart, to become off-center, slightly off the axis, and then hurled into an obsessional void?

Hysteria defied self-control; obsessional neurosis mimicked it.