Pedantism and magic. Rudnev V.P.

The new book of the famous Russian psychologist and philosopher is devoted to the analysis of the most mysterious mental illness, which Freud called the neurosis of obsessive states, and modern clinical psychiatry-obsessive-compulsive disorder.

What is the riddle? A lot of them. The most important thing is in the title of the book. These people, who are also called Anankasians (from ancient Greek Ananke - fate), in a strange way combine extreme punctuality, on the one hand, and superstition, a magical impact on reality - on the other. Freud set the second riddle in the book “Totem and Tabu”, where he introduced the concept of omnipotence of thought among “obsessive neurotics”. How do they know the future? How do they know the time of their awakening? Somehow, for example, in a dream, they fall into the future, then come back and make their amazing predictions.

The book is unusual in that the theoretical thoughts of the philosopher are combined with the clinical experience of a therapist. So, in the chapter “Microanalysis”, the author offers on the basis of the original concept of the work of an unconscious psychotherapeutic method of treating hypomanic disorders, which lasts 17 seconds. In the last chapter, “Magic Implication” gives a contributive picture of the world, in which the reality of the obsessive-commentary personalities does not appear as a disorder of the psyche, but as a different and more perfect way to see and understand the world.

The book is written in a lively and fascinating language , It will be interesting not only to psychiatrists, psychologists and psychotherapists, but also to philosophers, linguists, culturalists, all readers interested in the problems of the human psyche.