Explaining what the word "obsession" means, Russian experts note that it is the submission of the human mind to some thought, to longing. Studies of the 70s of the 20th century showed that 74% of people are obsessed in one way or another. But what this obsession is and what to do has been described differently by religious figures for centuries.
In religion
In Christianity, it was believed that the possessed person obeys the spirit, demon, devil. And they connected the meaning of the word “obsession” with the infliction of evil due to the infusion into the human body of a kind of supernatural being that controls it from a distance.
In urban legends
Echoes of such beliefs are preserved in urban legends. In them the signs, symptoms of obsession were similar. They associated with the belief in the transmigration of the souls of the dead, animals into inanimate objects.
In psychiatry
A scientific explanation of what obsession is is psychiatry. It is the name of a group of states in which a person feels that his will and mind are subordinate to some external force. In different patients, different phenomena can play the role of this power - an alternative person, “spirits” and so on. This is a form of psychosis or delirium.
Symptoms
The main symptom of a person's obsession is the loss of a sense of identity. The patient ceases to be aware of the surrounding reality. His behavior is changing. Signs of obsession are a limited range of movements, loss of body control, seizures, body temperature disorders, changes in voice tones, and so on. Diagnosis of the disease in this case is complicated: a fairly wide range of diseases is accompanied by such manifestations.
Types of Obsession
Ignorant people for obsession can take schizophrenia. Schizophrenics are characterized by hallucinations. When there are signs of a person’s obsession, he feels that an evil entity is nearby, suffering from strange ideas and so on.
In epileptic seizures, people may exhibit incoherent verbal flow. And after them, a person may feel that he has received some spiritual experience, remember his visions.
Uncontrolled speech in patients with Tourette’s syndrome is often considered a sign of obsession. Such patients give out streams of speech, accompanied by sudden movements. Often there is a case when a person gives foul language, without controlling it. And such a manifestation is included in the concept of obsession with many people.
Patients with bipolar disorder often suffer from mood swings. They can become aggressive misanthropes. If the patient has a multiple personality, he can unknowingly change it from one to another.
Symptoms of hysteria fall under the religious definition of obsession. This is a neurosis in which disorders of an affective, vegetative nature are observed. And such a person seeks to attract the attention of others in all available ways.
State of obsession
To better understand what this obsession is, it’s worth imagining an experience in which a person perceives his gestures, voice, as belonging to someone else. As a rule, we are talking about their manifestations with negative characteristics. There is a sense of intrusion from the outside or external control. These external forces are usually unfriendly, hostile and disturbing. Sometimes they speak of a demon inside. Doctors often come across voices in the patient’s head.
The mechanism of occurrence of this unusual and difficult to explain phenomenon is associated with the separation of some part of the "I" and its suppression in the subconscious. Types of obsession differ in varying degrees. Obsessive states are the result of a painful, traumatic life experience, most often maltreatment in childhood, and are considered a creative way to resolve difficult situations.
People experiencing this type of crisis have a clear feeling that their soul and body have been captured and controlled by beings or energies that differ in their individual personal characteristics. They perceive the "invaders" as a hostile and disruptive element that has fallen from outside to them. It seems to them that a creature without a body acts in them, a demonic entity or an evil person who captured them with the help of black magic.
Understanding the definition of obsession, you need to consider that it is characterized by serious manifestations of both an antisocial and a criminal nature: aggression, depression, sexual licentiousness, excessive use of alcohol and drugs. Only after the start of psychotherapy does the obsession with the face begin to fade.
During the experience of seizures, the patient may suddenly start to cramp, show a semblance of a devilish face, roll his eyes to give a wild expression to his face. Hands and body twitch in strange poses, the voice changes completely, it sounds as if from another world.
Amazingly, this may resemble the experience of “exorcism” in the Christian church or the rites of expelling evil spirits in various indigenous cultures. An attack often goes away only after a sharp vomiting, violent physical activity or even a temporary loss of control. These conditions can also have a healing, transforming character, sometimes leading to a deep spiritual transformation of the face. This is characteristic of epileptics.
Sometimes an obsessed person thinks a lot about the presence of alien creatures and struggles to resist them. This situation arises completely spontaneously in everyday life - in the form described. Then, as a rule, this is accompanied by severe fears, and the patient feels despair: relatives, friends and often even doctors have a tendency to reject it.
They react to the behavior of an obsessed person with a strange mixture of fear and moral condemnation. Often such people were called intermediaries of evil forces, they were refused to enter into any contact with them.
The disgusting archetype is a transpersonal entity, it is a negative mirror image of the divine. It often seems that this is a paranormal phenomenon. A person who can not be intimidated by the unusual nature of this condition can help the patient, which will be able to maintain the patient's full consciousness in order to dispel his sense of negative energy. So there are cases of healing.
Obsession: devil or mental illness?
Scientists and proponents of a religious view of the problem have argued that this is obsession. The story of the most famous obsessed in history - Anna Lisa is indicative. She was born in a Bavarian village in 1952. Her whole family was a believer, a girl was brought up in Catholic traditions.
Her large family had a tradition that one of the family members must have worked in the spiritual sphere. The young girl was really close to faith in God. Prayers and church visits were in her first place, and the omission of these actions should have had good reason. Anna Lisa was a very successful girl in a local gymnasium, and her teachers remember her as a modest and smart girl. Already while studying at the gymnasium, she wanted to become a teacher. Continuing education at the Faculty of Education for this girl was the key. She was destined to shed light on the world that this is an obsession. And also open a new milestone in the study of this phenomenon.
The onset of the disease
To understand that this is an obsession, it makes sense to consider how such an ailment develops on a classic example - the documented story of Anna-Lisa. Already during her studies at the gymnasium, her first problems began to appear. First, the girl appeared mood swings, aggression or depression. It took quite a while for parents and teachers to do this because she never clashed in the team. She was a pretty quiet girl, whom no one paid much attention to. However, it has never been proven that she became the object of bullying or humiliation by classmates or anyone else that could affect her psychological problems.
A more serious interest in her health condition manifests itself only after she overcame her first epileptic seizure. Prior to this, the girl complained of frequent headaches, was disgusted with food, suffered from insomnia, but there were more terrible symptoms. She heard strange sounds and voices that no one else heard, complained that she began to see unfamiliar faces in a dream and in reality. Hallucinations prevented her, very often she complained of disgusting smells that no one felt. Anna-Lisa said that she was surrounded by dark forces that frighten him so that sometimes she cannot even catch her breath.
Research results
Neurological, psychological and psychiatric manifestations disappeared after overcoming the first epileptic seizure. Together with him at the same moment several other health problems appeared, so she was subjected to analysis and treatment. Long-term treatment has not yielded any results. The doctors could not explain the changes in her health, but since the seizure was epileptic, the doctors prescribed her a remedy for this disease.
In the end, she managed to successfully complete her studies at the Faculty of Education. In the first year at the university, an epileptic seizure repeated. The attack was even stronger than the first time. Her health condition deteriorated significantly, inflammation of the pleura and lungs began. Therefore, Anna Lisa had to postpone her teaching duties, and the girl did not yet know that she would not return to the university.
Analyzes did not reveal serious problems. Anne-Lise was diagnosed with an epileptic disorder. During attacks, the patient falls ill and experiences a clouding of consciousness, the attack is accompanied by severe spasms and tension of the nervous system, his limbs can tremble, twitch in an unnatural way. After the patient remains disoriented.
It was these symptoms that were in the attacks of Anna Lisa, so the doctors chose this diagnosis. The only mystery was that outside the seizures there were no signs (both physiological and psychological) of epilepsy. As already mentioned, her examination showed no symptoms of the disease, and in fact the girl was healthy. Doctors made a helpless gesture regarding the nature of her condition. Soon the wanderings from doctor to doctor became fatal for her psyche. She fell into even greater depression, her deterioration in attitude towards professionals, even close ones, was observed. Her condition worsened rapidly. During visions, she began to observe demons. They chased her.
Doctors initially believed that these visions were caused by hallucinations, but after other studies, no pathological personality disorders were detected. Visions came to be seen as her fantasies. Psychology considers our imagination in the process of personality development as something useful, but sometimes it can lead to a separation from reality, and the patient can consider the pictures created in the imagination so real that they replace reality with him. Probably, this manifested itself in Anna-Lisa. In 1972, the next attack took place, but medical examinations showed no deviations.
Path to healing
The girl began to seek the path to healing in faith. Depression and aggression showed no signs of improvement. Anna-Lisa complained that she continued to feel as if someone else was looking at her. She saw things and ghosts that no one noticed. She began to pray, and was increasingly convinced that help could only be through spiritual life. Her family believed that this was indeed the only possible way. During a religious pilgrimage in Italy, the girl refused to look at the image of Christ. She became interested in the priest Ernst Alt, who found out that it was an obsession. He began to pray with her. The exorcists were also interested in her, finding out that this was an obsession.
Soon, the girl refused food and liquid, her depression worsened, aggressiveness grew. Voices told her that she was spoiled, damned, and would ultimately burn in hell. Parents began to go to all church institutions in which demons were expelled, and their story reached the Vatican. In 1975, the rite of the expulsion of spirits according to the Roman canon was performed. Anna-Lisa refused food and liquid, during the ritual refused a glass of water, but after a while she drank her own urine from the container.
More and more uncontrollable attacks of rage came out in her when she attacked people around her and objects that came into her arm. Hyperactivity was observed when it began to be thrown into the air and rushed to the ground. The reaction to the ritual of expelling spirits was of varying degrees of intensity and strength. Several times the girl spoke in foreign voices and in foreign languages that she could not learn. The exorcists counted 6 demons in it. They called them Cain, Judas, Nero, Lucifer, Hitler, and there was an unknown demon.
For the period from 1975 to 1976 More than 60 sessions have been held. Some required up to four hours; at least two rituals were performed during the week. Anna-Lisa voluntarily stopped all other types of treatment, the doctors could not convince her of the need for medical treatment. Her parents supported her, and so the obsessed surrendered only to the hands of the exorcists. During the sessions, she cursed Christ and all the saints. Her physical condition was getting worse, but the exorcists continued. During the ritual, the exorcist noticed that most of all Anna-Lisa reacts to holy water, howls and suffers, tries to bite everyone around. They were able to improve her condition by October 1975. Then the visions changed to positive, until finally they stopped completely.
Nevertheless, the girl increasingly said that she could not help. She said that she must die in order to atone for the sins of all young people. Henceforth, she refused the doctor, food and any attempts at treatment. During the priest's visit on June 30, 1976, she whispered, asking for the remission of sin that her holy father had granted her. The next day, July 1, 1976, she exhaled for the last time.
Her story became popular, she is considered a model of stories about obsession. All of it is documented. More than one film has been made in the history of Anna Lisa; the majority of people consider the concept of obsession with it.