When the Pros become Cons in people with obsessive-compulsive disorder.

Although descriptive psychopathology of obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) is well-established, this disorder still presents very enigmatic and puzzling aspects. Hence the usefulness for further contributions to better clarify the picture. For example, one of the most problematic manifestations of OCD consists in pathological doubt, whose origin, however, remains unclear.

How obsessive doubts about the past differ from ordinary ones.

Obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) still presents several enigmatic aspects, especially when viewed only from a third-person perspective. Instead, things become more comprehensible if we try to reconstruct the patient's first-person point of view. In this paper, an analysis of obsessive doubts about the past, illustrated by clinical examples, allows us to show that obsessive doubts, unlike ordinary ones, do not arise from insufficient knowledge of what happened.

The role of the Retrospective Identification of Motivations and Inclinations in explaining obsessive beliefs.

While psychopathological phenomena of obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) have been well described some time ago, instead there is still need for a deeper understanding of mechanisms underlying psychopathological phenomena themselves. About this, a recently proposed concept - the 'Retrospective Identification of Motivations and Inclinations' (RIMI) - seems to have a promising explanatory capacity about different aspects of obsessive-compulsive disorder. For example, as shown elsewhere, it appears to shed new light on the so-called 'fear of self' in OCD.

A process that can throw light on the so-called ‘fear of self’ in obsessive-compulsive disorder: the Retrospective Identification of Motivations and Inclinations.

In recent years, to better understand the psychopathology of Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD), increasing attention has been paid to the so-called ‘fear of self’, that is the fear of people with OCD of housing in their inner unacceptable aspects of Self. However, the exact dynamics of the phenomenon is still unclear: to better clarify it, a specific psychological process, termed Retrospective Identification of Motivations and Inclinations (RIMI), will be described here. When a patient with OCD evaluates his/her inner experience (thought, emotion, imagery, etc.

[Explicative psychopathology in obsessive-compulsive disorder: a postrationalist viewpoint].

While descriptive psychopathology of obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) is now well-established, there is still a lack of a satisfying model of explicative psychopathology that explains the mechanisms that generate obsessive phenomenology. The main attempts to delineate such a model are based on cognitive therapy: according to this approach OCD is a consequence of dysfunctional beliefs (i.e.