ABSTRACT
Psychoanalytic conceptualisation of obsessional neurosis since at least the late 1950s seems strangely stunted. The new label of obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) made certain phenomena constitutive of a diagnostic category rather than seeing them as clues which would require further investigation as to the diagnosis. This meant that diagnostic questions became lost in both mainstream psychiatry and in many psychoanalytic currents outside the Lacanian orientation. Nosological histories are notoriously imprecise, as if the actual moment when OCD separated off from obsession cannot be pinpointed. Lacan’s combinatorial approach resituates the Freudian problem of love and hate, just as it offers a new understanding of the way in which symptoms include pairs of opposites which are apparently inconsistent. The question of how psychoanalysis engages with the obsessional is of course linked to that of how the obsessional engages with psychoanalysis.
