ABSTRACT
By the age of 14, Charles was spending at least three hours per day in the shower. He
had been doing this for years. He couldn’t help himself; he just had to do it.
This is the way Judith Rapoport introduced one particular case study in her 1989 book, The Boy Who Couldn’t Stop Washing.1 The book is now considered a psychology classic and was one of the first to raise the topic of obsessivecompulsive disorder or OCD.
