When I hang my washing out on the line, I like to ensure three things:
(i) all items of a similar type are kept together (socks with socks, pants with pants, etc.)
(ii) all items are hung according to size (the largest things first)
(iii) all items are hung inside out, facing the same way and the same way up.
In addition, I like to make sure all of the pegs are wooden and of the same type; or, if using the plastic pegs, that they are all the same colour (preferably blue).
According to a full-figured friend of mine who likes to boast of having a degree in psychology, this meticulous attention to detail and concern with aesthetics isn't a noble attempt to impose order upon a chaotic world and give style to an otherwise drab and dreary domestic chore; rather, it's a sign that, like Sheldon Cooper, the fictional theoretical physicist played so brilliantly by Jim Parsons in the CBS television series The Big Bang Theory, I suffer from a mental health issue known as obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD).
Technically, she means obsessive-compulsive personality disorder (OCPD), which is clinically distinct from the above, though I hardly dare correct her for fear that she regards this as further proof of the condition; a condition which, in my view, is neither undesirable nor unhealthy, but is rather egosyntonic and characteristic of all great artists, dandies, philosophers, and others concerned with achieving a level of perfection.
My friend might find pleasure in doing her laundry in a carefree manner - recklessly mixing the colours with the whites, hanging things in a higgledy-piggledy fashion, folding items in an incorrect manner - but she'll never know how to give birth to a dancing star or understand why it is that nothing tastes as good as skinny feels.
This matter of being labelled with a personality disorder by irritating little people merely for being delightfully poetic and perfectionist about performing certain tasks has required urgent philosophical attention for far too long. Thank you for handing us back our sanity - we victims of a far more unhealthy form of correctness.Great piece, Stephen.
ReplyDeleteThis post interested me especially, since I once worked in a London clinic with an OC-disordered patient: a young Indian woman who couldn't leave the house for hours until she'd performed a complex variety of cleaning, tidying and organisational 'rituals'. (At times, she couldn't even sit down in my consulting room without adjusting the cushion several times on her chair, till it was 'just so'.) I had the feeling the word 'ritual' was significant for her, and that her strange state of possession carried a quasi-religious tone, with its management strategies having a correspondingly apotropaic function, warding off the world's 'evil'.
ReplyDeleteIn Jung's striking formula, 'the gods have become diseases'. What occluded god could this form of pathology serve? Where is the daemon - or the angel - in the madness? ('Much madness is divinest Sense', as the poet Emily Dickinson famously wrote...)
If the difference between the two conditions turns on the attitude of the individual to their behaviour, moreover, the question becomes: who or what mediates, organises and/or evaluates this attitude? The ego? The psychiatrist? Or something/someone else? Either way, who among us is truly master (or mistress) in their own house?
The Nietzschean allusion seems highly germane to Jung, who read him, and wrote on him, with some authority - interpreting him as the psychologist that Nietzsche himself insisted he always was. A plausible working hypothesis here might be: the more internal chaos (aligned for Nietzsche with creativity), the more the need for a compensatory outer order - which can mutate into a kind of persecutory (or self-persecuting) perfectionism. The rage for order, to varying degrees, is a calling for all of us, though the artist doubtless suffers more. For chaos, one might here read complexity, though some of its forms are more tyrannical than others, which is also why we have scapegoats.
Either way, how boring life would surely be if we were all entirely rational! Send in the (compulsive) clowns . .