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It has been said that compulsive ritual as a manifestation of the rigid, dutiful, compulsive will has objective results, but without productive value, to the extent that any action is initiated solely for the fulfillment of prescribed requiremental rules or duties (such as prescriptions of generosity, propriety, completeness, or cleanliness) without the essential significance of the action, the aim of affecting some objective change (Shapiro, 1981). This view also holds that ritual action is not beneficently aimed at the alteration of the individual/environmental relationship, but rather aimed at the alteration of the individual's relationship with himself, which is affected by the mere performance of the act itself. To this end, actions such as the moving of a spoon from place to place, the cleaning of hands, and the closing of windows are believed to be of no fundamental importance and merely signifiers of satisfied required actions.
The view of this paper, however, maintains that not only are ritual actions of productive value precisely because they operationalize internal aims but that indeed ritual actions are far from unimportant in that, apart from the act itself, contained in each ritualistic action is the personal traumatic ideational content that has taken symbolic signification in the form of a defense mechanism. Moreover, the compulsive ritualistic action is conceptualized as a symptom that is symptomatic of the specificity of the neurotic individual proper. Therefore, the satisfaction of the formal requirements of duty are only secondary to that which the object of the action represents symbolically to the subject. In other words, it is the content of the action rather than the stilted, conscientious form it takes that is conceptualized herein as having productive value.
In fact, it is hypothesized that the ritual action, being in character with the rigid, conscientious style of the compulsive individual, seems to suggest that the style itself reinstates