Ob e s Fall 2018
Obssession Obsession is the official magazine of Freud Institute. The fall edition explores OCD and sexuality. Freud Institute was founded by John-Michael Maxime Kuczynski, PhD., as a politically incorrect, sexy, defiant, mind-blowing site for people to receive psychoanalysis and engage in intelligent conversations about OCD, NPD, BPD, anxiety, sex, derealization disorder, eating disorders, grief, relationships and personalities. Freud Institute also publishes Real Time Philosophy, an online journal.
Ob e s -Com s e D r e : Val e H s u t
Men Cheat, Women PLay House Women hold onto the illusion that a man will make her his “one” and his “only.” But if given the chance, a man will cheat. Even if he has to come up with a new definition of cheating. My man says they are just “panty pals.” I want to play house. Pretend that I’m a 1950’s housewife. But on one level, his desires makes me feel excited. My heart races when I think about a silly little girl pleasuring my man. And I want to taste what he tastes. I still want to please him because he is my man. If that’s what he wants...
Table of Contents How to Get Rid of OCD The Obsessive-Compulsive Must Accept His Own Sadistic Sexuality What is the Prognosis for People with OCD? The Way to Beat OCD is to Have a Purpose in Life The Limitations of CBT in the Treatment of OCD Turn OCD Against Itself Intrusive Thoughts: Why People with OCD Have Them Reading Difficulties in People with OCD Is OCD a Disease?
How to get rid of ocd by j.-m. kuczynski Is there an effective treatment that can eliminate OCD for good? There is only one way to 'get rid' of OCD, and that is to find a calling in life in which one's obsessive compulsive tendencies are an asset, as opposed to a liability. OCD is not so much an illness as it is a distinctive way of processing emotional information. In the wrong environment, that psychological architecture can hold one back; in the right one, it can push one forward. Many writers, composers, mathematicians, lawyers, philosophers and creative and analytical people of many stripes (e.g. Beethoven, Einstein, Dr. Johnson) have OCD; such people have found callings in which their OCD works for them. So it's not about eliminating OCD; it's about putting it to one's advantage. I myself have done that in a very big way. I am being OCD right now by virtue of writing such a thorough answer to this question (how to get rid of OCD?). But in being so thorough, I am putting to my obsessive-compulsive tendencies to nonpathological use, instead of letting them express themselves as OCD. And that is point: one doesn't get rid of mental illnesses by getting rid of them. Rather, one chooses to work in areas in which those mental illnesses are functional and, therefore, not mental illnesses.
Women feel motivated when they have hope of true love. When a man wants other women, she sees no point in living. Life has been a cruel joke. God is a sadist. She no longer wants to please her man. This woman realizes there is no “soul mate” and no longer functions. She has choices. Walk away. Choose an emasculated Beta male. Stay and validate her man’s sexuality. Become submissive.
The Obsessive-Compulsive Must Accept his Own Sadistic Sexuality By J.M. Kuczynski An essential part of the treatment of the obsessive-compulsive is getting him to accept his own sexuality, which invariably has an extremely sadistic and/or masochistic character. If he does not accept his sexuality, there will be a continuation of the alienatedness of thought from feeling that is responsible for OCD. And if he does accepts his sexuality, this will effectuate an OCD-eliminative reconciliation of thought and feeling. Let me put these points into context. All mental illness involves some kind of withdrawal from reality. But there are two different ways of withdrawing from reality and thus two different kinds of mental illness. There are mental illnesses that effectuate this withdrawal by destroying the coherence of one’s ideation: these are known as psychoses.
And there are mental illnesses that effectuate this withdrawal not by diminishing the coherence of one’s thinking but by paralyzing one’s will. These are known as neuroses. Neuroses do not destroy the coherence of one’s thought. Or rather--they do not the coherence of one’s intellection, that is, of one’s mental activity so far as it is concerned with the discerning of logical relations. But there is a respect in which they diminish the coherence of one’s mentation: they estrange intellection from its ordinary emotional concomitants. So the neurotic can think and he can also feel, but his thoughts are alienated from his feelings, the result being that his will is weakened. And the reason for this weakening of will is that, as philosophers have long known, action is not solely about thought, nor solely about feeling, but about the two operating jointly and symbiotically; and in the neurotic, this symbiosis has been disrupted.
In the psychotic, this symbiosis has not been disrupted; but the psychotic’s intellection is incoherent, so that, even though his will is intact, it is led on so many fool’s errands by his compromised powers of reasoning. The obsessive-compulsive’s intellection is coherent. Nay, hyper-coherent. Indeed, it is made hyper-coherent by the fact that it is estranged from the usual emotional concomitants of thought and can thus pursue its own course without being weighed down by the usual emotional resistances. But the obsessive-compulsive’s will is as atrophied as his intellect is hypertrophied---and for the very same reason, this being the just-mentioned alienatedness of thought from feeling. And the restoration of the obsessive-compulsive’s personality consists entirely in his restoring this thought-feeling balance. And this is done by finding a profession that is congenial to him and that enables him to flourish without having to perform the impossible the impossible feat of changing his own psychological architecture.
What is the prognosis for people who have OCD By J.-M. Kuczynski People who have OCD have it because it provides them with relief from anxiety—from anxiety so intense as to be almost inconceivable to people who have not had OCD. But OCD is just a defense-mechanism. And as is the case with most defense-mechanisms, there comes a time in the subject’s life when it starts to do more harm than good. At that point, the obsessive-compulsive has to make a decision: What do I want? Do I want mere freedom from anxiety? Or do I want to live and grow? It is 100% up to him what he chooses. If he chooses to grow, he will, and his OCD, without exactly vanishing, will assume productive forms. If he chooses not to grow, he won’t.
OCD, though an affliction, is ultimately a voluntary one. If the obsessive-compulsive chooses to remain in his defensive bubble of isolation from the world, then his OCD will defeat him. If he chooses to re-engage the world, then his OCD will assume non-pathological and even productive forms, as it did with Beethoven and Einstein. OCD, though an affliction, is an affliction of the will and is in this respect unlike cancer or asthma, which have nothing to do with the integrity of one’s will. And OCD is eliminated (or at least made adaptive) by exercising one’s will in growthoriented ways. The symptoms of OCD are involuntary only in a relative sense. Relative to a determination to remain within his defensive bubble of non-engagement, there is nothing much that the obsessive-compulsive can do about those symptoms. He can engage in a bit of ‘cognitive-behavioral therapy.' But the effects of such therapy will be shallow and short-lived, absent a determination on the obsessive-compulsive’s part to grow and change himself in ways that make his OCD irrelevant.
On the other hand, if he does choose to leave his defensive bubble and re-engage the world, then his OCD will become irrelevant. So relative to a determination on his part to re-engage the world, the symptoms of OCD are voluntary. So ultimately OCD is indeed voluntary, and if one sees it for the voluntary condition that it ultimately is, then the prognosis is 100% positive. But if one sees it as a garden-variety pathology, then the prognosis is negative, a 'garden-variety' condition being one that does not afflict one’s will and that falls outside the scope of the one’s will. OCD is an affliction of one’s will; it is a weakening of one’s will, in consequence of a withdrawal from the world. And by choosing to go back out into the world, the obsessive-compulsive strengthens his will and causes one’s OCD to assume benign if not productive forms.
The Way to beat ocd is to have a purpose in life by j.-M. Kuczynski Charles Manson’s followers gave him everything: money, sex, labor, drugs, adoration. And what did give them? Nothing. Or almost nothing. He gave them one thing. And it was the most important thing of all: he gave them a purpose. He made them believe that they were part of an important cause. A person with a cause and no money has almost everything. A person with all the money in the world and no cause has almost nothing. And Manson gave his minions a cause, and they gave Manson everything else. Jim Jones’ followers gave him everything. They provided him with slave labor. They barely slept. And (until the very end) they did all of this voluntarily. And what did Jim Jones give his followers? Nothing. Or just one thing. He gave them a sense of purpose. He gave them a cause that was their own.
These were profoundly evil men—consummate manipulators. But it was for that very reason that they knew exactly what people need. If they hadn’t known as much, they couldn’t have been such successful predators. And what people need, as these two knew, is a purpose. People will put up with pain and strife if they have a purpose. And they won’t if they don’t. Getting rid of OCD is hard. If a given obsessive-compulsive has a purpose in life that his OCD is preventing him from fulfilling, then he will get over his OCD. Otherwise he won’t. OCD is simply too painful to get rid of unless one really has to. get rid of it. And one really has to get rid of it if and only if OCD is interfering with one’s purpose in life. But there is deeper connection between having a purpose in life and getting rid of OCD. OCD is about having a bifurcated psychological structure. It is about being of two minds. It is about not having a single hegemonic set of values to which all psychical activity is subordinated and therefore not having any way of resolving the internal conflicts that are wrenching one’s psyche apart. If one has a grand purpose in life, one has a way of resolving these conflicts. For one then has master plan to which everything else in one’s mind, including one’s internal conflicts, are subordinated. In which case those conflicts will be resolved. In which case one’s OCD goes away. Contrariwise, one's internal conflicts aren't resolved, and one's OCD won't go away, if one has no master plan. The good news is that one wouldn’t have OCD in the first place unless one did have some grand purpose in life. This is because OCD is what happens when one is estranged from one’s own purpose. OCD is about alienatedness from one’s true self and one’s true purpose, and the way to get over it is to find that purpose and actualize it.
The Limitations of CBT in The treatment of ocd by j.-m. Kuczynski There is a method of treating OCD known as ‘cognitive-behavioral therapy’ (CBT). CBT involves getting obsessive-compulsives to do the things that they are phobic about doing. So if a given obsessive-compulsive is afraid of touching dirty surfaces with his bare hands, then his CBT may involve him shaking hands with homeless people and not washing hands afterwards. Cognitive-behavioral therapy should really just be called ‘behavioral therapy’, since there is nothing cognitive about it. In fact, it is anti-cognitive: all cognitive issues are ignored or addressed only by way of their behavioral derivatives. In any case, it is patently obvious that getting over OCD involves changing one’s behavior. If a given obsessive-compulsive showers 20 times a day, then the first thing he must do is stop showering twenty times a day. If he spends 10 hours a cleaning, then the first thing he must do is stop spending so much time cleaning.
So there is nothing wrong with behavioral therapy—or ‘cognitive’ behavioral therapy, if you want to call it that. In fact, behavioral therapy is quite obviously an ineliminable part of the restoration of the obsessive-compulsive’s psychological well-being. But here is the problem. OCD is extremely 'productive', meaning that it produces symptoms with almost limitless energy and creativity. If one symptom is squashed down, without its underlying causes being addressed, some other symptom will take its place. This does not mean that all is lost for the obsessive-compulsive. It just means that the underlying cause of the obsessive-compulsives various obsessions and compulsions must be addressed. And ultimately there is always one such cause. That cause is that the obsessive-compulsive has fled from reality into a world of symbolic proxies of reality. His obsessions have ideas for their objects, not the external realties for which ideas stand. And his compulsions are merely obsessions that are externalized in behavior.
The cause of this flight from reality into symbolic proxies thereof varies from case to case. So the cause of the cause of OCD varies from person to person. But the cause of OCD does not so vary. It is always a fear-driven flight from reality into a safe internal world in which ideas have taken the place of realities and in which thinking has taken the place of doing. And ultimately the only way to improve the obsessive-compulsive’s condition is to get him out of this bubble of pseudo-reality. Getting him out of this bubble involves getting him to behave normally. There is no way to get him to rejoin the living without breaking the back of his various compulsions. For these compulsions---for example, the endless showering and hand-washing, the cleaning---are externalized obsessions and as such represent the encroachment into the external world of the obsessive-compulsive’s replacement of real realities, as it were, with symbolic realities. The obsessive-compulsive’s various compulsives actions serve as a kind of veil between himself and reality that prevents him from directly engaging it. And he has to engage it. Plus, he has to function, which he won’t do, as long as he is compulsive. And he also has to enjoy life, which he won’t do so long as he is compulsive. But the essence of the restoration of the obsessive-compulsive’s sanity is getting him to engage reality. If his behavior is treated without addressing this alienatedness from reality, the obsessions and compulsions will simply assume new forms. On the other hand, if his behavior is treated as part of a larger program of reconciling him to reality, then there will be genuine structural improvement, as opposed to the mere replacing of one set of symptoms with another.
Turn OCD Against Itself by J.-M. Kuczynski If you put a two-year old in ocean-water, it will start crying. But then it gets used to the water. And when you try to take it out two hours later, it starts crying again! Children are OCD like in many respects. They need comforting routines. They need to be told certain bedtime stories over and over again. They need to sleep with specific stuffed animals. And so on. But this clinginess of theirs can be turned against itself. Right now, they need to sleep with the snoopy stuffed animal, and they will howl and scream if you try to get them switch to their Dumbo stuffed animal. But after an initial period of protest, the clinginess they had towards Snoopy will transfer over to Dumbo.
With OCD it’s the same way. It’s the same way, because it’s the same thing. OCD isn’t just similar to the just-described obsessive clinginess of children: it is identical with that clinginess. Like all mental illnesses, OCD is regressive: it is the mind’s returning to a modus operandi from its earlier days. Put another way, OCD is the persistence into adulthood of a childhood defense-mechanism. And that childhood defense-mechanism is one of clinging to certain habits, so as to insulate oneself from a frightening world within a safe little autistic bubble. And that is what OCD is. OCD is about clinging to certain rituals and habits that make one feel safe. It is the presence in an adult of a defense-mechanism that, in non-neurotics, ceases to be operative during early childhood. The other side of the coin is that, underlying the obsessive-compulsive’s rigidity is the same neural plasticity—the same transferability of clinginenss—that is present in the child and that is indeed the hallmark of a child’s mind.
The obsessive-compulsive is binary: he is all about all or nothing. Either he loves or hates. Either he does no exercise or he compulsively exercises. Either he has to have bananas in his morning cereal or he has to not have them in his cereal. So the obsessive-compulsiveness obsessive-compulsiveness—his clingness—is about binariness; it is about all or nothing-ism. And inherent in his all or nothing-ism is a child-like ability to change---to do 180 degree shifts. So, paradoxically, underlying the obsessive-compulsive’s rigidity is non-rigidity—is neural plasticity. And the obsessive-compulsive’s greatest asset is therefore his OCD itself! He must use the binariness, and concomitant ability to change, to combat the rigidity and fixity of habits to which his OCD disposes him. Let me be more concrete. There is always something that the obsessive-compulsive has to do that he is afraid of doing, in much the same way that the child is afraid of getting into the bathtub. And the obsessive-compulsive must confront this fear, and he must do it quickly and unblinkingly. And then what will happen is that he will be as obsessive-compulsive about doing this new thing as he was about not doing it before, just as the child, once he settles into his bath, will kick and scream when he has to get out of the bath tub. So turn OCD against itself--by using the all-or-nothingism inherent in it and the neural plasticity inherent in and hidden in that all-or-nothingins--to effectuate growthcritical changes in oneself.
Intrusive thoughts: Why people with ocd have them by J.-M. Kuczynski If you have a goal, it is easy not to be lazy. But if you don’t have a goal, it is hard not to be lazy, since there is then no point in not being lazy. Similarly, if you have a goal, it is easy not to succumb to neurotic compulsions. But if you don’t have a goal, it is hard not to do so since there is then no point in tolerating the anxiety brought on by not doing so. As for obsessions, these are always displacements: one obsesses about such and such as a way of not confronting thus and such.
And when one has a goal, one’s obsessional energies are naturally channeled in the right direction, since, under that circumstance, one’s mind stands to gain more in the way of relief from anxiety by not obsessing than by obsessing. And when doesn’t have a goal, one’s mind stands to gain more in the way of anxiety-relief by obsessing than by not obsessing, and one is therefore inclined to keep on obsessing. As for intrusive thoughts, these are one’s mind’s way of telling one—in a compressed, crude,and distorted way---what one has to do. Notice that one’s intrusive thoughts concern sex or violence or sexual violence.
This is because the people who have such thoughts are in the process of castrating themselves—they are in the process of trying to become faceless bureaucrats---and their minds are recoiling at this violence that is being done to them, and they are shouting at one’s conscience mind, trying to tell it not to surrender. Intrusive thoughts are not the problem; the person who is making a eunuch of himself is the problem; the intrusive thoughts are the last gasp of the still robust part of him. In any case, the way to get over obtrusive thoughts is to have a goal in life. So long as one is drifting, one’s mind will be unsatisfied and will hiss and buck, sometimes by flooding one’s consciousness with intrusive thoughts or compulsions, sometimes in other ways: but so long as one is drifting, it is just a matter of time before one’s psyche begins to disintegrate. And one can be free from psychopathology only so long as a one has a goal that one’s mental energies can organize themselves around and that one’s drives can discharge themselves through.
All people are dominated by compulsions. In the case of the non-obsessive-compulsive, those compulsions are unconscious. In the case of the obsessive-compulsive, they are conscious. And that is what it is to have OCD: it is to consciously experience the compulsions that others only unconsciously experience. Thus, where the non-obsessive-compulsive has the illusion of freedom, the obsessive-compulsive has the illusion of its absence. In actuality, the obsessive-compulsive, by virtue of being aware of the compulsions to which he is subjected, has the ability to liberate himself from those compulsions, whereas the non-obsessive-compulsive, by virtue of not being thus aware, does not.
Reading difficulties in people with ocd by J.-M. Kuczynski People with OCD are generally unusually intelligent, and they tend to do well on standardized tests, especially tests of reading comprehension. But OCD often makes it extraordinarily difficult for such people to read. When reading, their obsessionality flairs up: they have to ritualistically re-read words or phrases—not because they don’t understand what they’ve read, but because their OCD compels them to. Or upon turning the page, they are stricken with a morbid fear that there was some kernel of wisdom that they didn’t take in on the previous page; and they go back and re-read it, then turn the page again—only to be stricken once again by the same fear. And so on. Two questions arise: What is this about and how is it to be treated? The answer to the second question is clear: They must not back down; they must not not read.
They must simply re-train their brains in such a way that their OCD finds different prey. The written word is much too valuable to be alienated from. And it is especially value to people with OCD, given their intellectual bent and given also the nature of the disturbances underlying OCD. Which brings us to the answer to the first question, which is: These reading disturbances are text-book cases of resistance: The very reason the obsessive-compulsive has problems reading is that, when he is reading, he is in danger of reading something that will shed light on his own emotional disturbances. Be it noted that the very obsessive-compulsives who have the most severe reading-related problems only have them with certain kinds of material. More specifically, they only have them with ‘good’ books and articles—with material that is rich in content. They generally don’t have them with ‘pulp’---with things that are easy to read and not informative. And they have them the most with works that specifically concern psychological maladies.
Oftentimes, a given obsessive-compulsive who practically goes into convulsions when forced to read psychology can read mathematical logic without any problems. In fact, the sanitary of nature of such material may make reading it a kind of haven for him from his OCD. In this connection, I suspect that oftentimes when people go into psychologically (but not logically) sterile fields, such as logic and physics, it is, in part (though obviously not entirely) because of the absence of troubling emotional resonances in work in those disciplines. And this may explain why the very obsessive-compulsives who have the most severe reading-related difficulties may do the best on reading-comprehension tests: for the material on such tests tends to be sterile; it tends to be narrowly factual and thus not to arouse psychological resistances. But it is very important to resolve these difficulties early in the obsessive-compulsive’s life. For if he becomes habituated to not being able to read—which often happens---then he will lose out on both the professional and personal benefits of being able to absorb information through the written word. And for him, these benefits are especially great. The obsessivecompulsive is a thinker by nature, and he is also a loner, which means that he has a double need for the ‘companionship’ of the written word.
Is OCD a Disease? By J.-M. Kuczynski When a condition is described as a ‘disease’, it is usually implied that the person who has it cannot simply ‘will it’ away. That person may be responsible for getting it in the first place, as is the case with someone who get lung cancer because of smoking. But once he has it, so is it assumed, his continuing to have it is not about his simply failing to make the right effort of will. Given that OCD very clearly is an illness of sorts, it seems to follow that someone who has OCD is ‘stuck with it’, in the way in which someone who has lupus or asthma is simply stuck with it—that, although his condition may be treated, as asthma can be treated, and even eliminated, it is not a question of simply willing it away. But here is the problem: OCD, though indisputably a disease, is a disease that afflicts the will itself. It is an affliction of the will.
A person with osteoporosis is somebody with porous bones, not a porous will. A person with cancer is somebody with damaged cells, not with a damaged will. But somebody with OCD is somebody with a damaged will. And the only way to fix a damaged will is by exercising that will. And that is what the obsessive-compulsive must do. And if he doesn’t do that, he is quite as responsible for his condition as is a fat person who refuses to stop overeating. Let me put these points into context. People with OCD can be willful---in fact, they are categorically so. And they can also be legitimately highly determined: in fact, they are unusually likely to be capable of being determined to an exceptionally high degree.
But in other respects, their will, though functional, has been ruptured. Their will is like that of an exceedingly strong person who has pulled a muscle: that person is still strong and in some contexts can exercise that strength, but his ability to exercise his strength is more much context-dependent than it would be if he didn’t have a ruptured muscle. Somebody with OCD is somebody whose psyche has been bifurcated into two halves: a Dr. Jekyll half and Mr. Hyde half—an id-half and a superego-half. And these two halves are at war with each other: the bestial, criminal side of the obsessive-compulsive wants to come out, but the angelic morality-driven side won’t let it; so the criminal side has to leak out in symptoms. And the paralysis of will that is the hallmark of OCD is the result of a stalemate between these two sides.
But at the end of the day, it is entirely up to the obsessive-compulsive what he does. He isn’t like a paralytic who simply can’t move. Rather, he is somebody who, although he can exercise his will, won’t. He won’t because of the anxiety he will experience. But he still can. If he were offered a million dollars, he would, regardless of the anxiety. To be sure, the obsessive-compulsive is diseased; he does have a very real psychopathology. But his being diseased consists not in his being unable but rather in his being unwilling to do the right thing. And getting the obsessive-compulsive to get over is OCD involves strengthening his atrophied willingness to act. And the way to strengthen it is to get him to act—first a little, then a lot. That is not all there is to getting over OCD: the conflicts underlying the obsessive-compulsive’s paralysis of will must be addressed. But in order for them to be addressed meaningfully, they must be accompanied by veritable doing on the part of the obsessive-compulsive. The purpose of psychoanalytic constructions must be to direct the will—to indicate pathways that it should follow. But unless it actually follows those pathways, those constructions will be so much theory. And psychoanalysis is not about theory; it is about practice: it is about getting the patient out of the bubble of his mind, which, ultimately, can only be done by doing it.