Mental Obsession: Unrealistic or Unpragmatic; A Philosophical Analysis of Obsessive Thinking

Abstract

Mental obsession‒mostly considered as an illness or as a neurosis‒ consists of repeated, compulsive, unstoppable thoughts causing severe anxiety, and often leads to obsessive actions like washing hands or body, checking, counting, doing some ritual, and so on. In psychology, these thoughts are supposed to be absurd and completely irrational; so in cognitive therapy sessions, psychologists try to reveal their irrationality for patients. In a similar way, psychiatrists tend to block these thoughts’ way to the patient’s mind, by prescribing different drugs. Free from psychiatrical or psychological approaches, this article, taking a philosophical one, conducts an analysis of mental obsession, based on which, obsessive thinking makes one’s living abnormally interrupted and discontinuous, which means it is useless and inefficient; at the same time, it entails truth and perceives real details of things which can not be grasped by everyday consciousness. Therefore, obsessive thoughts are not unrealistic, though they are unpragmatic.

Keywords

• mental obsession
• detail orientation
• skepticism
• perfectionism
• unpragmatic
• unrealistic