This article revisits obsessive neurosis through a clinical and theoretical reflection on doubt and rumination, taking as its point of departure the Gospel parable of the Talents as it emerged spontaneously in analytic work with several patients. The parable illuminates forms of psychic paralysis in which individuals “bury” their capacities and withdraw into an unlived life structured by compulsive questioning and repetitive thought.

Drawing on Freud and subsequent contributions by Bouvet, Loewald, Soavi, Celani, Baruzzi, and Ogden, the paper advances a relational and developmental re-reading of obsessive functioning. It proposes that doubt and rumination serve not only defensive aims-linked to repression, ambivalence, and the drive to know-but also a protective function in relation to a fragile internal object and an idealized yet misattuned figure. Obsessive thinking may unconsciously safeguard the survival of oedipal objects experienced as endangered, even at the cost of vitality and action.

By re-examining a clinical territory often regarded as theoretically exhausted, the article argues for renewed psychoanalytic attention to the relational dimensions of obsessive suffering and to its enduring relevance in contemporary analytic practice.