When Reassurance Becomes the Ritual: Understanding OCD’s Hidden Logic
Most people think of OCD as an illness of fear; fear of germs, of harm, of contamination, of mistakes. But in psychoanalytic terms, it’s often something subtler: a way of organising anxiety when the world feels too uncertain.
At its heart, OCD is not just about fear; it’s about control. The mind finds meaning in repetition; the ritual becomes an attempt to hold reality together, to make it predictable. The reassurance-seeking isn’t just about safety – it’s about restoring a sense of mastery in a world that can’t be mastered.
From a psychoanalytic perspective, the ritual isn’t random, it’s a kind of language. It says something the person can’t yet say aloud. The act of checking or cleaning is a stand-in for an unspoken wish or fear, one that often has little to do with the object of the ritual itself.
In therapy, we don’t try to strip the rituals away overnight. That only strengthens the anxiety they’re holding back. Instead, we listen for the logic within them – the hidden story they’re telling. Often, the same gesture repeats through different parts of a person’s life: the need to “be sure,” the fear of “getting it wrong,” the guilt of wanting control.
Psychotherapy offers a space where those patterns can be spoken, analysed and worked through. When reassurance is the ritual, the aim isn’t to shame it away but to uncover what it’s been defending against all along.
And as the person begins to work through this, the symptom loosens its grip. The world doesn’t become more certain – but one’s relationship to uncertainty begins to change.
More on OCD Treatment Book an AppointmentRecommended Reading:
- Jacques Lacan: Seminar X: Anxiety
- Jacques Lacan: The Obsessional Subjunctive
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