A Note on Obsessional Indecision

Obsessional indecision results, as we know, from the patient's ambivalence. In some cases however it is the outcome of multiple and contrasting identifications. For one patient, whether or not to eat up all the food on her plate had become a major issue. As a child she used to struggle with her mother who tried to make her eat up all her food. In her indecision as an adult, she perpetuated this struggle and the accompanying suffering reflected both the pain of having had to submit, the suppressed resentment and the punishment for the latter. The same patient suffered from obsessional indecision as to whether to spend her vacation in the mountains or at the seaside. Her father preferred the sea, her mother, the mountains.

Often the obsessional indecision and ambivalence is ‘borrowed’, i.e. taken over from ambivalently loved persons. To achieve therapeutic results it is necessary in the analysis not only to point out the identification but to work through the motives for this identification, e.g. fear, hate, guilt, pity.

Some patients have a deep sense of shame or self-hatred because of their neurotic symptoms. As children they were ashamed of their ill-balanced parents. Sometimes they felt guilty about being ashamed of their parents and had to over compensate their initial feeling of superiority by identifying with their parent's illness or shortcomings. Afterwards they hated themselves as they originally hated their parents.

Another aspect of neurotic indecision is illustrated by the child who can not decide whether to take chocolate cake or mocha, and becomes so unhappy that he must have both. In such a case, indecision is simply a painful distortion of greed. However as a secondary development greed may become an attempt to avoid painful feelings of indecision. To avoid the painful necessity of having to make a choice, the child wants all the food, the adult all the money or all the women (or men) in the world. This may be one factor in antisocial development.

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