ABSTRACT
Obsessions express a generalised disorder of activity, that is all they do: one day one will reach the point of appreciating the value of obsessional individuals and their psychological states because of the wide range of insight they offer us. In the mid-1970s, the last vestiges of authoritarianism disappeared from Europe. The socio-political changes have been profound. Around 1980, the Keynesian welfare states, which had guaranteed growth and the redistribution of wealth since 1945, began to reach the end of the line. Obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) and the new therapies for OCD were co-constructed in a way that enabled a completely new audience to find recognition in the tables of obsessions/compulsions. The generalisation of psychometric instruments has to be understood in this context, in which a trend among researchers to restrict OCD to the most severe cases met with an opposing trend among the patients’ associations, where the spectrum of OCD was broadened to legitimise less severe and less specific cases.
