Dispassion and OCD: Understanding Psychical Freedom vis-à-vis the Problem of Obsessive Intrusive Thoughts

This paper will explore a seemingly intractable challenge to any concept of psychical freedom: the problem of obsessive intrusive thoughts and the intense passions these thoughts bring with them. Speaking from my own experience with Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder, I will aim to describe the phenomenon of the obsessive intrusive thought as the OCD sufferer experiences it. I will also propose a recovery of the ancient monastic practice of “dispassion” as a manner of responding to intrusive thoughts without obsession, that is, as a way of relating to the thoughts less neurotically and with greater psychical freedom. Key here are two symptoms common among OCD sufferers: (1) some thought, image, or related series of thoughts and/or images that plague the psyche against one’s wishes, and (2) a visceral emotional response to said thoughts and images. While such unwelcome intrusive thoughts may be a universal experience among human beings, the person living with OCD gets stuck on these thoughts; he or she lingers on them, comes back to them, and tries to manage or eradicate them through some form of safety-seeking behavior. This presents a major challenge to one’s sense of psychical freedom, as these thoughts can feel like a predatory presence that has invaded one’s mental landscape and refuses to leave. Such obsessive intrusive thoughts can even feel like a tyrannical force, colonizing the psyche, even enslaving it. The visceral emotional response to the thoughts becomes a poison to one’s sense of inner peace and clarity, inflicting the psyche with dark and tumultuous emotions that feel intolerable. 

It is precisely this relationship between thoughts and passions that Rowan Williams so helpfully describes in various places in his body of writings, influenced as he is by the ancient Christian monastic tradition. I will turn, therefore, to Williams and to one of his beloved ancient monks, Maximus the Confessor, to try to untangle the complex relationship between thoughts and passions which is operative within Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder. These thoughts and passions, of course, correspond to the two above-mentioned characteristic features of OCD: (1) the unwelcome thought or image and (2) the visceral emotional response to said thought or image. It was Sigmund Freud, in fact, who hypothesized that the emotion—and not the intrusive thought—is actually the engine, or the fulcrum, of obsessional neurosis: the content of the thoughts and images may change—even significantly—over a person’s life, but the particular emotion that results from these thoughts is ultimately what turns an intrusive thought into an obsessive intrusive thought, and thus the emotion is what remains constant throughout the course of a person’s experience of this psychiatric condition. What Williams and Maximus share with Freud is the belief that it is the underlying passion which most needs to be addressed. As Maximus says in his Four Hundred Texts on Love, “The intellect of a man who enjoys the love of God does not fight against things or against conceptual images of them. It battles against the passions which are linked with these images.” The actual thoughts and images are, in the end, quite unimportant. It is the person’s way of relating to these thoughts that is of critical importance.

For Williams and Maximus, the key to psycho-spiritual freedom is to relate to one’s troubling thoughts without passion. The ancient monastic tradition of which Maximus is a part refers to this more pacific relation with one’s thoughts as “dispassion.” This dispassion is an ability to recognize and acknowledge unwelcome thoughts—even sometimes to boldly face them when they are particularly forceful—without falling prey to flights of affective excess that may have previously followed from these thoughts. The way of dispassion loosens the hold a thought has over a person, allowing the thought to come and go without the person involving themselves in a complex entanglement with it. One is then free with respect to their unwelcome thoughts, knowing the fleeting and ultimately unimportant nature of these mental phenomena. This manner of relating with intrusive thoughts grants the OCD sufferer an agency which their condition seemed to have wrested from them. The person living with OCD can then settle into an acceptance that intrusive thoughts will come again, perhaps in the same form, perhaps in a new form, but by this disposition of dispassion, they now have a means of relating to their intrusive thoughts without being overtaken by them. 

Indeed, the method of dispassion bears certain marked similarities to both Exposure and Responsive Prevention (ERP) and Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), the two “gold standards” of OCD treatment among specialists today. We should be cautious, however, to jump to any false equivalences. The dispassion which ancient monks like Maximus advocated was a spiritual disposition propped up by the rigorous practice of things like contemplative prayer, fasting, hospitality, and reconciliation. It was also a means of more intimate communion with God, neighbor, and creation, not simply a means of self-help or of reprieve from neurotic symptoms. This was a form of spiritual healing which knew well the varying neurotic tendencies that plague each and every human psyche, tendencies which were, for someone like Maximus, the product of the social and historical inheritance of original sin. Dispassion is something much grander in its ambitions than any therapeutic modality; it is a means of leaning into one’s very salvation, which is nothing other than an unfiltered and unclouded communion with the Christ who came to share in our psychically tortured condition, and to transform it by his compassionate love, stronger than the most horrifying intrusive thought, stronger than sin, stronger than death.