Obsession

“ We must distinguish carefully between obsession and insanity. The latter is a break in the connection between the ego and his vehicles, while the former is the ousting of the ego by some other entity. Only a weak ego would permit obsession — an ego, I mean, who had not much hold upon his vehicles. ”

“ We have made many metaphorical words from joining together two Latin words and making a new meaning. We speak of a person having an "obsession" about something when he is always thinking of one thing. But the word obsession comes from the Latin word obsidere, "to besiege;" and so in the word obsession the constant thought [150] is pictured as continually trying to gain entrance into the mind. We use the word besiege in the same metaphorical sense. ”

“ The idea of duty, which, ill understood, causes so many ravages in timid consciences, is no doubt an elaboration of the subconscious. Obsession is perhaps the force which impels to sacrifice, just as it is that which incites to suicide. ”

“ It is certainly a matter of common human experience to be conscious, for good and for evil, of a kind of obsession of one's body by some sort of spiritual power. We may regard these moments of obsession, with their consequent exhilaration or profound gloom, as due purely to the activity of our own soul ”

“ In the first place, the obsession becomes no longer nonsensical nor incomprehensible, it is full of meaning, well motivated and an integral part of the patient's emotional experience. Secondly, it is a necessary reaction toward an unconscious psychological process, revealed in other ways, and it is to this very circumstance that it owes its obsessional nature, that is, its resistance to arguments based on logic or fact. In itself the obsession is something wished for, a kind of consolation. ”

“ With your knowledge of psychiatry, it would be impossible for you to believe that anyone could shake off an obsession so quickly. And I've been so happy to get free from all that, that your suspicions haven't bothered me. ”

“ Webster defines "obsession" as "the state of a person vexed or besieged by an evil spirit, antecedent to possession." The latter term he defines as "the state of being possessed, as by an evil spirit," etc. Allan Kardec employs obsession as a generic term, to include simple obsession, which accords with Webster's definition of the term; fascination, which is "an illusion produced by direct action on the medium's thought," paralyzing his judgment; and subjugation, which completely paralyzes the will, and causes the medium to act in spite of himself. ”

“ The nature of fixed ideas has greatly occupied contemporary alienists. For other reasons and in their own way they, too, have been led to divide obsession into two classes, the intellectual and emotional, according as the idea or the affective state predominates. Then they have been led to ask: Which of these two elements is the primitive one? For some it is the idea. For others, and it seems that these are the more numerous, the affective state is in general the primary fact; the obsession always rests on a basis of morbid emotion and in a retention of impressions. ”

“ Whatever part self-consciousness played in the individual case, we must class the peculiarity among the defects, not signs, of genius. "A tender heel makes no man an Achilles."
To the second faulty habit, obsession, I wish to devote special attention. This word we have already defined as an unduly insistent and compulsive thought, habit of mind, or tendency to action. The person so burdened is said to be obsessed.
Few children are quite free from obsession. Some must step on stones; others must walk on, or avoid, cracks; some must ascend the stairs with the right foot first ”

“ Light or darkness, my imagination rides me. But of course if it's all wrong I want to get rid of it. You can't, naturally, help me to destroy the faculty itself, but you can aid in the defeat of its application to a particular case. It was because you so smiled, before, on that application, that I valued even my minor difference with you; and what I refer to as my loss is the fact that your frown leaves me struggling alone. The best thing for me, accordingly, as I feel, is to get rid altogether of the obsession. ”

“ I'm not sure I can explain that. An obsession is a strange thing, and so is suicidal depression—and so's pregnancy. You don't just sit quiet and work out the mathematics. Your mind shifts and struggles like a thing in a web, tries to decide what matters most. ”

“ If the victim of the obsession will deliberately try to think of something else, or to think of nothing at all—every time he catches himself in the act of thinking about his business out of hours, he certainly will, sooner or later—probably in about a fortnight—cure the obsession, or at least get the upper hand of it. ”

“ Obsession is only a special case of psychic disintegration, a kind of doubling of consciousness. The individual becomes a person "possessed," whose self has been confiscated for the sake of the fixed idea, and whose submission to his situation is wrought with pain. ”

“ If we examine closely those who have passed for being possessed, we shall not perhaps find one amongst them, whose mind had not been deranged by some accident, or whose body was not attacked by some infirmity either known or hidden, which had caused some ferment in the blood or the brain, and which, joined to prejudice, or fear, had given rise to what was termed in their case obsession or possession. ”

“ Thus, obsessions and phobias have their origin, according to Freud, in sexual life. The obsession represents a compensation, a substitute for an unbearable sex idea, and takes its place in consciousness. ”

“ This thought produces a mental panic, the blood mounts to his head, he becomes incapable of coherent thought or speech, and the task of finishing his dinner would now be beyond his power even if he had not lost all taste for it.
Such illustrations of obsession in daily life, by no means rare, could be multiplied indefinitely, and may be perhaps better appreciated than the text-book illustration of the man who neglected to flick off with his whip a certain stone from the top of a wall, and who could not sleep until he had returned to the spot and performed the act. ”

“ II. Though love, even in its average manifestations, is inseparable from obsession and impulsion, I see in these two characteristics no legitimate reason for placing it unrestrictedly—as some writers have been pleased to do—in the category of pathology. [161] It has its natural end, and tends to fulfil it by appropriate means. Every one knows that it sometimes reaches the confines of madness ”

“ A second form, which for want of a better term may be called objective, is demoniac melancholia—the delusion of obsession or possession,—which, formerly superabundant in all religions, has now become rarer. [201] In obsession, or external demonomania, the patient is not in the true sense possessed; he hears, sees, feels, smells the spirits who are obstinately determined on his ruin, but he does not feel them within him. ”

“ His moral teaching amounts to this: to inculcate truth-telling about small matters and evasion about large, and to cultivate a morbid obsession in the necessary dawn of sexual consciousness. So far from wanting to stimulate the imagination, he hates and dreads it. ”

“ Whether the complex shall be awakened as such a recurrent memory, or shall function as a dissociated subconscious process, producing other disturbances, or remain quiescent in the unconscious, depends upon other factors which we need not now consider.
3. Clinically the periodic recurrence of such complexes is an obsession. An obsession as met with is most likely to be characterized by fear not only because the instinct of fear is the most painful of the emotions, but for another reason. ”

“ Into the house of conduct erected by the superficial self it sends an obsession, which doesn't, owing to a twist that the superficial self, which isn't candid, gives it, seem to bear any relation to the suppressed wish. ”

“ So the little thing grew bigger. He was healthy and normal, ate regularly, slept long hours, and yet the growing little thing was becoming an obsession. Work performed. The phrase haunted his brain. ”

“ If such were the mechanism in insistent ideas, obsessions, and impulsions, it would, as I have intimated, explain their insistency, their persisting recurrence, the difficulty 364in modifying them, notwithstanding the subject realizes their falsity, the point of view often inexplicable to the subject, and the persistence of the affect. There is a constant striving of affective subconscious processes, when stimulated, to carry themselves to fulfilment. ”

“ He will examine the family history of this woman and perhaps will give us the answer: "The people who develop obsessions are those in whose families similar and other psychic disturbances have repeatedly occurred." In other words, if this lady develops an obsession she does so because she was predisposed to it by reason of her heredity. ”

“ That such constantly 568repressed thoughts with their strong feeling tones should be conserved in the unconscious was a psychological necessity, and also that they should emerge by the force of their own urge into consciousness from time to time like an obsession whenever stimulated by environmental and personal conditions. ”

“ The setting in obsessions.—This question of the functioning of unconscious complexes as subconscious processes is of fundamental importance for psychology, whether normal or abnormal, and if well established gives an entirely new aspect to its problems. ”

“ When the social and sane instincts lose in the conflict, interest in the present may decline to indifference, and the obsessions may focus on real or fancied errors of the past—duty to a dead child, a business failure, etc. At any rate, there is a tendency to indulge temperament. ”

“ Listen now to those consequences that spring from the attributes of Goodness, Passion, and Darkness. Contentment, the satisfaction that arises from joy, certainty, intelligence, and memory,—these are the consequences born of the attribute of Goodness. I shall now mention the consequences of Passion and Darkness. Desire, wrath, error, cupidity, stupefaction, fear, and fatigue, belong to the attribute of Passion. Cheerlessness, grief, discontent, vanity, pride, and wickedness, all belong to Darkness. ”

“ Wherefore, touching illusions and impressions, as also strong emotions of love, hatred, jealousy, or revenge, these nerve and brain sensations are easily conveyed from one human subject to another by Suggestion. ”

“ The victim of my own ardent passions, and the errors of one whose memory will ever be dear to me, I prepare to withdraw the veil—a veil, spread by an importunate, but, I fear, a mistaken tenderness. Learn, then, from the incidents of my life, entangled with those of his to whom you owe your existence, a more striking and affecting lesson than abstract philosophy can ever afford. ”

“ His whole body and his whole intelligence form together an instrument of exquisite sensibility whereby the perceptions of his inmost soul are hourly tortured, delighted, caught up into ecstasy, torn and crushed by jealousy and fear, or plunged into the frigid waters of despair. ”

“ That thought is, perhaps, the first link in a chain of thoughts and images which will be the torment of your conscience and the bane of your life. That sentiment to which you imprudently pandered is perhaps the source of countless fears, regrets, remorse and sorrows. That imprudent glance is perhaps the first spark of a conflagration which nothing can extinguish, and which will destroy your brightest hopes. ”

“ Be that as it may, she became obsessed by one of those all-mighty, dominating impulses that conquer the will, the judgment, even the desire; that crush down previously accepted ideas of right and wrong, forcing a fresh, oft-times dreaded, idea masterfully into a shrinking heart and mind. ”

“ And even among those who have kept themselves pure from those grosser abominations; how much anger and pride how much sloth and idleness, how much softness and effeminacy how much luxury and self-indulgence, how much covetousness and ambition, how much thirst of praise, how much love of the world, how much fear of man, is to be found! Meanwhile, how little of true religion! ”

“ It is a story well fitted to raise vulgar wonder—vulgar abhorrence; do you wonder that I, who since I was nine years old have slept and waked on the thought, should have been filled with hate, rancour, and every evil passion, till the blessed thought dawned on my soul, that I would prove her innocence, and that she should be avenged—for this I live. ”

“ Such contempt for everything, such disbelief in all things, such a contemptuous despising of everything, and of her own self as well, embraced her and possessed her, that at the end of the meditation she said to herself: "It is all one!" ”

“ Yes, separated for ever from this external world, your thoughts must needs revert to yourself, and your vision dwell internally upon the bygone scenes of your ill-spent life; and I am not without hope that such a mental and constantly presented picture will send the blush of shame even upon your hardened features, that your soul, deadened as it now is to every good and holy impulse, will become softened and tender by repentance. ”

“ Whatever sinister passions were heaving under its splendid and complex surface, I was too agitated by a simple and innocent desire of my own, to notice the signs or interpret them correctly. The most innocent of passions will take the edge off one's judgment. ”

“ By yielding to the sway of their credulous fancies, allowing their passions to be worked up to a tremendous pitch of excitement, and running into excesses of folly and violence, they have left a dark stain upon their memory, that will awaken a sense of shame, pity, and amazement in the minds of their latest posterity. ”