Distinguished Features Of Obsessional Personality Disorder
It is a psychiatric disorder characterized by obsessive thoughts and compulsive behavior, for example, continual washing of the hands prompted by a feeling of uncleanliness. The Obsessional person gives scant regard to the emotional aspects of a situation or an interaction.
• He is rigid rather than flexible, over attentive to details rather than to the wider scope of an event or encounter, and prefers to have everything predictable and orderly.
• He often appears officious, sometimes so pedantically that he can be comical, and not only controls himself excessively but also attempts to dominate others.
• He appears to behave in an excessively egotistical manner, and responds in an overriding way when involved in a venture calling for co-operation.
• He is over careful, methodical, liking things cut-and-dried, concerned with neatness and orderliness.
• He can be very meticulous, punctual and over-organized, to the extent of becoming uncomfortable and even upset if his routines are disturbed by an unexpected development.
• He has a set of fixed standards and points of view, from which he can deviate only with great difficulty. He is uninfluenced, therefore, by the wishes, needs, opinions or views of other people.
• The meticulousness and preservation of sameness extends to the person’s mode of dress, which can be scrupulously neat.
• He can be over conscientious, paying greatly excessive attention to minutiae; lie may work compulsively, and be unable to make use of opportunities for relaxation. Such a person, in consequence, can be of particular usefulness in a bureaucratic post calling for scrupulous concern with details.
• He may be highly obstinate when faced by any requirement that he should deviate from his straight and narrow path.
• At times such a person appears to leave some loophole, so that the conformity, inhibition and rigidity are waived in some context or other. The precise, neat youngster who must have everything in place, may for example permit himself to have his clothes cupboard in disorder, or may periodically forget thrift to overspend in a foolish self-indulgence which rationally is at odds with his habitual miserliness.
• The gross form of the disorder is easy to recognize. The milder forms may be less obtrusive, and may be particularly evident only at times of pressure, as when an examination is looming for a youngster or when a house-proud woman has relatives coming to stay in her home.