Obsession
Obsession: Meaning, Origin and the Difference from Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder
Obsession: Meaning, Origin and the Difference from Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder
DESCRIPTION: For centuries, ‘obsession’ meant a siege. In English, ‘I’m obsessed’ is now a compliment—the history of the word from Seneca to Freud, and how it differs from obsessive-compulsive disorder.
Obsession: From suffering to product advertising
The word ‘obsession’ originates from military terminology and meant ‘siege’. It found its way into psychiatry via demonology, where it referred to something from which people suffered. Today, someone might write ‘I’m obsessed’ under a photo to express approval. This text traces the word’s journey, its shift in meaning, and who benefits.
What ‘obsession’ originally meant
The Latin obsidere is composed of ob (against) and sedere (to sit). Someone who obsides sits in front of a city and lets no one in or out. The noun obsessio means ‘siege’. In English, obsession first appeared in the 1510s with precisely this military meaning, which is no longer in use today.
Yet this image already contains the seeds of the word’s subsequent history. A siege comes from outside. It is imposed, it confines, and it does not cease until the besieged have surrendered. The word, in its original sense, describes a situation in which one finds oneself, not a quality that one exhibits.
Siege and possession: the dividing line in demonology
Around 1600, ‘obsession’ in English referred to the hostile activity of an evil spirit. A careful distinction was made here. In the case of ‘possessio’, the demon was regarded as having invaded the person and as master of their body and faculties. In the case of ‘obsessio’, the demon remained an attacker on the outside: the affected person was besieged, but not subdued.
Demonology conceived of these states as a progression: besieged, subdued, possessed. First, the enemy stands outside the walls. He makes his presence felt, frightens, entices, threatens and keeps the person on tenterhooks. Then the besieged person is subdued: he remains himself—but his attention, his time and his movements no longer belong to him alone. Only in the case of possession in the strict sense has the attacker invaded. He is no longer outside the city, but within it.
This dividing line has survived in theology. Obsessive thoughts are not possession. They are part of the condition of being besieged: the thought is there, it imposes itself, it can occupy hours, but the person affected recognises it as a thought and specifically does not want it. The suffering lies not in the loss of consciousness, but in consciousness from which there is no escape.
The German language has never linguistically recognised this distinction. The German Dictionary by Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, published between 1854 and 1961, contains no entry for ‘Obsession’. The loanword entered German only later as a technical term. The Grimm dictionary does include ‘Besessenheit’ (possession), and the concept behind it is taking possession: something has taken hold and controls the person. This corresponds to the Latin possessio. German offers no term for distress from external sources that is endured while fully conscious. Anyone wishing to name this in German had to resort to a loanword or coin a new term.
A case in point: Messerschmidt and the spirit of proportion
The sculptor Franz Xaver Messerschmidt illustrates how this distinction plays out in real life. Friedrich Nicolai visited him in Pressburg in 1781 and described the visit in 1785 in his Description of a Journey through Germany and Switzerland in the Year 1781. Messerschmidt maintained that ghosts haunted and tormented him at night; he regarded anyone who doubted this as an enemy. His furnishings consisted of a bed, a flute, a tobacco pipe and an Italian book on the proportions of the human body. Hanging by the window was a drawing of an armless Egyptian statue, which he never looked upon without reverence.
His defence was a system. Everything on earth followed certain proportions, and whoever evoked within themselves proportions superior to those of another thereby gained superior strength. So he pinched himself, especially on the right side beneath his ribs, observed the resulting grimace in the mirror, and carved it in stone or cast it in tin and lead in order, as Nicolai recounts, to gain dominion over the spirits, so that they might no longer have dominion over him. He counted sixty-four types of grimace. When Nicolai visited, sixty heads were complete, and Nicolai saw him working on the sixty-first, glancing in the mirror every half a minute. He had spent eleven years on it.
The distinction also applies to the Messerschmidt case. Power remains outside; the besieged man retains his sanity; and the action by which he defends himself must be repeated, because doing it once is not enough. Obsessive thoughts and compulsive actions are present here as a ‘biography ’, almost a hundred years before Westphal defined the concept of an obsession. Nicolai already interprets the matter in secular terms: he regards the ghosts as products of an imaginative faculty which, although they originate from within, appear externally.
No word existed for his condition at the time. Only later generations gave names to his thoughts.
Initial impulses and assent: the earlier distinction
The dividing line predates demonology. The Stoics distinguished the involuntary initial impulse from the assent of reason, through which it first becomes an emotion. Seneca describes three stages in De ira (Book 2, Chapters 1 to 4). First, an involuntary impulse strikes the soul—the primus ictus animi—which, according to Seneca, cannot be avoided by reason. In his example, this precedes anger, not yet anger itself. At the second stage, the will assents to a proposition such as ‘I must be vindicated’, and thus anger begins. The third stage is beyond control: the person overcome by anger desires retribution at all costs. In later terminology, these initial stirrings are called propatheiai, literally ‘pre-feelings’.
Augustine applies this model to sin. In De sermone Domini in monte (Book 1, Chapter 12), he distinguishes three stages: the suggestio, the suggestion of a thought via memory or the senses; the delectatio, the pleasure that arises from dwelling on it; and the consensus, the assent of reason. Sin consists solely of the third stage. Gregory the Great summarises this in his reply to Augustine of Canterbury, as recorded by Bede in the first book of his Historia ecclesiastica: all sin is committed in three ways—through suggestion, delight and assent. The suggestion comes from the devil, the delight from the flesh, and the assent from the spirit.
Thus, the description at issue here was complete one and a half millennia before its psychiatric formulation: an external process experienced whilst fully conscious, devoid of consent, and yet attributed to the person concerned. Augustine’s tripartite division further determines the locus of suffering. It lies between suggestion and consent, where one does not want a thought but has it nonetheless.
The scholastic continuation of this question concerns the reflexivity of the will: whether the will can direct itself towards its own acts and bring itself to will. Duns Scotus and William of Ockham debated this in the 13th and 14th centuries. It is precisely at this point that, to this day, the distinction is drawn between a deliberate, everyday obsession and an involuntary obsessive thought.
How psychiatry adopted the term
In the 19th century, the term entered medicine. In 1838, Esquirol classified such conditions as ‘monomania’, a form of partial insanity in which the rest of the mind remains intact. Bénédict Morel spoke of ‘délire émotif’. On 5 March 1877, Carl Westphal gave a lecture on ‘compulsive ideas’ to the Berlin Medical-Psychological Society. He provided the first useful German definition: ideas that impose themselves against one’s will, whilst thinking otherwise remains intact. In 1903, Pierre Janet’s two-volume work Les obsessions et la psychasthénie was published, classifying the clinical presentations that are now categorised as obsessive-compulsive disorder.
Notably, a linguistic divergence arises in this context. German adopts the concept of ‘compulsion’ and emphasises that something happens against one’s will. French and English, however, retain the notion of ‘siege’ and emphasise that something comes from outside and will not go away.
Freud’s ‘Compulsive Neurosis’ and the English translation
In 1909, Freud published ‘Remarks on a Case of Compulsive Neurosis’ in the Yearbook for Psychoanalytic and Psychopathological Research, the case history of the so-called ‘Rat Man’. The patient was 29 years old; treatment began in 1907. Freud describes a man haunted by thoughts he detests, who develops protective rituals that consume an enormous amount of his time.
In the English Standard Edition, the text is titled ‘Notes upon a Case of Obsessional Neurosis’. Here, the Latin word for ‘siege’ takes the place of the German ‘Zwangs’. What in German concerns the freedom of the will concerns, in English, the limits of the self. Both versions describe suffering.
What obsessive thoughts are, medically speaking
The ICD-11 lists obsessive-compulsive disorder under 6B20 and defines obsessive thoughts as recurrent and persistent thoughts, images or impulses to act that are experienced as intrusive and unwanted and are usually accompanied by anxiety. Those affected try to ignore them, suppress them or neutralise them through compulsive behaviours. The DSM-5-TR formulates this almost identically in Criterion A: recurrent thoughts, impulses or images that are experienced as intrusive and unwanted and which cause significant anxiety or distress in most affected individuals. A diagnosis requires that the condition takes up a significant amount of time – for example, more than one hour a day – or causes considerable distress and impairment.
Regarding prevalence: out of every hundred adults, around two will develop obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) over the course of their lives, and just over one in a hundred within a single year. The figures come from Ruscio and colleagues, who analysed a large American population survey in 2010: 2.3 per cent over a lifetime and 1.2 per cent within twelve months, based on 2,073 adults surveyed in accordance with the DSM-IV diagnostic manual in force at the time. The German treatment guideline from 2022 specifies a range of one to three per cent over a lifetime.
Central to all definitions is unwantedness. Obsessive thoughts are alien to the self. They do not align with what the person affected wants or considers to be right, and this is precisely what causes them distress.
‘I’m obsessed’: the reversal of the word’s meaning into enthusiasm.
In 2013, Teddy Wayne described in The New York Times how the word's meaning has shifted in everyday American English. In his article, he quotes Davis, who describes the shift as follows: something that people have to do but want to avoid has become something they want to do and which gives them pleasure. At the time, Wayne found around five hits per minute in a Twitter search for “I’m obsessed”, including references to cream soda, cardigans, and ketchup.
The reversal in English is complete. What was undesirable has become desirable. What was alien to the self has become close to the self. And what once signalled suffering now signifies enthusiasm. Anyone who says they are ‘obsessed’ with a TV series, a brand or a person is thereby expressing, beyond mere enthusiasm, that they are capable of intense feelings – and that is regarded as a positive trait.
In German, nobody says ‘I’m obsessed’. The English phrase, with its friendly tone, has no common German equivalent, and ‘I’m obsessed with’ sounds archaic at best these days.
This shift in connotation has taken hold elsewhere, namely in the noun form. On 20 May 2020, the Digital Dictionary of the German Language added a second, figurative meaning alongside the psychological definition of ‘obsessive thought or compulsive behaviour’: ‘a particularly deep and all-consuming passion, an urgent desire’. The evidence for this comes from a fashion blog from 2019: ‘My obsession this summer is clear: earrings.’ German has thus officially recorded this shift in the lexicon of fashion, lifestyle, and the arts.
The other automatically generated typical associations with ‘Obsession’ are: morbid, manic, pathological, delusional, destructive, self-destructive, perverse, perversion, neurosis. Related terms listed there include ‘obsession’, ‘mania’, ‘addiction’ and ‘morbid passion’. In the German text corpus, therefore, ‘Obsession’ remains predominantly a term for illness. A shift in meaning that has taken hold in everyday English appears in German as a narrow secondary meaning within an otherwise pathologising context.
The paths via youth language and abbreviations
German youth and internet slang regularly and fully adopt English adjectives describing states of mind: ‘lost’ was Youth Word of the Year in 2020, ‘cringe’ in 2021, ‘goofy’ in 2023, along with ‘safe’, ‘sus’ and ‘side eye’ from the same family. And ‘obsessed’ is clearly making the rounds in German chats and comment sections too.
Another form is the abbreviation ‘voll OCD’ or ‘mein OCD’, used to say someone is extremely tidy, a perfectionist, or meticulous. ‘Ich bin da voll OCD’ is common in German internet slang and carries the same friendly connotation as its English counterpart, referring to precision, a love of order and an eye for detail.
The abbreviated version, however, sneaks back in the word that was too cumbersome in German. ‘OCD’ stands for ‘obsessive’, and those who use the three letters generally do not know what the ‘O’ stands for. The positive connotation is thus conveyed covertly: the speaker adopts a diagnostic term as a compliment on their character without realising it.
In 2015, Rachelle Pavelko and Jessica Gall Myrick examined in Computers in Human Behaviour how trivialising posts about OCD on Twitter shape perceptions of people with this diagnosis. Users who identified themselves as affected received recognition.
Three distinct processes are thus apparent so far: the elevation of the noun in lifestyle language, the adoption of the English adjective by younger speakers, and the use of the abbreviation ‘OCD’ as a compliment.
Who benefits from this shift in meaning
For the English-speaking world – and for German lifestyle language, which follows its lead – the situation can be summarised as follows: siege has turned into enthusiasm. Anyone who says ‘I’m obsessed’ is expressing a judgement of taste rather than distress. The phrase says: ‘This thing has got me hooked (and that makes me interesting).’
Advertising language now has no qualms about this. Sephora calls its skincare campaign ‘Skin Obsessed’. Kellogg’s turns the obsession with Crunchy Nut into a comical advert for cornflakes. A manufacturer of dietary supplements advertises with ‘It’s A Healthy Obsession’ and ‘Quality Obsessed’. The word suggests ideal consumer behaviour, unwavering brand loyalty or self-optimisation. ‘Illness’ is no longer the antithesis of desire. It becomes its seal of approval.
The brand doesn’t want you to like its product. It wants you to describe yourself as someone who isn’t quite themselves without the product.
The word thus performs ideological work. It translates dependence into devotion, repetition into loyalty, and attachment to an object into personality. A TV series, a brand, a lipstick or a musician does not simply take over everyday life. They supposedly give it colour, direction and a sense of self. Anyone who says ‘obsessed’ presents this limited degree of freedom as a choice.
The things themselves are not neutral in this context. Images, repetition, platforms, rankings, recommendations, and advertising imbue them with emotion. Beyond mere use, the product promises belonging, intensity, and a recognisable sense of self. The friendly self-diagnosis provides the perfect phrase to describe it. What the brand means by repurchase rates, dwell time, and loyalty is called ‘obsession’ for the customer.
This positively charged ‘obsession’ is therefore no harmless linguistic quirk: it fits perfectly with a culture that wants people to think about things, talk about things, show things and return to things. The old word still recognised that a siege is not a free choice; the new one turns the siege into devotion.
The second shift: obsession as a reproach
Whilst the word becomes praise when used to describe oneself, it remains a reproach when used to describe others. This aspect remains in constant use in German. Anyone who continues to write after a break-up, who enquires too often, or who clings to a subject, is obsessive. The word explains nothing and ends everything. It turns behaviour into a diagnosis and the other person into a case study.
These two movements belong together. The very same culture that celebrates one’s own persistence as devotion declares the other’s persistence to be a disorder. Whoever is speaking at any given moment decides how these roles are assigned.
What remains static in Lacan
Psychoanalytically, the difference can be defined more precisely. Lacan describes desire as ‘metonymic’: it glides; it finds fulfilment in no single object; it continues to the next. The objet petit a, which he introduces in Seminar XI (1963/64), is the cause of desire and comes into being at the very moment it is lost. Through this, it keeps the movement going.
In Seminar VII (1959/60), Lacan describes how the Beautiful halts desire's path toward the thing. This is precisely where obsession in the strong sense lies: at the point where the movement ceases and an object takes the place that the movement required. The object is then no longer chosen. It takes over. What, from the observer’s perspective, looks like great love is, in fact, a standstill of the gliding, unfulfillable desire.
The jouissance that Lacan elaborates in Seminar XX (1972/73) describes the flip side: beyond a limit, pleasure turns to pain, and yet the clinging continues. Anyone who finds themselves at this point rarely says ‘I’m obsessed’. They usually have no words at all to describe their condition.
How the difference manifests itself
A useful distinguishing feature is already contained in the definition. The obsessive thought is alien to the self. Everyday obsession is close to the self, deliberate and pleasurable.
A second distinguishing feature is the question of the consequences. Someone who describes themselves as obsessed with a TV series stops watching when the season ends and loses nothing in the process. Someone with an obsessive-compulsive disorder loses hours, relationships and the ability to work – and yet still cannot stop. In between lie situations where someone clings to a person or an idea for a long time.
There is even a method for measuring parasocial attachment to famous people. The Celebrity Attitude Scale distinguishes between three levels, ranging from the entertaining and sociable, through the intensely personal, to the borderline pathological. The highest level is associated with a tendency towards fantasy and dissociative experiences. Those who describe themselves as ‘obsessed’ are generally at the first level but use the vocabulary of the third to describe themselves.
Key points in brief
• Obsessio means ‘siege’. The English word ‘obsession’ first appeared in the 1510s with this military meaning, and then around 1600 to describe the influence of an evil spirit from outside.
• Demonology distinguished between ‘possessio’ (a spirit within the body, with loss of consciousness) and ‘obsessio’ (external distress, with consciousness remaining intact). This distinction still accurately describes obsessive-compulsive disorder to this day.
• The German Dictionary by the Brothers Grimm (1854–1961) contains no entry for ‘Obsession’. It does contain ‘Besessenheit’ (possession), and the concept associated with this is that of taking possession, i.e. the Latin ‘possessio’. The German heritage lexicon lacks a term for the siege from outside.
• This distinction predates demonology. In De ira 2.1–4, Seneca distinguishes the involuntary primus ictus animi from the assent of the will. Augustine distinguishes between suggestio, delectatio and consensus, and designates only consensus as sin. Gregory the Great transmits this triad through Bede.
• Westphal defined the ‘obsessive thought’ in 1877; Janet systematised the field in 1903 in Les obsessions et la psychasthénie. Freud’s ‘Remarks on a Case of Obsessional Neurosis’ (1909) is titled ‘Notes upon a Case of Obsessional Neurosis’ in English.
• The sculptor Franz Xaver Messerschmidt provided the case study. According to Nicolai’s account from 1785, he was tormented by ghosts. To ward them off, he pinched himself while observing the grimaces he made in the mirror and spent eleven years sculpting these grimaces to gain mastery over the ghosts. The sculptures were not given names until 1793.
• ICD-11 (6B20) and DSM-5-TR define obsessive thoughts as intrusive and unwanted. Lifetime prevalence: 2.3 per cent (Ruscio et al. 2010), one to three per cent according to the German S3 guideline of 2022.
• Described publicly since 2013, albeit in English: ‘I’m obsessed’ as a compliment.
• In German, the phrase ‘ich bin obsessed’ is uncommon. What has gained acceptance is the positive connotation associated with the noun: on 20 May 2020, the DWDS included the figurative meaning ‘a particularly deep and absorbing passion’, attested in a fashion blog.
• Youth slang includes ‘voll OCD’, which is common in German internet slang and is regarded as a compliment for a love of order. OCD stands for ‘obsessive-compulsive’, a fact of which very few speakers are aware.
• Advertising transforms dependence into devotion and attachment to an object into personality. It fits an economy that imbues objects with emotions and measures attachment in repeat purchase rates and dwell time. Conversely, this same culture labels others’ clinging as a disorder.
• Lacan: Desire glides; obsession stands still. At the point where an object replaces movement, choice ceases, and the object binds.
• The distinguishing feature is alienation from the self. Obsessive thoughts are rejected and cost hours, relationships and the ability to work. Everyday obsession is deliberate and ends without consequence.
Sources
· Harper, D.: Online Etymology Dictionary, entries for ‘obsession’ and ‘obsess’: https://www.etymonline.com/word/obsession
· Digital Dictionary of the German Language, entry for ‘Obsession’ (version accessed on 20 May 2020, related terms, typical collocations): https://www.dwds.de/wb/Obsession
· DWDS word profile for ‘Obsession’: https://www.dwds.de/wp/Obsession
· Langenscheidt, Youth Word of the Year, overview of past years: https://www.langenscheidt.com/jugendwort-des-jahres-2025
· Davis, L. J.: Obsession: A History, University of Chicago Press, 2008: https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/O/bo5856991.html
· Nicolai, F.: Description of a Journey through Germany and Switzerland in 1781, Berlin and Stettin 1785 (Visit to Franz Xaver Messerschmidt in Pressburg). English translation of the section by Herbert Ranharter: https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2010/09/30/the-heads-of-franz-xaver-messerschmidt/
· Seneca, L. A.: De ira, Book 2, Chapters 1–4. Latin text: https://www.thelatinlibrary.com/sen/sen.ira2.shtml
· Augustine: De sermone Domini in monte, Book 1, Chapters 12, 34. English translation: https://www.newadvent.org/fathers/16011.htm
· Bede the Venerable: Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum, Book 1, Chapter 27 (Gregory the Great’s reply to Augustine of Canterbury): https://sourcebooks.fordham.edu/basis/bede-book1.asp
· German Dictionary by Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm (¹DWB), search for ‘Obsession’ (no entry): https://www.dwds.de/wb/dwb/search/?q=obsession
· Pavelko, R. L., Myrick, J. G.: ‘That’s so OCD’. The effects of trivialising illness via social media on user perceptions and impression formation, Computers in Human Behaviour 49 (2015), 251–258, DOI 10.1016/j.chb.2015.02.061: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2015.02.061
· Knuuttila, S.: Emotions in Ancient and Medieval Philosophy, Oxford University Press 2004
· Boddice, R.: The History of Emotions, Manchester University Press 2018
· Westphal, C. On Obsessive Thoughts, Berliner klinische Wochenschrift 14 (1877). On the history of its reception: Der Nervenarzt (2015), ‘Are the current concepts of obsessive-compulsive disorder a novelty?’: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00115-014-4229-x
· Janet, P.: Les obsessions et la psychasthénie, Paris 1903, digital copy: https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k3411368r
· Freud, S.: Remarks on a Case of Obsessive-Compulsive Neurosis, Yearbook for Psychoanalytic and Psychopathological Research 1 (1909): https://www.projekt-gutenberg.org/freud/zwangneu/chap012.html
· World Health Organisation, ICD-11, 6B20 Obsessive-compulsive disorder: https://icd.who.int/browse11/l-m/en
· Ruscio, A. M., Stein, D. J., Chiu, W. T., Kessler, R. C.: The epidemiology of obsessive-compulsive disorder in the National Comorbidity Survey Replication, Molecular Psychiatry 15 (2010), 53–63: https://www.nature.com/articles/mp200894
· S3 Guideline on Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder, AWMF Register No. 038/017, as at 2022: https://register.awmf.org/assets/guidelines/038_017l_S3_Zwangsst%C3%B6rungen_2022-07.pdf
· Wayne, T.: ‘Obsessed? You’re Not Alone’, The New York Times, 24 March 2013: https://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/24/fashion/obsessed-youre-not-alone.html.
· Merriam-Webster, entry for ‘obsessed’: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/obsessed
· Illouz, E.: Cold Intimacies. The Making of Emotional Capitalism, Polity Press, 2007. German edition: Gefühle in Zeiten des Kapitalismus, Suhrkamp 2006
· Lacan, J.: Le Séminaire, Book VII: L’éthique de la psychanalyse (1959/60), Seuil 1986. Book XI: Les quatre concepts fondamentaux de la psychanalyse (1963/64), Seuil 1973. Book XX: Encore (1972/73), Seuil 1975
· Maltby, J., Day, L., McCutcheon, L. E. et al.: ‘Extreme celebrity worship, fantasy proneness and dissociation’, Personality and Individual Differences (2006): https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0191886905002552
· Horton, D., Wohl, R. R.: Mass Communication and Para-Social Interaction, Psychiatry 19 (1956), 215–229: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00332747.1956.11023049
Related
DESCRIPTION: For centuries, ‘obsession’ meant a siege. In English, ‘I’m obsessed’ is now a compliment—the history of the word from Seneca to Freud, and how it differs from obsessive-compulsive disorder.
Obsession: From suffering to product advertising
The word ‘obsession’ originates from military terminology and meant ‘siege’. It found its way into psychiatry via demonology, where it referred to something from which people suffered. Today, someone might write ‘I’m obsessed’ under a photo to express approval. This text traces the word’s journey, its shift in meaning, and who benefits.
What ‘obsession’ originally meant
The Latin obsidere is composed of ob (against) and sedere (to sit). Someone who obsides sits in front of a city and lets no one in or out. The noun obsessio means ‘siege’. In English, obsession first appeared in the 1510s with precisely this military meaning, which is no longer in use today.
Yet this image already contains the seeds of the word’s subsequent history. A siege comes from outside. It is imposed, it confines, and it does not cease until the besieged have surrendered. The word, in its original sense, describes a situation in which one finds oneself, not a quality that one exhibits.
Siege and possession: the dividing line in demonology
Around 1600, ‘obsession’ in English referred to the hostile activity of an evil spirit. A careful distinction was made here. In the case of ‘possessio’, the demon was regarded as having invaded the person and as master of their body and faculties. In the case of ‘obsessio’, the demon remained an attacker on the outside: the affected person was besieged, but not subdued.
Demonology conceived of these states as a progression: besieged, subdued, possessed. First, the enemy stands outside the walls. He makes his presence felt, frightens, entices, threatens and keeps the person on tenterhooks. Then the besieged person is subdued: he remains himself—but his attention, his time and his movements no longer belong to him alone. Only in the case of possession in the strict sense has the attacker invaded. He is no longer outside the city, but within it.
This dividing line has survived in theology. Obsessive thoughts are not possession. They are part of the condition of being besieged: the thought is there, it imposes itself, it can occupy hours, but the person affected recognises it as a thought and specifically does not want it. The suffering lies not in the loss of consciousness, but in consciousness from which there is no escape.
The German language has never linguistically recognised this distinction. The German Dictionary by Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, published between 1854 and 1961, contains no entry for ‘Obsession’. The loanword entered German only later as a technical term. The Grimm dictionary does include ‘Besessenheit’ (possession), and the concept behind it is taking possession: something has taken hold and controls the person. This corresponds to the Latin possessio. German offers no term for distress from external sources that is endured while fully conscious. Anyone wishing to name this in German had to resort to a loanword or coin a new term.
A case in point: Messerschmidt and the spirit of proportion
The sculptor Franz Xaver Messerschmidt illustrates how this distinction plays out in real life. Friedrich Nicolai visited him in Pressburg in 1781 and described the visit in 1785 in his Description of a Journey through Germany and Switzerland in the Year 1781. Messerschmidt maintained that ghosts haunted and tormented him at night; he regarded anyone who doubted this as an enemy. His furnishings consisted of a bed, a flute, a tobacco pipe and an Italian book on the proportions of the human body. Hanging by the window was a drawing of an armless Egyptian statue, which he never looked upon without reverence.
His defence was a system. Everything on earth followed certain proportions, and whoever evoked within themselves proportions superior to those of another thereby gained superior strength. So he pinched himself, especially on the right side beneath his ribs, observed the resulting grimace in the mirror, and carved it in stone or cast it in tin and lead in order, as Nicolai recounts, to gain dominion over the spirits, so that they might no longer have dominion over him. He counted sixty-four types of grimace. When Nicolai visited, sixty heads were complete, and Nicolai saw him working on the sixty-first, glancing in the mirror every half a minute. He had spent eleven years on it.
The distinction also applies to the Messerschmidt case. Power remains outside; the besieged man retains his sanity; and the action by which he defends himself must be repeated, because doing it once is not enough. Obsessive thoughts and compulsive actions are present here as a ‘biography ’, almost a hundred years before Westphal defined the concept of an obsession. Nicolai already interprets the matter in secular terms: he regards the ghosts as products of an imaginative faculty which, although they originate from within, appear externally.
No word existed for his condition at the time. Only later generations gave names to his thoughts.
Initial impulses and assent: the earlier distinction
The dividing line predates demonology. The Stoics distinguished the involuntary initial impulse from the assent of reason, through which it first becomes an emotion. Seneca describes three stages in De ira (Book 2, Chapters 1 to 4). First, an involuntary impulse strikes the soul—the primus ictus animi—which, according to Seneca, cannot be avoided by reason. In his example, this precedes anger, not yet anger itself. At the second stage, the will assents to a proposition such as ‘I must be vindicated’, and thus anger begins. The third stage is beyond control: the person overcome by anger desires retribution at all costs. In later terminology, these initial stirrings are called propatheiai, literally ‘pre-feelings’.
Augustine applies this model to sin. In De sermone Domini in monte (Book 1, Chapter 12), he distinguishes three stages: the suggestio, the suggestion of a thought via memory or the senses; the delectatio, the pleasure that arises from dwelling on it; and the consensus, the assent of reason. Sin consists solely of the third stage. Gregory the Great summarises this in his reply to Augustine of Canterbury, as recorded by Bede in the first book of his Historia ecclesiastica: all sin is committed in three ways—through suggestion, delight and assent. The suggestion comes from the devil, the delight from the flesh, and the assent from the spirit.
Thus, the description at issue here was complete one and a half millennia before its psychiatric formulation: an external process experienced whilst fully conscious, devoid of consent, and yet attributed to the person concerned. Augustine’s tripartite division further determines the locus of suffering. It lies between suggestion and consent, where one does not want a thought but has it nonetheless.
The scholastic continuation of this question concerns the reflexivity of the will: whether the will can direct itself towards its own acts and bring itself to will. Duns Scotus and William of Ockham debated this in the 13th and 14th centuries. It is precisely at this point that, to this day, the distinction is drawn between a deliberate, everyday obsession and an involuntary obsessive thought.
How psychiatry adopted the term
In the 19th century, the term entered medicine. In 1838, Esquirol classified such conditions as ‘monomania’, a form of partial insanity in which the rest of the mind remains intact. Bénédict Morel spoke of ‘délire émotif’. On 5 March 1877, Carl Westphal gave a lecture on ‘compulsive ideas’ to the Berlin Medical-Psychological Society. He provided the first useful German definition: ideas that impose themselves against one’s will, whilst thinking otherwise remains intact. In 1903, Pierre Janet’s two-volume work Les obsessions et la psychasthénie was published, classifying the clinical presentations that are now categorised as obsessive-compulsive disorder.
Notably, a linguistic divergence arises in this context. German adopts the concept of ‘compulsion’ and emphasises that something happens against one’s will. French and English, however, retain the notion of ‘siege’ and emphasise that something comes from outside and will not go away.
Freud’s ‘Compulsive Neurosis’ and the English translation
In 1909, Freud published ‘Remarks on a Case of Compulsive Neurosis’ in the Yearbook for Psychoanalytic and Psychopathological Research, the case history of the so-called ‘Rat Man’. The patient was 29 years old; treatment began in 1907. Freud describes a man haunted by thoughts he detests, who develops protective rituals that consume an enormous amount of his time.
In the English Standard Edition, the text is titled ‘Notes upon a Case of Obsessional Neurosis’. Here, the Latin word for ‘siege’ takes the place of the German ‘Zwangs’. What in German concerns the freedom of the will concerns, in English, the limits of the self. Both versions describe suffering.
What obsessive thoughts are, medically speaking
The ICD-11 lists obsessive-compulsive disorder under 6B20 and defines obsessive thoughts as recurrent and persistent thoughts, images or impulses to act that are experienced as intrusive and unwanted and are usually accompanied by anxiety. Those affected try to ignore them, suppress them or neutralise them through compulsive behaviours. The DSM-5-TR formulates this almost identically in Criterion A: recurrent thoughts, impulses or images that are experienced as intrusive and unwanted and which cause significant anxiety or distress in most affected individuals. A diagnosis requires that the condition takes up a significant amount of time – for example, more than one hour a day – or causes considerable distress and impairment.
Regarding prevalence: out of every hundred adults, around two will develop obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) over the course of their lives, and just over one in a hundred within a single year. The figures come from Ruscio and colleagues, who analysed a large American population survey in 2010: 2.3 per cent over a lifetime and 1.2 per cent within twelve months, based on 2,073 adults surveyed in accordance with the DSM-IV diagnostic manual in force at the time. The German treatment guideline from 2022 specifies a range of one to three per cent over a lifetime.
Central to all definitions is unwantedness. Obsessive thoughts are alien to the self. They do not align with what the person affected wants or considers to be right, and this is precisely what causes them distress.
‘I’m obsessed’: the reversal of the word’s meaning into enthusiasm.
In 2013, Teddy Wayne described in The New York Times how the word's meaning has shifted in everyday American English. In his article, he quotes Davis, who describes the shift as follows: something that people have to do but want to avoid has become something they want to do and which gives them pleasure. At the time, Wayne found around five hits per minute in a Twitter search for “I’m obsessed”, including references to cream soda, cardigans, and ketchup.
The reversal in English is complete. What was undesirable has become desirable. What was alien to the self has become close to the self. And what once signalled suffering now signifies enthusiasm. Anyone who says they are ‘obsessed’ with a TV series, a brand or a person is thereby expressing, beyond mere enthusiasm, that they are capable of intense feelings – and that is regarded as a positive trait.
In German, nobody says ‘I’m obsessed’. The English phrase, with its friendly tone, has no common German equivalent, and ‘I’m obsessed with’ sounds archaic at best these days.
This shift in connotation has taken hold elsewhere, namely in the noun form. On 20 May 2020, the Digital Dictionary of the German Language added a second, figurative meaning alongside the psychological definition of ‘obsessive thought or compulsive behaviour’: ‘a particularly deep and all-consuming passion, an urgent desire’. The evidence for this comes from a fashion blog from 2019: ‘My obsession this summer is clear: earrings.’ German has thus officially recorded this shift in the lexicon of fashion, lifestyle, and the arts.
The other automatically generated typical associations with ‘Obsession’ are: morbid, manic, pathological, delusional, destructive, self-destructive, perverse, perversion, neurosis. Related terms listed there include ‘obsession’, ‘mania’, ‘addiction’ and ‘morbid passion’. In the German text corpus, therefore, ‘Obsession’ remains predominantly a term for illness. A shift in meaning that has taken hold in everyday English appears in German as a narrow secondary meaning within an otherwise pathologising context.
The paths via youth language and abbreviations
German youth and internet slang regularly and fully adopt English adjectives describing states of mind: ‘lost’ was Youth Word of the Year in 2020, ‘cringe’ in 2021, ‘goofy’ in 2023, along with ‘safe’, ‘sus’ and ‘side eye’ from the same family. And ‘obsessed’ is clearly making the rounds in German chats and comment sections too.
Another form is the abbreviation ‘voll OCD’ or ‘mein OCD’, used to say someone is extremely tidy, a perfectionist, or meticulous. ‘Ich bin da voll OCD’ is common in German internet slang and carries the same friendly connotation as its English counterpart, referring to precision, a love of order and an eye for detail.
The abbreviated version, however, sneaks back in the word that was too cumbersome in German. ‘OCD’ stands for ‘obsessive’, and those who use the three letters generally do not know what the ‘O’ stands for. The positive connotation is thus conveyed covertly: the speaker adopts a diagnostic term as a compliment on their character without realising it.
In 2015, Rachelle Pavelko and Jessica Gall Myrick examined in Computers in Human Behaviour how trivialising posts about OCD on Twitter shape perceptions of people with this diagnosis. Users who identified themselves as affected received recognition.
Three distinct processes are thus apparent so far: the elevation of the noun in lifestyle language, the adoption of the English adjective by younger speakers, and the use of the abbreviation ‘OCD’ as a compliment.
Who benefits from this shift in meaning
For the English-speaking world – and for German lifestyle language, which follows its lead – the situation can be summarised as follows: siege has turned into enthusiasm. Anyone who says ‘I’m obsessed’ is expressing a judgement of taste rather than distress. The phrase says: ‘This thing has got me hooked (and that makes me interesting).’
Advertising language now has no qualms about this. Sephora calls its skincare campaign ‘Skin Obsessed’. Kellogg’s turns the obsession with Crunchy Nut into a comical advert for cornflakes. A manufacturer of dietary supplements advertises with ‘It’s A Healthy Obsession’ and ‘Quality Obsessed’. The word suggests ideal consumer behaviour, unwavering brand loyalty or self-optimisation. ‘Illness’ is no longer the antithesis of desire. It becomes its seal of approval.
The brand doesn’t want you to like its product. It wants you to describe yourself as someone who isn’t quite themselves without the product.
The word thus performs ideological work. It translates dependence into devotion, repetition into loyalty, and attachment to an object into personality. A TV series, a brand, a lipstick or a musician does not simply take over everyday life. They supposedly give it colour, direction and a sense of self. Anyone who says ‘obsessed’ presents this limited degree of freedom as a choice.
The things themselves are not neutral in this context. Images, repetition, platforms, rankings, recommendations, and advertising imbue them with emotion. Beyond mere use, the product promises belonging, intensity, and a recognisable sense of self. The friendly self-diagnosis provides the perfect phrase to describe it. What the brand means by repurchase rates, dwell time, and loyalty is called ‘obsession’ for the customer.
This positively charged ‘obsession’ is therefore no harmless linguistic quirk: it fits perfectly with a culture that wants people to think about things, talk about things, show things and return to things. The old word still recognised that a siege is not a free choice; the new one turns the siege into devotion.
The second shift: obsession as a reproach
Whilst the word becomes praise when used to describe oneself, it remains a reproach when used to describe others. This aspect remains in constant use in German. Anyone who continues to write after a break-up, who enquires too often, or who clings to a subject, is obsessive. The word explains nothing and ends everything. It turns behaviour into a diagnosis and the other person into a case study.
These two movements belong together. The very same culture that celebrates one’s own persistence as devotion declares the other’s persistence to be a disorder. Whoever is speaking at any given moment decides how these roles are assigned.
What remains static in Lacan
Psychoanalytically, the difference can be defined more precisely. Lacan describes desire as ‘metonymic’: it glides; it finds fulfilment in no single object; it continues to the next. The objet petit a, which he introduces in Seminar XI (1963/64), is the cause of desire and comes into being at the very moment it is lost. Through this, it keeps the movement going.
In Seminar VII (1959/60), Lacan describes how the Beautiful halts desire's path toward the thing. This is precisely where obsession in the strong sense lies: at the point where the movement ceases and an object takes the place that the movement required. The object is then no longer chosen. It takes over. What, from the observer’s perspective, looks like great love is, in fact, a standstill of the gliding, unfulfillable desire.
The jouissance that Lacan elaborates in Seminar XX (1972/73) describes the flip side: beyond a limit, pleasure turns to pain, and yet the clinging continues. Anyone who finds themselves at this point rarely says ‘I’m obsessed’. They usually have no words at all to describe their condition.
How the difference manifests itself
A useful distinguishing feature is already contained in the definition. The obsessive thought is alien to the self. Everyday obsession is close to the self, deliberate and pleasurable.
A second distinguishing feature is the question of the consequences. Someone who describes themselves as obsessed with a TV series stops watching when the season ends and loses nothing in the process. Someone with an obsessive-compulsive disorder loses hours, relationships and the ability to work – and yet still cannot stop. In between lie situations where someone clings to a person or an idea for a long time.
There is even a method for measuring parasocial attachment to famous people. The Celebrity Attitude Scale distinguishes between three levels, ranging from the entertaining and sociable, through the intensely personal, to the borderline pathological. The highest level is associated with a tendency towards fantasy and dissociative experiences. Those who describe themselves as ‘obsessed’ are generally at the first level but use the vocabulary of the third to describe themselves.
Key points in brief
• Obsessio means ‘siege’. The English word ‘obsession’ first appeared in the 1510s with this military meaning, and then around 1600 to describe the influence of an evil spirit from outside.
• Demonology distinguished between ‘possessio’ (a spirit within the body, with loss of consciousness) and ‘obsessio’ (external distress, with consciousness remaining intact). This distinction still accurately describes obsessive-compulsive disorder to this day.
• The German Dictionary by the Brothers Grimm (1854–1961) contains no entry for ‘Obsession’. It does contain ‘Besessenheit’ (possession), and the concept associated with this is that of taking possession, i.e. the Latin ‘possessio’. The German heritage lexicon lacks a term for the siege from outside.
• This distinction predates demonology. In De ira 2.1–4, Seneca distinguishes the involuntary primus ictus animi from the assent of the will. Augustine distinguishes between suggestio, delectatio and consensus, and designates only consensus as sin. Gregory the Great transmits this triad through Bede.
• Westphal defined the ‘obsessive thought’ in 1877; Janet systematised the field in 1903 in Les obsessions et la psychasthénie. Freud’s ‘Remarks on a Case of Obsessional Neurosis’ (1909) is titled ‘Notes upon a Case of Obsessional Neurosis’ in English.
• The sculptor Franz Xaver Messerschmidt provided the case study. According to Nicolai’s account from 1785, he was tormented by ghosts. To ward them off, he pinched himself while observing the grimaces he made in the mirror and spent eleven years sculpting these grimaces to gain mastery over the ghosts. The sculptures were not given names until 1793.
• ICD-11 (6B20) and DSM-5-TR define obsessive thoughts as intrusive and unwanted. Lifetime prevalence: 2.3 per cent (Ruscio et al. 2010), one to three per cent according to the German S3 guideline of 2022.
• Described publicly since 2013, albeit in English: ‘I’m obsessed’ as a compliment.
• In German, the phrase ‘ich bin obsessed’ is uncommon. What has gained acceptance is the positive connotation associated with the noun: on 20 May 2020, the DWDS included the figurative meaning ‘a particularly deep and absorbing passion’, attested in a fashion blog.
• Youth slang includes ‘voll OCD’, which is common in German internet slang and is regarded as a compliment for a love of order. OCD stands for ‘obsessive-compulsive’, a fact of which very few speakers are aware.
• Advertising transforms dependence into devotion and attachment to an object into personality. It fits an economy that imbues objects with emotions and measures attachment in repeat purchase rates and dwell time. Conversely, this same culture labels others’ clinging as a disorder.
• Lacan: Desire glides; obsession stands still. At the point where an object replaces movement, choice ceases, and the object binds.
• The distinguishing feature is alienation from the self. Obsessive thoughts are rejected and cost hours, relationships and the ability to work. Everyday obsession is deliberate and ends without consequence.
Sources
· Harper, D.: Online Etymology Dictionary, entries for ‘obsession’ and ‘obsess’: https://www.etymonline.com/word/obsession
· Digital Dictionary of the German Language, entry for ‘Obsession’ (version accessed on 20 May 2020, related terms, typical collocations): https://www.dwds.de/wb/Obsession
· DWDS word profile for ‘Obsession’: https://www.dwds.de/wp/Obsession
· Langenscheidt, Youth Word of the Year, overview of past years: https://www.langenscheidt.com/jugendwort-des-jahres-2025
· Davis, L. J.: Obsession: A History, University of Chicago Press, 2008: https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/O/bo5856991.html
· Nicolai, F.: Description of a Journey through Germany and Switzerland in 1781, Berlin and Stettin 1785 (Visit to Franz Xaver Messerschmidt in Pressburg). English translation of the section by Herbert Ranharter: https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2010/09/30/the-heads-of-franz-xaver-messerschmidt/
· Seneca, L. A.: De ira, Book 2, Chapters 1–4. Latin text: https://www.thelatinlibrary.com/sen/sen.ira2.shtml
· Augustine: De sermone Domini in monte, Book 1, Chapters 12, 34. English translation: https://www.newadvent.org/fathers/16011.htm
· Bede the Venerable: Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum, Book 1, Chapter 27 (Gregory the Great’s reply to Augustine of Canterbury): https://sourcebooks.fordham.edu/basis/bede-book1.asp
· German Dictionary by Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm (¹DWB), search for ‘Obsession’ (no entry): https://www.dwds.de/wb/dwb/search/?q=obsession
· Pavelko, R. L., Myrick, J. G.: ‘That’s so OCD’. The effects of trivialising illness via social media on user perceptions and impression formation, Computers in Human Behaviour 49 (2015), 251–258, DOI 10.1016/j.chb.2015.02.061: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2015.02.061
· Knuuttila, S.: Emotions in Ancient and Medieval Philosophy, Oxford University Press 2004
· Boddice, R.: The History of Emotions, Manchester University Press 2018
· Westphal, C. On Obsessive Thoughts, Berliner klinische Wochenschrift 14 (1877). On the history of its reception: Der Nervenarzt (2015), ‘Are the current concepts of obsessive-compulsive disorder a novelty?’: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00115-014-4229-x
· Janet, P.: Les obsessions et la psychasthénie, Paris 1903, digital copy: https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k3411368r
· Freud, S.: Remarks on a Case of Obsessive-Compulsive Neurosis, Yearbook for Psychoanalytic and Psychopathological Research 1 (1909): https://www.projekt-gutenberg.org/freud/zwangneu/chap012.html
· World Health Organisation, ICD-11, 6B20 Obsessive-compulsive disorder: https://icd.who.int/browse11/l-m/en
· Ruscio, A. M., Stein, D. J., Chiu, W. T., Kessler, R. C.: The epidemiology of obsessive-compulsive disorder in the National Comorbidity Survey Replication, Molecular Psychiatry 15 (2010), 53–63: https://www.nature.com/articles/mp200894
· S3 Guideline on Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder, AWMF Register No. 038/017, as at 2022: https://register.awmf.org/assets/guidelines/038_017l_S3_Zwangsst%C3%B6rungen_2022-07.pdf
· Wayne, T.: ‘Obsessed? You’re Not Alone’, The New York Times, 24 March 2013: https://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/24/fashion/obsessed-youre-not-alone.html.
· Merriam-Webster, entry for ‘obsessed’: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/obsessed
· Illouz, E.: Cold Intimacies. The Making of Emotional Capitalism, Polity Press, 2007. German edition: Gefühle in Zeiten des Kapitalismus, Suhrkamp 2006
· Lacan, J.: Le Séminaire, Book VII: L’éthique de la psychanalyse (1959/60), Seuil 1986. Book XI: Les quatre concepts fondamentaux de la psychanalyse (1963/64), Seuil 1973. Book XX: Encore (1972/73), Seuil 1975
· Maltby, J., Day, L., McCutcheon, L. E. et al.: ‘Extreme celebrity worship, fantasy proneness and dissociation’, Personality and Individual Differences (2006): https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0191886905002552
· Horton, D., Wohl, R. R.: Mass Communication and Para-Social Interaction, Psychiatry 19 (1956), 215–229: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00332747.1956.11023049
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