The air freshener can has to be on the right side of the toilet tank and has to be laid on its side when showering.
Shirts must face left in the closet.
The car must never stop until you reach your destination. Turn right on a red light even if a right turn is not the direction you want to go.
Don’t walk the same path to and from the bathroom, or the carpet will get smashed down.
All paper currency must be flat, facing the same way, with the portrait on top, and sorted by denomination from ones at the front of the billfold followed by fives, tens, etc.
By the time Bev left her boyfriend, the number of shower-related rules—which had begun with a simple, reasonable, request to turn on the exhaust fan—had grown to a dozen. She was regularly reprimanded for leaving the shower door eight inches ajar rather than the prescribed six (the perfect distance to balance the need to air out the stall but not obstruct someone in the bathroom), not hanging up her towel perfectly, not returning the bath mat properly. When they dined out, she wasn’t even allowed to choose what to order, so certain was her boyfriend about what she would “really like.” He was mystified that she could not see the logic of this. “People with this disorder really don’t get that you’re a separate person they can’t control,” Bev said, “even to the point of expecting you to like the foods they like.” They have made such a careful study of the options that their conclusion, to them, has the authority of a Consumer Reports refrigerator recommendation.
Such extreme conscientiousness is always justified by the utmost rationalization. The ways people with a compulsive personality have chosen to live their lives seem so right to them, so much better, smarter, more efficient, less wasteful, than other choices. “Sometimes it feels like it’s due to a love of beauty and elegance,” as one member of the online OCPD forum put it. “Finding the most elegant solution to something, or doing day-to-day things in a very thoughtful and careful manner, is just really, really satisfying. It’s creating order and harmony, reducing entropy and chaos. Other times it seems like a totally irrational fear of incompetence, in oneself or in others.” “The rules may be crazy but they are there to help us cope with the world,” said another.
For one man with OCPD, the sight of someone dog-earing the pages of a book provoked angst and anxiety on a par with what others would feel upon seeing someone methodically gouging chunks out of Michelangelo’s David. Dog-earing, he explained, “messes up” the orderliness of a book and “changes the status quo,” something that should never be done lightly. It also “changes the book into an object that is less than perfect, and that is unacceptable.”
The lawn has to be mowed in a different direction every week.
When pumping gas, top it off until the dollar amount is a round number, or at worst a half dollar or quarter-dollar. In a book used only for this purpose, note the date, mileage, amount, price per gallon, total amount spent, and where purchased.
Organize food in the cupboards by time zones, starting at Hawaii (pineapple), moving on to the United States (hot dog buns) and Italy (pasta) and ending at Japan (soy sauce). Turn the packages so all the labels face front, forming a de facto world map.
All knobs or dials in the vehicle—temperature, fan, or stereo volume—must be left in the middle, or vertical, position, upon exiting the car.
Let me insert a caveat here. OCPD gets applied to behaviors and personalities like a twin-size quilt trying to cover a king-size bed. Lots of behaviors may have elements of OCPD, but they are something else entirely. Specifically, insistence on adhering to rules and explosions of anger when they’re broken have strong elements of the controlling behavior and contempt for others that marks narcissism and even psychological abuse.
What can we make of a man who decrees that his girlfriend’s friends and family are not allowed to phone her during what he designates as his “quality time” with her—after 8:30 p.m. six nights a week and all day on weekends? This guy is not invoking the conscientious, perfectionist, order-making rules of someone with OCPD, but the controlling domination of a narcissist. So, too, with many of the “OCPD rules” that wives and husbands told me about. If the rule is “agree with everything I say without exception,” “keep everything the way I like it because that is the right way,” “not have friends who take up your time, because I might need you and I always come first,” and always “have the children at the front door like little soldiers when I arrive home from work, as my mother did”: again, not the anxiety-driven compulsions of OCPD, but the egotistical, dictatorial orders of narcissism and coercive control.
Is obsessive-compulsive personality disorder a mental illness? It’s not as if the minds of people with “crazy rules” and extreme conscientiousness aren’t working properly. They’re not seeing visions or hearing voices, they’re not dysfunctional, and they’re often not dissatisfied with their beliefs and compulsions. But psychiatrists do classify OCPD as a mental illness, and have since the time of French neurologist Philippe Pinel (1745–1826). Best known for reforming the treatment of mental illness, Pinel literally unchained the patient-inmates at Hospice de la Salpêtrière. Established by Louis XIV in the mid-seventeenth century on the former site of a gunpowder factory,II it housed ten thousand paupers and prostitutes but also people with mental disabilities, epilepsy, and other neurological and mental illnesses. Seeing the breathtaking number of ways the mind can go off the rails, Pinel proposed that one can have a mental illness without being mad, “mad” in this case meaning the experience of delusions or hallucinations, intellectual impairments, or other defects of reasoning. Lucidity of thought could exist alongside “defects of passion and affect,” Pinel argued, so that one’s power of reason might be intact at the same time that the emotions are deeply unbalanced. And voilà: certain personalities became “disorders.”
In the early twentieth century, American and European psychiatrists had a field day coming up with forms of personality pathology. Being shallow, cocksure, or undependable all qualified. So did being “excessively” critical of others, querulous, impulsive, insecure, moody, fractious, callow, cold, rigid, or obstinate. Every edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual has included personality disorders, starting with the first, in 1952. Over the years, it became easier to meet the diagnostic criteria for OCPD. The DSM-III of 1980 required a person meet four of five criteria, while the DSM-III-R of 1987 required meeting five of nine. That loosening of the standards had the effect of doubling the incidence of OCPD, psychiatrists Bruce Pfohl and Nancee Blum of the University of Iowa noted in a chapter in a 1995 book, The DSM-IV Personality Disorders. But, they continued, “it is not clear whether this represented an improvement.” Indeed. The debate over whether any personality can be disordered reached a crescendo in the debate over conscientiousness in the service of work.
Work, Work, and More Work
Compulsive working, manifested as excessive devotion to job and productivity to the exclusion of relationships and downtime, is one of the eight diagnostic criteria for obsessive-compulsive personality disorder. “It’s a very insidious kind of compulsion because you get rewarded for it,” said Michele, who runs a website firm in Austin, Texas. Society dangles the promise of riches and renown in return for hard work. It is the rare company that asks its employees not to work hard; the rare parents who tell their high-schooler to dial back on the Advanced Placement courses and resume padding. To the contrary. To pronounce oneself a workaholic and a multitasker is a badge of honor in twenty-first-century America. “In this culture,” Michele said, “trying to recover from workaholism is like trying to stay sober in a bar.”
In those who feel intense anxiety when they are doing anything but working, the seeds were likely sown in childhood. Especially in a certain demographic (at least middle class, with educated parents, and usually in a suburb or city), “kids have to be in an activity and productive constantly,” Michele said. “It’s almost frenzied”—signing up baby for infant yoga and music “appreciation
,” arranging play dates and museum visits and science-center outings. “It continues into high school, where activities take over these kids’ lives.” It’s only rarely that the activity is done for its own sake, let alone for any joy it brings. (Remember that when anxiety rather than joy or other positive emotion becomes the impetus for a behavior, the behavior qualifies as compulsive.) If you find yourself at a recreational soccer or baseball game, ask some of the kids—especially the benchwarmers—why they’re there. “I love soccer” or “I love baseball” is usually a distant runner-up to “I have to do extracurricular activities to get into college.” If the parent feels more driven to get the child to take music lessons, do volunteer work, make a sports team, captain the debating squad, and edit the yearbook than the child, it’s anxiety once removed, or compulsion by proxy.
Michele’s anxiety-driven compulsion to work began in grade school. “I was constantly trying to get attention by getting great grades. I got the message that you’re worthwhile if you produce. In college I worked as a waitress, where the faster you move the more you get done and the more you make.” To minimize downtime, which made her so anxious it felt as if her body were trying to jump out of its skin, she scheduled appointments too close together, forcing her to speed from one to the next. “I was constantly moving,” she said. “If I sat down to watch a movie I immediately jumped up again. I couldn’t sit and relax. I couldn’t watch TV unless I was also doing something else. I couldn’t read unless it was work-related or I was learning something—unless I felt I was accomplishing something. Even on vacation I made sure we were constantly scheduled—I was always saying Come on, come on, we have to go to the beach or the tennis court or on the tour.” For Michele, the “just right” feeling that drives people with OCD didn’t come from aligning photo frames or intoning magic numbers. It came from plunging into work.
Absent work, anxiety fills the compulsive doer’s every pore, as I heard one sunny September morning. I had driven up to West Point to meet Bruce for brunch at the historic Thayer Hotel, an impressive pile of stone overlooking the military academy’s track and field facility. We settled into a table with a breathtaking view of the Hudson River.
Even as a child, Bruce worked compulsively, driven by a need to best his brother and get the attention of his parents and other adults. “Whatever he did, I had to do better,” he said. It started when his brother was a Cub Scout. Bruce missed the age cutoff by a few weeks, which goaded him. When the den held a paper drive—yes, there was a time before recycling when Boy Scouts collected papers—Bruce’s unofficial hoard dwarfed everyone else’s; he still has the photo showing him perched atop a nine-foot-high pile. By high school he was running community youth groups, church fellowship groups, political groups, Boy Scout troops, “and every school group except the Girls Athletic Association,” Bruce told me, all driven by his own Age of Anxiety: an almost existential angst that came from wondering, Does my life matter? Is there any record that I was here? He lettered in baseball, football, and basketball; his photograph appears in his high school yearbook sixty-six times. He had figured out how to make his life leave an impression.
After law school, he took a job in a district attorney’s office in a rural community. “I could stay at the office until two or three in the morning every night, and I did,” Bruce recalled. “I’d go into the empty grand jury room and put twenty-three stacks of legal files on the twenty-three empty jurors’ chairs, working on twenty-three cases at a time. . . . It gave me a real status in the legal community. I prided myself on working longer, harder, smarter, better, and faster than anyone else in the office.” Striving to gain recognition and money “was what I had been all about since I was eight,” he said. “I created the vision of a super-competent, overachieving, powerful, highly respected worker. And I achieved that vision.”
Even after his compulsion to work led his wife to divorce him, “I’d bring home briefcases full of papers,” he recalled. “When my second wife said we have to move far away enough from my office that I couldn’t work until ten every night and go in every weekend, I’d work the property: my mind had to be fully engaged, even if I didn’t get any kudos for clearing a three-acre field. It wasn’t about the praise; it was keeping my mind working all the time. I had to keep mentally active. If I didn’t, I felt like climbing the walls.” An almost palpable twitchiness flooded him when he was not working, as if slacking off even slightly would erase his existence.
Batter Up . . . and Other Superstitions
It is the same twitchiness that drives some of society’s most public compulsions: those on athletic fields. George Gmelch, who played first base in the minor leagues for the Detroit Tigers organization in the 1960s, became interested in anthropology after he retired, and so combined his two loves: studying rituals in baseball the way other anthropologists study the rituals of exotic tribes. Gmelch was especially struck by a classic study of the Trobriand Islanders, who inhabit the Kiriwina Islands off the coast of New Guinea. Anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski had studied how the Trobrianders fished in both an inner lagoon, where fish were plentiful, and on the open sea, where yields were unpredictable. The islanders rarely invoked magic before lagoon fishing, where they believed their haul reflected their knowledge and skill, Malinowski observed in his 1922 opus Argonauts of the Western Pacific. But in the open sea, they used every magical ritual their ancestors had handed down to them, believing it would ensure their safety and increase their catch.
Gmelch saw parallels to the Trobrianders’ fishing rituals in baseball. Pitching and hitting each involve both a high degree of skill and a considerable amount of chance. A pitcher’s best pitch may be walloped out of the park, while his worst pitch may be smacked on a direct line to a fielder’s glove for a double play. Similarly, a hitter might get great wood on the ball only to see the laser shot caught by a speeding outfielder, or the opposite: barely make contact with the ball yet see a bloop fall in for a three-run double. Pitching and hitting are thus a bit like fishing in the open sea. Fielding, in contrast, is (save for the occasional bad bounce) almost pure skill—baseball’s version of fishing in the lagoon. And just like Trobriand fishermen, Gmelch found, baseball players call on magic in situations where Lady Luck can smack down talent like a typhoon can wallop the best fisherman: in hitting and pitching, not fielding.
For years third baseman Wade Boggs, who hit for both average and power during his years with the Boston Red Sox and then the New York Yankees in the 1980s and 1990s, ate chicken before every game, Gmelch wrote in his 1992 essay “Superstition and Ritual in American Baseball,”III which appeared in Elysian Fields Quarterly. Chicago White Sox shortstop Ozzie Guillen didn’t wash his shorts after he had a good game at the plate. After every win San Francisco Giants pitcher Ron Bryant added a stick of bubblegum to the stash in his back pocket. Minor league pitcher Jim Ohms of the Daytona Beach Islanders added a penny to his jock strap after each win, so that by the end of a successful season his every dash to first base to run out an infield grounder was accompanied by a bizarre jingling. One minor league catcher had a three-hit game one evening, kept wearing the shirt he had on, and had a pretty good week at the plate. “Then the weather got hot as hell, eighty-five degrees and muggy, but I would not take that shirt off,” he told Gmelch. “I wore it for another ten days, and people thought I was crazy.” Yankee great Mickey Mantle compulsively tagged second base en route to or from center field. Another player was more precise: he tagged third base as he jogged back to the dugout, but only after innings that were multiples of three. Outfielder John White told Gmelch that he was jogging out to center at the start of a game and picked up a scrap of paper. He hit well that night “and I guess I decided that the paper had something to do with it. The next night I picked up a gum wrapper and had another good night at the plate . . . I’ve been picking up paper every night since.”
Pitchers have a reputation for being both cerebral and neurotic, and who can blame them, playing a position so painfully depen
dent on backup from eight other guys? Minor league pitcher Dennis Grossini, one of Gmelch’s teammates in the Tigers organization, got up at precisely ten a.m. every day he was scheduled to start a night game. Three hours later he stopped in the nearest restaurant for two glasses of iced tea and a tuna fish sandwich. He then changed into the sweatshirt and jock strap he wore the last time he won, and an hour before game time put a chaw of Beech-Nut chewing tobacco into his cheek. On the mound, he touched the letters of the team name on his uniform after each pitch and straightened his cap after each ball. After every inning in which the opposition scored, he washed his hands. “I’d be afraid to change anything,” Grossini told Gmelch. “As long as I’m winning, I do everything the same. . . . When I can’t wash my hands, it scares me going back to the mound. I don’t feel quite right.”
It isn’t just baseball players, of course; rituals are ubiquitous in sports. One reason is that success and failure are unambiguous and close to instantaneous. That makes it easy to associate an action with a good or bad outcome, even if, logically, that action has no effect on performance. When tennis great Rafael Nadal takes the court, he sets up his water bottles according to a ritual known only to him, picks up his towels in a certain order, adjusts his gait with a little hitch or shuffle to avoid stepping on lines and pulls at his shorts before he serves. During changes of side, when the players sit briefly on sideline chairs, Nadal shakes his legs as if he is getting ants off them. When he walks back onto the court he zigzags and then, reaching the baseline, hops like a kangaroo. Through ritual, Gmelch wrote, a player “seeks to gain control over his performance”—just as the regular mortal with a compulsive personality uses crazy rules to gain control over his world.
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