According to phenomenological literature, the life-world of the obsessive subject is characterized by its claustrophobic closure, the attempt to stop the flow of time, and the inability to accept the formlessness hidden behind the form. The obsessive obstinately tries to build defences against what he cannot tolerate of reality and this effort causes loss of spontaneity in the pre-reflective dimension of existence, resulting in the thought process being oversaturated and ending up by blocking action. Our proposal is to unpack the phenomenon of partition in the obsessive’s world, analysing the similarities and differences with the schizophrenic life-world. In fact, although the mechanization and the predominance of a reflective dimension are similar in these psychopathological typologies, these phenomena are based on completely different foundations: the ontological question in the case of the schizophrenic subject, while the ontic question in the case of the obsessive subject. By decomposing reality, the obsessive tries to stem the dimension of the formless, which is hidden under the representative order of things which he cannot tolerate. Understanding the hyper-rationalizing tendency of obsessive thought offers important clinical implications by providing shareable insights into psychotherapeutic development.

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Introduction

“All we ask is a little order to protect ourselves from chaos” [1].

Phenomenological psychopathology proposes an approach that attempts to explore the life-world of subjects affected with psychiatric illnesses, seeing their existence as the development of a particular world-project [2-4]. According to the phenomenological literature, the life-world of the obsessive subject is characterized by its claustrophobic closure, the attempt to stop the flow of time, and the inability to accept the formlessness hidden behind the form [5, 6]. The obsessive obstinately tries to build defences against what he cannot tolerate of reality, and this effort causes loss of spontaneity in the pre-reflective dimension of existence. Everything, every thought, and every possibility are analysed from the perspective of their possible implications, resulting in the thought process being oversaturated and ending up by blocking action.

Following this intuition, our proposal is to unpack the phenomenon of partition in the obsessive’s world, analysing the purpose of control which then makes the natural course of life sterile. The sterile and artificial world, as it appears to the obsessive, reveals an interesting parallel to the schizophrenic life-world, with whom it shares aspects of mechanization and the predominance of a reflective dimension, though on different bases. The aim of the present article was to come up with a phenomenological development of the hyper-rationalizing tendency of obsessive thought and to highlight any clinical implications and psychotherapeutic potential [7-9].

Materiality and Disgust

In the phenomenological literature on the subject of obsessions, particular importance is attached to the work of Erwin Straus who, using what he calls “structural analysis,” reconstructs the essential characteristics of the obsessive world [6, 10]. The inevitable starting point for any phenomenologically based unfolding is, in fact, a description of the patient’s life-world or his own individual and peculiar way of being-in-the-world [9]. In this sense, the patient’s life experience can be deepened by following the subdivision of experience into Heidegger’s so-called existentialia, that is, the transcendental structures of the Dasein: the experience of time, the experience of space, the experience of the body, the experience of the other [3, 8]. Straus’s particular contribution in this field regards the importance assumed by the category of materiality, which expresses the relation of inter-reactivity present between the human being and the objects that populate his world [6, 11].

In the case of the obsessive subject, the category of materiality becomes the cornerstone for understanding his experience of the world. Indeed, what we see is a negative transformation of the world that casts a shadow on the aspects of innocence, integrity, life, highlighting instead the features of dirt, obscenity, death. Life and death seem to compenetrate in every living being despite our defensive tendency to experience them as dualities clearly distinct from one another [9, 12]. Realizing this truth can provoke in us a moment of disgust or anguish, but normally, it does not stop us from detaching our gaze and living as far as possible by ignoring the mortal aspect in life itself. Moving from the perceptive horizon to the cognitive, our efforts are constantly directed to making aneidos submit to eidos, the formless to form, the indeterminate to determinations [9, 13]. A world that failed to deal with aneidos would be intolerable for us, but obsession is, in fact, the loss of the sympathetic relation with the world [6, 14]. By sympathetic relation with the world, Straus means the harmony of reciprocal interactions between the subject and the world, which ensures that the relationship is always placed in the “between” [6]. The world as it appears to the obsessive is like this: a world riddled with decomposition, in which beauty fails to hide decay, in which contingency nails us once and forever to the corpse we shall be [15]. The pathic experience that derives from this is that of anguish, in the desperate but vain attempt to impose a clear distinction between life and death, to stem the decomposition that penetrates every crack in the living, to make the world aseptic [3, 16].

The dominant sentiment in the existence of the obsessive is therefore disgust, pertaining not only to perceivable experience but also assuming moral connotations [17]. From his clear-sighted analysis of this sentiment, Straus infers its basic characteristic: independently of inevitable sociocultural conditioning, disgust arises when we see a part of the organism detached from its wholeness [6]. In the obsessive person, the aneidos manifests itself at every instant so that the disgust becomes pervasive and omnipresent, unavoidable. Physiognomy, or the qualitative aspect of objects as it presents itself in practice, in this case appears to be entirely subjugated to the theme of death, and the world turns into a homogeneous experience of decomposition [6, 14, 16].

Obsession as an Escape from Aneidos

The symptoms of the obsessive subject therefore represent the desperate attempt to escape from the ever-advancing threat of aneidos. Indeed, the very etymology of the term “obsession” derives from the latin word obsideo, whose meaning is “to besiege” and clearly expresses how these subjects feel trapped by evil looming over them [11, 18]. Nonetheless, the attempt at self-defence has little success and becomes a paradox [9, 12]. The fight of the obsessive assumes the connotations of Sartre’s bad faith: to escape something, we not only have to know what it is we are trying to escape, we also have to keep our eyes fixed on it intensely at every moment, to monitor it as it advances on us; we have to be obsessed by it, whilst we believe we are forgetting it [15].

According to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5), obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD) is characterized by the presence of obsessions, in the form of intrusive thoughts or images, that the subject tries in vain to repress and by the presence of compulsions, understood as repetitive behaviours or mental actions aimed at reducing the anxiety or discomfort caused from obsessions [19]. The content of the obsessions can be different: the prevailing themes concern cleanliness, symmetry, taboos, and the risk of causing harm to oneself or to others [19-21]. Each of these themes can, to a greater or lesser extent, be read in phenomenological terms according to the unfolding of the obsessive world we are pursuing. To begin with, contamination is the main theme on which the previous phenomenological literature focused and expresses, as we have said, the mixture of vitality and putrefaction and the fear of being infected by death and aneidos [6, 16]. Even harm or sexual obsessions suggest a source of aggression and forbidden desires that a lot has to do with the aneidos that is inside us and that obsessive subjects try to escape [17]. Finally, the obsessions of symmetry, order, and control seem to us an attempt to subdue chaos. In common, we see the effort to subject the aneidos to the eidos, under the pressure of the anguish of indeterminacy [6, 22].

Nevertheless, what makes the existence of obsessive individuals even more tragic is the egodystonic nature of their symptoms [23]. While classical psychopathology has found in egodystonia the crucial element that allows us to distinguish obsession from delusion, the current categorization of DSM-5 includes the variant “with poor insight” among the specifiers for the diagnosis of OCD [19]. Interestingly, this specifier places the accent on the border areas between obsession and schizophrenia [24]. In fact, even when present, the awareness is not sufficient to get rid of obsessive symptoms or relegate them to a level where they are annoying but more or less manageable [25]. On the contrary, obsessive subjects appear to be completely dominated by their obsessions [6]. Their effort to bring order to the indeterminate thus assumes the exhausting nature of a labour of Sysiphus destined to be never-ending, the constant striving towards an objective that is quite simply impossible to achieve.

By means of rituals, the obsessive engages in repetition as a way of guaranteeing the world of form, like a magic chant that will keep the shadow of decomposition and death at a distance [13, 16]. In some way, the obsessive has a more profound intuition than most of us of the reciprocal and inevitable compenetration of life and death, which does not attain cognitive awareness but remains a pathic, pre-representative register of our inherence in the world. Yet the obsessive denies this intuition, which, following Deleuze’s proposal, may harbour the talent for experimentation as an effort to constantly overturn the obvious, as a premonition of the undifferentiated magma from which we extract the simulacra of representation [13, 26]. The obsessive however chooses the reassuring world of the figurative, although he cannot stop feeling the difference that is rife in every attempt made to shore it up, remaining trapped by it.

Appealing to the orderly world of representation, just as the escape from the aneidos, places him in a paradoxical position with regard to movement: if on the one hand movement is frenzied and without respite, on the other, it takes the form of running on the spot, leading nowhere. The former becomes clear in the case of the manic-obsession described by Von Gebsattel [17], whilst the latter can be found in Straus’s descriptions of the impossibility of action, blocked by doubts [6]. In reality, these are just two faces of the same experience: from the frenzied attempt to defend boundaries to the paralysing doubt that prevents action, it is still a matter of the same effort to dismiss contingency from one’s own experience of the world.

Decomposition between Partition and Decay

The term decomposition thus comes to denote the nucleus within which the obsessive’s whole experience takes shape: on the one hand, in its meaning as decay, it is what he is escaping from; on the other, with the meaning of partition, it is the means he brings into play to effect the escape. The linguistic overlap shows with disconcerting clarity that we cannot escape the death that is within us without making it the centre of our existence. The partition, in its attempt to render reality sterile, to deconstruct it into its smallest details, to analyse all its implications and try and control it, only ends up by placing before our eyes a disarticulated, rigid, and mechanized world.

The exasperated attention to detail, with its corresponding loss of perspective of the whole, is the price the obsessive has to pay when faced with a decomposition of reality [11]. In the case of the obsessive, we speak of hyper-rationalization of the world, meaning an effort to rationally comprehend reality that wishes to exclude any aspect that cannot be directly codified. Reality is rendered aseptic by means of an operation of hyper-segmentation that aims to saturate the world with conscious meanings so that no room is left for indetermination.

The oversaturation of thought becomes hyper-awareness of reality as the bearer of references, the inability to decide on a direction, and therefore total refusal. The obsessive refuses the indetermination that actually exists in reality and tries to divide it up into parts, determine their functions, and disinfect the references [3]. Terrified by the possibility of encountering the death that is contained in everything, he tries to make the world sterile and detach himself from it. The effort of separating himself from the world aims primarily to avoid contagion by references and by reality. In this way, however, devitalization and artificialization of the world takes place, which has repercussions both on his relation with objects and, strikingly, in the field of inter-subjectivity. The obsessive denies temporalization because this would mean accepting the seed of death that exists in every living thing.

Following Ricoeur’s line of thought, we might say that the obsessive reinforces the promise of self-identity or makes an effort to maintain his own identity unaltered, in order to save it from the transformative power of time and the other [27]. Phenomenologically, it is possible to subdivide the concept of identity in the pre-reflexive self (minimal self), which corresponds to our spontaneous and unreflective inherence in the world, and in the reflexive self (narrative self), which corresponds to the narrative we produce about ourselves [28-31]. According to Ricoeur [27], narrative identity derives from the dialectic between “idem identity,” understood as sameness over time (being the same), and “ipse identity,” understood as the sense of belonging to oneself (being oneself). Selfhood develops when an individual is able to integrate alterity into one’s own identity dialectic [22]. On the contrary, the obsessive subject, experiencing alterity as a threat, favours the world of the always identical.

Nonetheless, reality is a system of references [32] and, having the pre-reflective dimension of how the world is constituted firmly in mind, the obsessive cannot disregard it. In his frenzied attempt to refuse it, he feels beset by it. The result is atomization or the constant and exhausting practice of segmenting reality, which continually disrupts the references between things, creating the illusion of devitalization and thus of a static situation, a victory over the passage of time. The eventual aim would be to detach the object from its references, by dividing it up infinitely and merely filling it with its significance, at this point independent of reality, static and eternal, devoid of relations with the world that might compromise its purity. The obsessive thus finds himself blocked in a fraudulent attempt to render the world lifeless – and thus deathless – a world in which he is immersed, trying desperately to avoid the natural chain of references of things in the world of life [23]. Movement, understood as a natural forward impulse and thus towards the discovery of new references, transforms itself into a practice that is impossible to abandon oneself to. The obsessive is not projected towards the discovery of the whole scenario but deludes himself in false contemplation, in the attempt to be an indifferent, external observer instead of an actor in his own world-project. His endeavour to avoid all thought and action finally yields to the inevitable residue, the atom, with the result that reality is atomized.

Hyper-Reflectivity and Hyper-Rationalization: A Parallel between the Schizophrenic and the Obsessive Worlds

The attitude towards formlessness creates an interesting link between the world of the obsessive subject and the world of the schizophrenic individual, some aspects of which are radically different, while on other occasions they almost seem to border on one another and become confused [24, 33-40]. It seems as though both intuitively sense the formlessness hidden behind our ordering of reality but that a person with schizophrenia, according to Deleuze [13, 26], makes it the emblem of the possibility to detach from representation. On the contrary, the obsessive is too terrorized by it and barricades himself in a world of form, whose fragility he perceives only too well.

As regards the schizophrenic experience, psychiatric phenomenology has long questioned what its pathognomonic characteristic is, arriving at the formulation of various hypotheses. At the basis of schizophrenia, there would seem to be a defect of the minimal self or of the pre-reflective self, of the spontaneity of our relationship with the world [29, 31, 41, 42]. Some authors have even hypothesized that the defect is even more basic, at the level of a pre-individual proto-self that has to do with the affective resonance among living organisms [28, 43, 44]. Each of them underlining a particular aspect, various authors have spoken of loss of natural evidence, loss of common sense, loss of sympathetic relation with reality, lack of vital impulse, disembodiment [31, 44-47]. Far from being characterized as a lack of rationality, in fact, Sass stressed that schizophrenia represents only an excess of it. In particular, when the pre-reflective experience of the world fails, the schizophrenic subject develops a compensatory hypertrophy of the reflective dimension, which serves as a compass in reality. Sass coined the term hyper-reflectivity to define this preponderance of the reflective grip on reality as opposed to the spontaneity of the pre-reflective relation [29, 48].

The hyper-reflexivity of schizophrenic individuals and the hyper-rationalization we have described in obsessive subjects have elements in common, but they must be phenomenally distinct in order to facilitate clinical diagnosis. Indeed, in both cases, hyper-segmentation of the world is observed, as well as a disproportion between attention to detail and an overall view, giving priority to the reflective dimension. Nevertheless, in a person with schizophrenia, there is a real inability to constitute reality on the basis of pre-reflective evidence so that the details become building blocks to be assembled in order to gain an overall view, though a posteriori (bottom-up segmentation) [29]. In the obsessive subject, instead, the overall vision is guaranteed by the integrity of the pre-reflective constitution of the world, but the need to keep every aspect of it under control and avoid any cracks letting in formlessness drives him to apply the same excessive reflective attention, with the result of obtaining a rationalized reality which is just as rigid and stereotyped (top-down segmentation). To make use of a metaphor, in both cases, we are faced with a mosaic. In the case of the schizophrenic person, the tiles are composed one by one to produce the complete image, which is never acquired at a glance in its entirety. On the contrary, the obsessive sees the image in its totality before committing himself to deconstructing it in its fundamental tiles. In both cases, the hyper-reflective process of the schizophrenic and the hyper-rationalization of the obsessive lead to a superstructure of thought which in the first case affects the constitution of reality and its causes, posing itself as an ontological question, whilst in the second case, the consequences of actions are of more interest (an ontical question) [49]. Clinical vignettes can help in understanding this difference.

Edoardo, 26 years, received a diagnosis of schizophrenia. He always had a feeling of strangeness, as if it was easy for others to do things that he always had to strive for. As a boy, this was terrifying and prompted him to a long period of social withdrawal. Now, he has learnt “how to” and can tolerate contact with other people better. At 17 years, he developed a psychotic onset based on the idea that he was a robot and that there was someone who, from the outside, controlled his movements and emotions: this seemed to explain his difference from his schoolmates. Over the years, several hospitalizations have occurred, and Edoardo has also exhibited self-injurious behaviours, aimed at demonstrating that his body was a mechanical device. The pervasiveness of this delusion in his life is variable, but the sense of strangeness always remains. He continually looks for clues that attest to his diversity from others and strives to fill them with behaviours that are stereotyped and not spontaneous. He often says that it is like he is putting together a puzzle without having seen the whole design, and this causes him episodes of strong anguish due to the difficulty of “keeping all the pieces together.”

Giovanna, 21 years, suffers from OCD. Symptoms appeared for the first time when she was a child: already at 9 years, she had a series of rituals and the fear that if she did not follow them precisely, someone could die. The obsessive thinking worsened significantly at the age of 18 years, following the death of an aunt: Giovanna thinks since then that she is “marked” and that rituals are the only thing that, day after day, postpones the moment of her death. Gradually, she realized that the innocent experience of reality she always had masks a world full of potentially deadly dangers: whenever she thinks of a risk she has never thought of before, she has to perform rituals to avert it. This infinite effort saturates her days and commits all her time, blocking her in repetition. When she feels too overwhelmed by the thought of the implications of her gestures, Giovanna leaves her house and looks for a place where she has never been before: this gives her relief as this virgin place is not yet filled with the dangers she can imagine. Gradually, however, each place becomes saturated again. The dramatic aspect of Giovanna’s story is her awareness of the absurdity of worries, and yet her inability to defend herself from intrusive thoughts. This detachment is experienced as tragic, and Giovanna feels in a prison, guilty of not being able to stem such irrational thoughts.

In these vignettes, we see how both subjects present an oversaturation of thought and a sense of encumbrance, but while Edoardo uses that encumbrance to fill a void of meaning he is looking for, Giovanna feels encircled by the potentially dangerous references of the world she has around. Faced with a new experience, Edoardo tries to establish the coordinates of reality, while Giovanna can “rest” for a moment because her pre-reflective experience of reality is intact, and the hyper-rationalization has not yet filled everything. Edoardo, on the other hand, cannot find a moment of peace in his search because he must make an active effort to constitute reality in every moment.

Whilst the obsessive activates his own separateness and segmentation of the world, the schizophrenic subject is an unwitting victim as he lacks the natural evidence. The absence of spontaneity condemns him to an unceasing quest for naturalness, which is however unattainable on the reflective plane, resulting in the hypertrophy of the presence and obscuring the essence, diminishing the vitality implicit in existing [29, 46]. Instead, the spontaneity of the pre-reflective dimension is correctly constituted in the obsessive but, instead of being a trampoline, is experienced as a condemnation since it is this dimension of naturalness and carnality that is the other face of death [6]. Thus, the obsessive subject attempts to submit the pre-reflective and pathic dimension of life to reflection, retreating into a rationalizing position. Whilst the hyper-reflectivity of the schizophremic is an effort, albeit an unsuccessful one, to vitalize the world, the hyper-rationalization of the obsessive is instead an attempt to devitalize it.

According to Merleau-Ponty [12], the constitution of reality is affected by the ordering principles of our mind, but on a pathic level, we can intuit the existence of an underlying undifferentiated magma, from which the determinations emerge, and which he calls the chair. For the schizophrenic subject, the contact with the chair is an unattainable goal towards which he directs his efforts to constitute reality, but being artificial, the reality that he constitutes will never have the naturalness and vitality that truly characterize it [12, 46]. Instead, the obsessive has the intuition of the chair, but it gives him a sense of horror and obscenity which block all actions, creating resistance to the flow of life [6].

Minkowski [46] has identified in schizophrenia a characteristic lack of vital élan (vital impulse), that is, of the instinctual force that pushes, like an underground fire, our direction towards the world. While in schizophrenia this implicit drive to existence is lacking, its presence for the obsessive subject is a motive of anguish, seen like acceleration towards death and a residue that bears death within itself [46]: if he could, he would stop the flow of life itself for the sake of avoiding indetermination and formlessness. In his attempt to sterilize the world, the obsessive rationalizes it, stripping away, layer after layer, the cloaks of meaning things are clothed in, in the illusion of getting to a pure form, unaffected by the world’s becoming. Not only is this an impossible objective to attain since the hinge of dialogue between the ontical and the ontological is impossible to remove but it also appears as a mortal effort in which reality becomes plastic and devoid of life, blocked and passive.

In the world of the obsessive, the greatest threat is represented by his body, by the experience of the chair which does not submit to the laws of form and which stagnates within him [12]. Thus one’s body, like the surrounding environment, tries to be made aseptic, to be purified, to free itself from the aneidos that it cannot tolerate [6]. When the experience of disgust is instead moved to the outside world, the theme of body boundaries becomes the bulwark to be defended from contamination. Even if the importance of boundaries appears central to both obsession and schizophrenia, it is essential to underline the difference: while the schizophrenic subject is subjected to experiences of passivity in which he feels invaded by others, the obsessive individual does not fear invasion but contagion [50, 51]. His fear is not that the other invades him but that the other transmits his filth, his illness, the death he has within himself.

Conclusion

The comparison between obsessive and schizophrenic thought highlights how essential the phenomenological exploration of the life-world of the subjects is, in order to distinguish cases that are otherwise similar in terms of their superstructure of thought and the predominance of the reflective over the pre-reflective component. However different they may be in terms of search for control and for naturalness, the obsessive and the schizophrenic subjects both find themselves practising a segmentation of thought that at first sight might seem to be similar but instead reflects two different ways of constituting reality. Where a person with schizophrenia uses little building blocks of world to put together the reality that is pre-reflectively precluded to him, the obsessive is constantly attempting to avoid formlessness and tries to decompose reality to render it sterile and making himself immune to contamination by it [6, 29].

Formlessness, understood as the compenetration of life and death, as an experience of indetermination preceding any determination, is nonetheless an unavoidable element in our existence which in fact extends along the path of form [12, 13]; on pain of losing all vitality, all creativity, any original perspective on things. The obsessive would subject himself to this loss and would be ready to give up the vitality of the world because in the impetus of life, he cannot fail to see death drawing nearer. And yet there is no temporalization outside the experience of mortality and the obsessive, in his unsuccessful effort to stop the flow of life, damming it up in a mortal lack of movement, demonstrating how avoiding something only drives us to find it again in different forms. This is a fine demonstration of Sartre’s previously quoted bad faith, which represents the paradox of escape as the obsession with what we are fleeing from, which we therefore continue to find ourselves confronted with wherever we go [15].

A better understanding of the life-world of obsessive subjects and the hyper-rationalizing type of thought they use to approach reality becomes of fundamental importance in clinical practice, in order to attain a real understanding of their experience (verstehen) [25]. The clinical and diagnostic distinction between hyper-reflectivity and hyper-rationalization enables a distinction to be made between cases with significantly overlapping traits [20, 24, 52]. Clinically, the pictures of schizophrenia and OCD have overlapping elements that do not always allow them to be distinguished, especially in the initial stages [20, 24, 40]. The indication of this article is obviously not to be considered exhaustive for every differential diagnosis, but it could help to resolve some doubtful clinical cases that present aspects of hyper-segmentation of thought.

In addition, by recognizing the driving force of obsessive behaviour in the inability to tolerate becoming, it is possible to open up psychotherapeutic prospects directed towards the tolerance of formlessness and the acceptance of temporality as an inevitable counterpart of living [7, 9]. Attention to the individual experience and the life-world of the subject is the central element of phenomenological-dynamic psychotherapy. This therapeutic orientation makes unfolding the first step in creating a bond in which the therapist tries to suspend his prejudices in order to adhere as much as possible to the patient’s world, while being aware that any closeness can only be an approximation [7, 53]. The interest in the constitution of the subject’s thought and in the transformations of the world that this entails is however a presupposition of undeniable value within any psychotherapeutic orientation. On the one hand, immersion in the life-world of the other allows us to better understand his emotions and to choose the most suitable way to help him in difficulty. On the other hand, this article represents an example of how the structure of thought and the structure of the subject’s world are mutually correlated, showing a direction also for different psychotherapeutic orientations.

This is obviously a project to be created in the context of a relationship of long-term care, aiming at mutual trust and the exploration of the experience of the other, in order to reach an awareness that the other, despite its lack of form, and in the context of the intimation of death it contains, can produce something other than disgust [53]. When accompanied along this path of the awareness of becoming, pre-reflectively sensed but never accepted, the obsessive can find some respite from his unsuccessful attempts to escape the anguish of formlessness and the rebellion against his own pre-reflective structure of experience.

Statement of Ethics

Ethical approval was not required for this study in accordance with Italian guidelines. Written informed consent to participate in the study was not required in accordance with Italian guidelines. The patients provided their written and informed consent for the publication of this case report.

Conflict of Interest Statement

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding Sources

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Author Contributions

Dr. Cecilia Maria Esposito and Dr. Stefano Goretti: both authors worked on researching and writing the article.

Data Availability Statement

Not applicable.

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