One of them is known as undoing, and the other is known as isolation.

Let’s first discuss undoing.

Undoing means making something that had already happened, un-happen, reverse the course of history, time travel to the past, and eliminate the traumatic, problematic, and distressing event. Undo it.

But since this is an impossibility, at least in our universe, you cannot travel back in time, you cannot undo events, decisions, choices, and so on, this is a given, you have to survive somehow with this information.

So undoing is symbolic. There is symbolic motor action. We do something with our body which represents the undoing of past events.

You can find this also in magical practices, in folk customs, and in many religious rituals, where bodily action is a symbol, represents a symbolic attempt to connect with the past and often to change it.

The second defense mechanism that Freud said is in operation, in obsession with neurosis, is isolation.

It involves the motor sphere, the motoric sphere, motion, the motion of the body, muscles, tendons, and bones, and what have you. And isolation means that after there is an event which is unpleasurable, distressing, anxiety producing, etc., there is a pause, there is a break in time, during which nothing further can happen, no perception is possible, no action can take place.

Motor isolation functions to guarantee a break in the connections of thought. And you immediately see the close similarity to obsession.

This obsession is exactly this. Obsession divorces you from your own body, from the environment, from other people, from events in the past, and from catastrophes in the future. Obsession in other words is a fantasy. It’s a fantasy defense.

And exactly like every other fantasy defense, it’s a language. It’s a language element.

We will discuss Lacan’s view of obsession at the end of this video.

But it’s a language. It’s a fantasy.

The obsessional patient enacts some kind of taboo. It’s like a theater play. These rituals and ceremonies, they’re very theatrical, takes a lot of thespian skills.

So a taboo against touching, a taboo against stepping on certain pavement stones, a taboo against locking the door only once. These are all taboos and they involve enactments.

Because there is a fear that contact with the object will force the patient to face his unbound ambivalence, ambivalence between love and hate. Direct contact with the world, direct connection with other people, direct communication with one’s body, direct access to one’s thoughts, images, imaginations, ideas, any directness such as this is bound to provoke the underlying ambivalence of love and hate, the extreme excruciating uncertainty, the feeling of derealization, depersonalization. It’s not really me. I’m not really here.

In short, it’s bound to provoke extreme dissociation.

The isolation of an impression or an activity by means of a break in the chain of thoughts symbolically indicates that the patient does not want to allow thoughts relating to the forbidden event or the forbidden emotion to contaminate other thoughts.

Obsession serves as a barrier, as a firewall between a contaminated area, Chernobyl of the mind, Chernobyl of the mind and the pure area. In the contaminated area, they are repressed, forbidden, hateful, dangerous, anxiety inducing thoughts, menacing, threatening, unsettling thoughts, ideas, images, memories. They all reside in this contaminated region.

And it is separated with an obsessive compulsive partition, an obsession on neurosis, obsessive compulsive partition from another region of the mind, which is controlled, which is symbolic, which is ritualistic, which is therefore pure and unadulterated.

This prevents contamination and the punishment attendant on contamination.

Because if you contaminate the pure zone, you will be punished.

The punishment could be internal, but something bad will happen.

This impending doom and gloom and catastrophe are all the time in the mind of the obsessive.

In this regard, because organized obsessional neurosis, sometimes extremely debilitating, we need to ask ourselves, how come such a dysfunctional solution had arisen?

Normally, even dysfunctional solutions such as, for example, pathological narcissism, emotional dysregulation, they still have some benefit. They still, to some extent, self-affications.

But obsessional neurosis is paralyzing. It’s mortifying. It’s debilitating.

So why would it give rise? Why would evolution give rise to this?

Psychological evolution, at least.

And obsessional neurosis has a few factors that are very typical of it. And we can’t find them in most other mental health conditions.

First of all, there is a self-retaliation by the ego. The ego is self-directed.

In healthy people, the ego is directed outwardly, is directed to the outside. The ego provides reality testing. The ego tells you, “This is real. This is not real. You shouldn’t do this because this would be the realistic consequences of your actions.

And so on. So the ego is a reality principle.

But in an obsessive person, the ego is inwardly directed. The ego regards the internal landscape as the only reality.

And this is very similar to narcissism. Very similar. It is so similar that it’s easy to conceptualize pathological narcissism as a form of obsessional neurosis, or actually, or maybe obsessive compulsive disorder.

The ego looks to the inside and regards the reality inside and informs the individual about the internal reality so as to optimize outcomes internally rather than externally.

So externally, there’s paralysis. There’s debilitation. There’s secession of functioning.

But internally, equilibrium and homeostasis are restored. The self-recrimination by the ego causes a lot of guilt and shame and provokes the obsessional defenses.

When the ego looks inwardly, it is not happy with what it sees. It informs the patient and advises the patient to act now, soon, before it’s too late.

The second element, which is typical of obsessive neurosis, is the adherence to insistent preoccupations. We call them compulsions.

That’s repeating the same activities all the time and so on. And there is deployment of elaborate defenses.

In the obsessional patient, effective isolation allows the ego to cut itself not only from the outside but also from emotions, affects, desires.

In saccusses, the ego is cut off from reality. In obsession, it is cut off both from reality and from passion, desire, volition, the drive, the internal drive.

So, the tendency to equate obsessional neurosis with saccusses is very wrong, actually, for the reasons that I’ve just mentioned.

Okay, let’s wrap it up. Obsessional neurosis is a form of psychoneurosis.

And the dominant symptoms are obsessive thoughts and compulsive behaviors, obsessive rituals.

Obsessive thoughts are not like normal thoughts. They are experienced by the patient as unspontaneous, distracting, repetitive, ruminative, and coming from elsewhere, not from himself.

The subject matter is absurd, bizarre, irrelevant, threatening, obscene. The compulsive behavior is repetitive, stereotype, ritualistic, and superstitious.

According to the classical theory, obsessional neurosis centers around regression and ambivalence toward parental figures, hate love, and the introjects of parental figures.

Again, there is an interface here, a confluence with narcissism.

But more recent formulations focus, center around the high degree of internalization, the need to control impulses.

And the symptoms, they are failures to achieve control, they are attempts to accomplish control that fail. They’re examples of the return of the repressed.

Obsessional neurosis is a kind of disorder that occurs in people whose personality development has been based on alienation from instinct and emotion.

The obsessional ego is anti-libidinal, anti-impulsive, anti-emotional.

And the symptoms are either breakthroughs from the alienated aspects of the self, obsessional thoughts, or defenses against these breakthroughs, obsessional rituals.

And I promised all of you there. What we’ve all been waiting for, Jacques Lacan, who looks like my spitting image.

I swear to you, actually I look like his spitting image. I swear to you, we’re identical twins, especially in his later years.

It’s unsettling. It’s enough to cause me obsessive neurosis.

Lacan dealt with obsessional neurosis in his very extensive work, “Nevros Obsessionel.” He said that obsessional neurosis includes symptoms like obsessions, recurrent ideas, of course, impulses to perform actions which seem absurd or abhorrent to the subject, and rituals, compulsively repeated actions such as mentioned washing hands and so on.

So in this, Lacan does not depart from the classical and currently accepted view of obsessional neurosis.

But Lacan saw these symptoms and argued that the obsessional neurosis designates not a set of symptoms, but an underlying structure which may or may not manifest itself in the symptoms typically associated with it.

Again, we see Lacan’s linguistic term, his belief that everything mental is always symbolic in many ways.

The subject may well exhibit none of the typical obsessional symptoms and yet still be diagnosed as an obsessional neurotic by a Lacanian analyst.

So the symptoms don’t matter. The structure, the inner structure does.

Sometimes it gives rise to symptoms, sometimes not.

In the “Foo steps of Freud,” Lacan classifies obsessional neurosis and says that obsessional neurosis is one of the main forms of neurosis.

In 1956, Lacan developed the idea that, like hysteria, hysteria, by the way, called hysteria a dialect.

Freud was the first by far to suggest that there is some confluence, some venn diagram, some merger of language and psychology.

Psychology just describes sets of languages and dialects.

So he called hysteria a dialect.

And so in the “Foo steps of Freud,” Lacan said that exactly like hysteria, obsessional neurosis is a question which is being posed to the subject.

It’s like the subject’s existence or the subject’s being poses a question to him or to her.

And the answer to the obsessional neurosis is the compulsion.

The question which constitutes obsessional neurosis concerns the contingency of one’s existence.

Question about death, to be or not to be.

Am I dead or alive? Why do I exist?

The response of the obsessional, of the obsessive person, is to feverishly attempt to justify his existence.

Why do I exist?

Because I exist. To justify one’s existence, the question about death, there is a feeling of ominous thunderclaps.

Like if I don’t answer this question now, I will die.

I need to justify my existence. I need to testify, attest to my existence.

And this, of course, indicates strongly the special burden of guilt felt by the obsessive.

There’s a lot of guilt and shame there. And the guilt and shame, the message of the guilt and shame is, you don’t deserve to exist. You don’t deserve to have a life.

Justify yourself. Prove to us that you should live rather than, for example, die.

The obsessional performs compulsive rituals because he thinks that this will enable him to escape the lack in the other, the castration of the other, if you wish.

And it is a fantasy. The idea that other people can’t provide you with justification for your own existence, actually may even think that you don’t deserve to exist. That’s a lack. That’s a deficiency, which is life-threatening.

And so you, the obsessive fantasizes about this deficiency and kind of inverts it.

Rather than say, “Others are lacking. Others are castrated. Others are deformed.”

The obsessive says, “Something bad is going to happen to others. They’re going to be castrated. They’re going to be deformed. They’re going to be disabled.”

In other words, he catastrophizes. It’s a form of projection, of course. He projects his ill will, his recognition of other people’s deficiencies. He projects it as if he were worried for them, as if he wants their well-being, as if he, all he wants is for things to be good. And he’s even willing to invest in it by engaging in compulsive activities. That’s a fantasy, of course.

This projection is a fantasy. Fantasy is any divorce from reality.

And here’s a situation where the reality is that other people are deficient. But the obsessive doesn’t dare to admit this because then his ambivalence of hate and love will overwhelm him.

So instead he says, “They are not deficient, but they’re about to become deficient. Something evil is going to happen to them if I don’t stop it. I’m the only one with the power to stop it, grandiosity.”

And so he stops it. He stops it with his rituals and ceremonies.

In the case of Freud’s obsessional neurotic, you remember the ratman, Ranser, the patient developed elaborate rituals and he performed his rituals.

What is the aim of these crazy rituals? To ward off the fear of a terrible punishment about to be inflicted on his father or his beloved.

The only problem was his father was dead, has been dead for years.

The obsessive ratman found himself embedded in and trapped and captured in a fantasy.

And these rituals both inform and incontant. That’s what led Freud to draw parallels between obsessional neurosis and its structures and the structures of religion and Lacan concurred.

The hysterical question is about the subject’s sexual position. Am I a man or am I a woman?

When sexual identity is fuzzy or creates guilt and shame, hysteria ensues.

The obsessional neurotic is not concerned with this. It’s not about sex. He rejects both sexes. He’s asexual, not in the sense that he doesn’t practice sex, but in the sense that he’s sexless. He has no sex. He doesn’t call himself male or female because he has no body.

The obsession divorced him from his body. He is neither male nor female and both at once.

So he’s not concerned with this particular question. He’s concerned with existence. He’s concerned with securing the existence of himself and of others.

He believes, psychotically if you wish, or grandiosely if you are so inclined, he believes that he has the power. He has this magical power to prevent catastrophes and disasters.

Lacan draws attention to the way that the obsessional neurotic’s question about existence and death has consequences in multiple domains.

For example, his attitude to time, perpetual hesitation, procrastination, while waiting for the inevitable death, considering oneself immortal because one is already dead. Other features of obsessional neurosis have to do with a sense of guilt, close connection with mortification.

The obsessional neurotic does not only transform his excretions into, shall we say, Lacan used a different word, which won’t sit well with YouTube. So he doesn’t only transform his excretions into gifts and his gifts into excretions, but he transforms himself into his excretions.

It’s a timeless situation because only bodies die. Only bodies die. And anything that emanates from a bodyless mind that has the capacity to prevent disasters and catastrophes is by definition a gift.

Obsessive is God’s gift to the world. And in this sense, of course, it’s a prime subspecies of narcissism.