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Cold hands and feet plague him, cold feet psychically as well as physically, for a chronic and obsessive indecision is one of his most prominent complaints. A fatigability, that goes with a low blood pressure, lowered body temperature and a disturbed ability to utilize sugar for fuel purposes, is another of his chief complaints.
It is these latter glaring faults and trends that make for the character defects, and these really break down the final effort at adaptations and adjustments producing the tic or obsessive disorder. But the essential nucleus of the defect is lack of balance, precocious parental fixation, and continued attachment to the parent-stem, that makes the adult defect possible.
Suppose for a moment that we were dominated by the impulse to externalize all our thoughts and all our emotions, there would be some basis for the common, but inaccurate, saying that everyone is insane. This brings us to a form of insanity which the obsessive may well bear in mind, namely, that known as manic-depressive.
Moreover, Jones agrees that "familiar examples of compulsion in a slight degree are the obsessive impulses to touch every other rail of an iron fence as one walks past, to step on the cracks between the flagstones of the pavement, or not to step on them, and so on."
Often one experience of this kind builds up an obsessive fear; the associations left by the experience give the fear an open pathway to consciousness, without any inhibiting power. As in this case, the whole life of the individual becomes changed. Throughout history the man without fear has been idolized. The hero is courageous, that he must be; the coward is despised, whatever good may be in him.
Environment, habit-formation, training, education serve only to bring out the internal secretion make-up of the girl, or to suppress and distort and so spoil her. Adolescence will be peaceful, calm, semi-conscious, or disturbing, revolutionary and obsessive according to the reaction of the other endocrines to the rise of the ovaries.
Francis Tiffany has observed that if a ship could think, and should imagine itself submerged by all the waves between here and Europe, it would dread to leave its moorings; but in reality it has to meet but one wave at a time. The tendency of the average American in this bustling age, whether he is obsessive or not, is to live at least several hours in advance.
There is also a tendency to obsessive ideas and doubts; that is, ideas and doubts that persist in coming against the will of the patient, such as the obscene word or phrase that continually obtrudes itself on a chaste woman, or the doubt whether one has shut the door or properly turned off the gas.
He was not pleased with the discovery, and yet he was compelled to acknowledge the truth of it. The grain of dust had become more than annoying. It did not wear away, as he had supposed it would, but was becoming an obsessive factor in his thoughts. And the half-desire it built up in him, while aggravatingly persistent, was less disturbing than before.
The thought was circuitous but stalking, and whenever it reached that pentacle of the brain that was the true self which judged the merits of his own thoughts and actions as well as the intentions of the extraneous beings whom he interacted with, he almost believed that he was still with that creature the dog with its small clusters of ochre fur, he with his ochre wisps of obsessive thought, both cognate in that sense; the emaciated dog, an innocent that from its starvation was prey to disease, he having been the prey of four sadists and one sodomite in a family which decimated if not entirely obliterated the joy of his youth, and would have a reverberating effect throughout his life, both cognate in that sense as well.
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