You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Among patients in psychotherapy who are markedly obsessive in personality style (APA, 1980), certain psychological characteristics strike the author as particularly prevalent and important. They include an inordinate need for control; perfectionism; a significantly impaired ability to trust; conflict around dependency; fear of being “found out”; and an idiosyncratic response to perceived demands. Many of the specific traits thought typical of obsessives (stubbornness, ambivalence, orderliness, indecisiveness, stinginess, etc.) derive from and organize themselves around these core issues.
Of these central issues, the one most basic, pervasive, evident and clinically significant is the need for control. The obsessional's need for control includes (a) control of his own feelings, behavior, physical integrity, psychological cohesion and sense of identity; (b) control of others' opinions, attitudes and actions towards him and of their physical and emotional proximity to him; and (c) control over the myriad miscellaneous events that might affect him, including death.
This paper discusses theoretical and clinical aspects of the obsessive's exaggerated need for control. Specifically, it (1) suggests and describes the evolution of a nuclear defensive myth about attaining total control; (2) describes the obsessional's driven pursuit of confirmation for his myth and clinical consequences of this quest; (3) delineates symptoms occurring whenever the myth “fails”; (4) describes a mechanism utilized to gain an illusory