Obsessive–compulsive personality has been recognized for a long time as a “classic” neurotic-level organization.

In DSM-5 the essential feature of obsessive-compulsive personality disorder is a preoccupation with orderliness, perfectionism, and mental and interpersonal control, at the expense of flexibility, openness, and efficiency. This pattern begins by early adulthood and is present in a variety of contexts.

But what underlies the development of these characterological traits?

Summarizing the key aspects outlined by prominent  theorists and clinical psychotherapists, Nancy McWilliams  in her book “Psychoanalytic Diagnosis Understanding Personality Structure in the Clinical Process” , describes how parenting styles influence the development of obsessive-compulsive personality.

One route by which individuals emerge with obsessive and compulsive psychologies involves parental figures who set high standards of behavior and expect early conformity to them. Such caregivers tend to be strict and consistent in rewarding good behavior and punishing malfeasance.

When they are basically loving, they produce emotionally advantaged children whose defenses lead them in directions that vindicate their parents’ scrupulous devotion.

When caregivers are unreasonably exacting, or prematurely demanding, or condemnatory not only of unacceptable behavior but also of accompanying feelings, thoughts, and fantasies, their children’s obsessive and compulsive adaptations can be more problematic.

From an object relations perspective, what is notable about obsessive and compulsive people is the centrality of issues of control in their families of origin. Whereas Freud depicted the anal phase as engendering a prototypical battle of wills, people with an object relations perspective emphasize that the parent who was unduly controlling about toilet training was probably equally controlling about oral- and oedipal-phase issues (and subsequent ones, for that matter).

In old-fashioned obsessive–compulsive-breeding families, control may be expressed in moralized, guilt-inducing terms. Moralization is actively modeled. Parents explain their own actions on the basis of what is right. Productive behavior is associated with virtue. Self-control and deferral of gratification are idealized.

Many contemporary families that emphasize control foster obsessive and compulsive patterns through shaming rather than guilt induction.

It is important to appreciate this change if one is working with more contemporary obsessive and compulsive psychopathologies such as eating disorders.

Another kind of family background has been associated with obsessive and compulsive personality and, as is typical in psychoanalytic observation, it is the polar opposite of the overcontrolling, moralistic ambiance. Some people feel so bereft of clear family standards, so unsupervised and casually ignored by the adults around them, that in order to push themselves to grow up they hold themselves to idealized criteria of behavior and feeling that they derive from the larger culture. These standards, since they are abstract and not modeled by people known personally to the child, tend to be harsh and unbuffered by a humane sense of proportion.

Early psychoanalysts noted with great interest the phenomenon of obsessive–compulsive character in underparented children; it challenged Freud’s model of superego formation, which postulates the presence of a strong and authoritative parent with whom the child identifies. Many analysts were finding that their patients with the harshest superegos had been the most laxlyparented. They concluded that having to model oneself after a parental image that one invents oneself, especially if one has an intense, aggressive temperament that is projected into that image, can create obsessive–compulsive dynamics.

(c) Yuliia Holopiorova,

Ukrainian Association of Transference-Focused Psychotherapy

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