Obsession (n.) made a soft-hearted man watch where every passer-by disappeared lest he had killed him — a Cain phantasy, since all men are brothers — until he locked himself in and gave away the key.
An Obsession (n.) is a dream that couldn't fall asleep: a thought intensified by transference and distorted by censorship, which in sleep would have turned back into images.
An Obsession (n.) can be displaced but not removed: the patient can swap one foolish idea for a milder one, one ceremony for another, never be rid of it.
A Obsession (n.) is held in place by so many intense experiences that no counter-suggestion can dislodge it.
Obsession (n.) is the better term, since obsessional structures may be wishes, temptations, impulses, reflections, doubts, commands or prohibitions.
An Obsession (n.) shaken off returns distorted and better able to hold its ground: recurring obsessions are often one and the same in different words.
An Obsession (n.) keeps its first occurrence receding as analysis proceeds, because obsessional ideas are formations of very long standing.
The Obsession (n.) is one undertaken with the energy normally reserved for action, because of inhibition at the motor end: it represents an act regressively.
Obsession (n.) carries an overwhelming affect that is entirely justified — it is the idea that is wrong, having been displaced onto a stand-in for something repressed.
An Obsession (n.) is a feeling that has lost its own idea and attached itself to an innocent one by false connection.
An Obsession (n.) keeps its feeling at full strength and simply moves it onto an idea that does not deserve it.
An Obsession (n.) can be nothing but an unaltered memory of something important, like Pascal's abyss, and then it is close to hysteria.
An Obsession (n.) is an idea that forces itself on the mind plus a feeling, which may be doubt, remorse or anger as easily as fear.
An Obsession (n.) seems absurd because of a mésalliance: the feeling is justified, the idea it has married is not.
An Obsession (n.) swaps the forbidden idea for a substitute and leaves the original feeling exactly as it was.
An Obsession (n.) is always a transformed self-reproach that has come back up from repression.
An Obsession (n.) looks absurd because it is a compromise, formed between a resistance and a repressed train of thought.
An Obsession (n.) circulates with a borrowed currency: its force comes not from its own worth but from the repressed thing that backs it.
An Obsession (n.) is not powerful but untouchable: no conscious thought can dissolve it, because it is linked to a repressed memory.
An Obsession (n.) feels like an alien guest: thoughts from nowhere that defy the will, more powerful than the ego's own.