Why Intrusive Thoughts Don’t Mean What You Think They Mean
People with OCD often describe a thought that arrives out of nowhere – shocking, violent, or blasphemous, and the panic that follows. The mind races: Why did I think that? Does it mean something about me?
In everyday logic, a thought feels like an intention. But psychoanalysis shows that thought doesn’t work that way. Our minds are full of fragments, phrases, images, and associations that come from somewhere deeper; not from conscious choice, but from the unconscious.
Intrusive thoughts feel alien precisely because they are alien. They don’t fit with how the person consciously sees themselves, and yet they emerge insistently, demanding reassurance that they’re not true. But the reassurance never lasts.
This cycle – thought, fear, reassurance, relief, return – isn’t meaningless. It’s a structure that binds anxiety.
In therapy, we don’t take the content of the thought at face value. Instead, we ask: what’s its function? What’s it doing for the person? When it’s treated as literal, it tightens its hold. But when it’s treated as a message, something begins to move.
Often, the very thing a person fears being is the thing they’ve spent their life trying not to be – too selfish, too free, too angry, too sexual, too alive. The thought doesn’t reveal who they are; it reveals where they’ve drawn the line against themselves.
Psychotherapy helps give that forbidden space a voice, not to indulge it, but to understand what it’s trying to say. And in that understanding & working through, the thought loses its terror. It becomes part of speech, not something outside of it.
More on OCD Treatment Book an AppointmentRecommended Reading:
- Jacques Lacan: Seminar X: Anxiety
- Jacques Lacan: The Obsessional Subjunctive
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