ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the difficulties for the analyst in working with patients who are heavily defended by obsessional thought patterns. Their capacities for fantasy and symbolization are impaired, and they have not been able to approach their therapy as a space for “travelling hopefully”. Patients with obsessional thought disorder are generally recognized to be a particular challenge to the psychoanalyst. In therapy, there was no travelling hopefully with new thoughts or ideas and, because there was no map available, there could not be a journey. The primary psychic mishap leads to an obsessional need to feel in control of what happens and may also lead to phobic reactions. The patient would seem to have replaced his primary love object with his house, and is now so fixated on this house as the means to his security and his identity that leaving it brings terror on all fronts.
