OCD & Philosophy

You learn how to not use the intellectual abilities that would make you realize what a waste of time law school and the practice of law are.

So long as one is drifting, one’s mind will be unsatisfied and will hiss and buck, sometimes by flooding one’s consciousness with intrusive thoughts or with compulsions, sometimes in other ways: but so long as one is drifting, it is just a matter of time before one’s psyche begins to disintegrate. And one can be free from psychopathology only so long as a one has a goal that one’s mental energies can organize themselves around and that one’s drives can discharge themselves through.

OCD is a semi-legitimate defense mechanism. It is a way of keeping the subject sane while containing the subject’s intense—and in all cases completely justified---rage. The primary issue is not the OCD itself—that is a secondary issue. The primary issue is that the subject is in a situation where, in order to keep his sanity, he has to subject himself to the draconian internal discipline of OCD.

The primary issue is that the subject is in a situation where, in order to avoid becoming psychotic, he has to become neurotic.

The sciences are typically divided into the physical and the psychological—or, what comes to the same thing, the natural and the social. This is not the right way to divide the class of sciences. The right division is between the sciences that study entropic systems and the sciences that study counter-entropic systems. Biology and psychology study counter-entropic systems. Physics studies entropic systems. The concept of a function—not in the mathematical, but in the purpose-related sense---is completely alien to the logic of the entropic sciences, but it is central to the logic of the counter-entropic sciences.

A dialogue about OCD and philosophy.

Mental illness is about withdrawing from the world. Getting over mental illness is about re-engaging the world. And there is no way of engaging the world that is as significant as having a meaningful career. And this fact should do more in the way of way of orienting therapeutic efforts than it has done thus far, and this insight is the basic tenet of structural analysis.

An essential part of the treatment of the obsessive-compulsive is getting him to accept his own sexuality, which invariably has an extremely sadistic and/or masochistic character. If he does not accept his sexuality, there will be a continuation of the alienatedness of thought from feeling that is responsible for OCD. And he does accepts his sexuality, this will effectuate an OCD-eliminate reconciliation of thought and feeling.

Obsessions are thwarted compulsions. In other words, when one has a compulsion that one is prevented from acting on, one is left with an obsession. Equivalently, compulsions are obsessions that are expressed in behavior. So the relationship between the obsession and the compulsion parallels the relationship between intention and subsequent action.

Communism is the view that property should be owned collectively—that, in other words, there should be no such thing as private property, at least not on a commercially meaningful scale. Marxism is something very different from communism. Marxism is the view that our beliefs about the world, and also about morality, are rationalizations, and therefore falsehoods, that are based, not on objective fact, but on propaganda put out by the people who own the means of production.

Sanity is about living in the real world. Masturbation is about not living in the real world. So if one’s sex life is masturbation-based, one is to that extent not sane, even if one is otherwise sane. And if one’s sex-life is masturbation-based, it is unlikely that one is otherwise completely sane.