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The case I want to discuss concerns a young man of high intelligence who suffered from severe obsessional neurosis, which disturbed his life to a very great degree. He had various sorts of inhibitions which showed the invasion of symmetrical logic into conscious thinking, in spite of the fact that his reasoning capacity was extremely high. He had successfully passed all his examinations for his Ph.D., in the USA, with the exception of one subject which he postponed indefinitely. He constantly brought into the sessions various blatantly bi-logical reasonings worthy of the most severe schizophrenics, which he obviously was not. I shall concentrate here upon one small detail which, however, clearly illustrates some points about the concept of internal world.
Before going to bed he had to empty his bedroom of every object which might cause him anxiety. In particular there was a picture of a landscape which reminded him of his grandmother's native village. In a more or less conscious way he thought that to leave this picture at night in its place would amount to having his grandmother in the room, and this meant sleeping with her, which then meant indulging in impure acts with her. On the other hand, not being psychotic, he realized in some way that things were not as he thought them to be. Here is a strange, but very common, mixture of experiencing two incompatible conceptions.
One day he told me that he had felt the need to take all books with red or blue covers away from his room. He explained that these were