ABSTRACT
It may very well be that, within discourses of certain persuasions, recent classifications have not retained “obsessional neurosis” as a clinical entity. Rather than expanding on an extensive and involved phenomenology, this chapter tries to differentiate several levels through which obsessional neurosis becomes organised. The anal attribute and the anal character have now entered common language and they have become practically synonymous with the “obsessional character”, despite the disappearance of obsessional neurosis from the psycho-psychiatric dominant discourses of our society. The drives that are integrated by the fantasy derive from the void encountered through the subjugation to a genital-phallic enjoyment. As a matter of fact, that encounter, albeit enjoyable, presents the subject with the silence of the Other. The double operation elucidates why obsessional neurosis is a defence against enjoyment both as excess and as failure.
