Obsessive Hobbies

One frequently encounters psychiatric patients who, in addition to their symptoms, present a variety of odd or unusual occupations. Younger patients are sometimes brought to treatment with such activities as the major psychiatric complaint problem. The individual may collect useless scrap, or make calculations for no purpose, or read and re-read time tables, or travel around the subway hours upon end. He may find amusement in making up quizzes or personal games, tabulating the arrival and departure of all steamers, recording license numbers, or endlessly assembling and reassembling radios or clocks. Sometimes the activities outwardly resemble true hobbies, such as collecting pipes, or guns, sketching fountains or architectural designs, cataloguing commercial data, and the like; yet the way in which the hobbies are pursued, often to the exclusion of other activities, or the attendant anxiety, betrays their nature as pathological formations.

Properly speaking, such activities are not “compulsions”, as some psychiatrists regard them, nor harmless “sublimations” as others do, though they are related to both. They are rather in a special category of unsuccessful efforts in the direction of sublimation and health, to which relatively little systematic attention has been given in the psychiatric and psychoanalytic literature. Fenichel (3) describes certain of such “pleasurable obsessions” as transitional states between compulsions and perversions, which “tend to outgrow their hobby character and evolve into obsessive preoccupations, eventually becoming an absolutely necessary condition for well-being and protection against depression”. Glover (6) differentiates the category of transitory sublimations associated with pathological states and says: “We must keep a sharp look-out to make sure that the sublimations in question do not run in close association with open anxiety formations or concealed obsessive formations. They are then not true sublimations, but substitut