What we’ve said about Obsessive-compulsive personality disorder

“the core defense is that they have little access to their emotional lives. So these are people who are much more comfortable in the realm of thought, ideas, rather than getting to their feelings”

“So the core conflict is between obedience and defiance. So obedience, which is like obeying the rules, deference to authority. Someone like this is experienced as humiliation submission and can lead to rage and anger at someone putting rules on top of them”

“it's more the issue of controlling parent than anal fixation, really. But it is kind of interesting that the issues that obsessive-compulsive people get worried about have to do with cleanliness and timeliness and cooperation versus rebellion”

“Obsessive-convulsive people can be angry, but only if they feel it's realistic and justified to be angry. So they can be very angry if somebody is unfair. But it's very hard for them to find normal anger of the sort of, I'm just pissed off because I didn't get what I wanted”

“That's probably why a lot of people will call Jerry obsessive compulsive. But that's obsessive compulsive personality. There's really no evidence of obsessions or compulsions from OCD throughout the series”

“OCD properly should have recurrent intrusive obsessions that are paired to some kind of a mental or physically acting compulsion that is not satisfying know or minimally satisfying or requires a lot of repetition and often takes at least an hour a day of the obsessions and compulsions”

“someone with OCD, their symptoms are egodistonic, and that if you were to say, like, why are you doing that, they would get very upset about the fact that they're doing it”

“In the hysterical person, it's a defense against fear. In the obsessive compulsive person, it's a defense against the feeling of badness. And in the more narcissistic person, perfectionism would be a defense against shame”

“The neurotic range of obsessive-compulsive would be somebody who has ritualistic practices that they know are crazy. They know it involves internal anxiety that they have to do something about. They can make a good relationship with a therapist”

“At the borderline and psychotic levels, you have all those rituals and compulsions, but they tend to be egocentronic. In other words, you tend to think of them as natural and you don't know any other way to be”

“In psychotherapy, they need a therapist who can help them become more comfortable with their emotional life and really question the fact that feeling things is tantamount to loss of control”