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Freud (1926) described obsessional neurosis as “the most interesting and repaying subject of analytic research” (p. 112). In spite of the simplicity of his theory of an anal fixation, he did not believe that psychoanalysis had arrived at a satisfactory explanation of its origin or structure. While the advantage of the disorder lay in the obsessive patient's verbal presentation—in contrast with the hysteric's more obscure bodily pains—the difficulty lay in the “variety” of its forms, in the sweeping range, that is, of the problems we regard as obsessive (p. 155).
In a scholarly and wide-ranging contribution, Moshe Marcus and Steven Tuber seek to explain just one of the core features of obsessive mental functioning—doubt. The obsessive subject lacks a feeling of certainty in cases (e.g., repeatedly makes sure the door is locked) where certainty would seem warranted. Although the cognitive and neuropsychological literature has emphasized the problem of failure to achieve what Marcus and Tuber term affective certainty (Reed 1977; Dar et al. 2000; Taillefer et al. 2016), we lack a developmental theory to account for it. The authors seek to provide a theory, one grounded in ego psychological and Winnicottian thinking, along with a description of the mental processes that underlie this capacity.
After a comprehensive review of the empirical literature, which establishes the central place of doubt or indecision in obsessive functioning, Marcus and Tuber home in on the question of judgment. The person
who repeatedly checks the door, to make sure it is locked, can learn nothing new from yet another turn of the doorknob. The question is what he does with what he already knows—what “judgment” he makes, in the authors' terms, with the information he has.
Marcus and Tuber rely on Kant to dissect the mental processes at play in the capacity for judgment. To judge an object, for Kant, means to decide whether it falls under a general rule or category. In what he terms a determinativ