We often confuse and conflate obsession with attention.
We think that obsession is just exaggerated attention, but it is not.
Obsession is actually the exact opposite of attention. They are mutually exclusive.
Let's start with the fact that obsession is not about someone else. It's about you. Only about you.
Obsession is when you are overwhelmed by involuntary, imaginary, and intrusive dreams, wishes, fantasies or desires.
Notice the cumulative conditions and elements. Obsession is involuntary. You cannot help it. It just happens.
You are not in control. You are not the master of the obsession. The obsession is your master.
Second element, imagination. Obsession is imaginative.
It's a kind of extended daydreaming or fantasizing, and it includes narratives about the future.
Obsession is usually future-oriented.
And finally, obsession is intrusive. It takes over. It suspends all other psychological processes.
When you're obsessed, you find it difficult to think about anything except the obsession. Your thoughts are deactivated. Your emotions are channeled narrowly like laser focus onto the obsession.
But again, it's very important to understand that you are not obsessed about the subject of your obsession.
The subject of your obsession always comes second. The subject of your obsession is in the background.
What you're obsessed about is your interaction with the subject of your obsession, your role in the interplay with the subject of your obsession.
The emotions, thoughts, wishes, fantasies and desires evoked by the subject of your obsession in you.
Obsession is self-directed actually. The subject of the obsession is a kind of catalyst.
The subject of the obsession triggers in you psychological processes and you become addicted to these processes. You can't let go. You develop a special committed, invested relationship not with the subject of your obsession, but with the obsession about your subject.
So the relationship is between you and the obsession, not between you and the subject of the obsession. That's why people who obsess can obsess about anything and anyone at any given moment.
They obsess in principle, you just happen to be there.
And the obsession is very detailed, very imaginative. It's an act of creativity. It's a form of art.
And because it's involuntary and intrusive, it is perceived by the obsessed person to be inevitable as a kind of signal from the universe, something that is doomed to happen.
The obsession leads, therefore, to compulsion, compulsive acts.
And so this is obsession, where you are at the center of this process.
And you use people around you or situations or objects or places. You can be obsessed about anything in principle. You use these as triggers because you need to experience the obsession time and again.
It's intense. It's colorful, makes you feel alive.
The obsession drowns out your depression, your anxiety, and other negative effects, other negative emotions.
The obsession is in a state of heightened vividness. You feel that every cell in your body is reactive, is mobilized, and the obsession is a state of utmost arousal, excitement, and even one could say nirvana or enlightenment.
So obsession is a key element in, for example, religion, in political ideologies, because they mobilize you.
These collective theories or collective actions mobilize you. They mobilize you via mechanisms of obsession.
So this is obsession.
Attention is the exact opposite of obsession.
Attention is when your focus is on the other, on another person, not on you.
Attention is voluntary. Obsession is not voluntary.
You decide to pay attention. You can't decide to turn your obsession on or off. It has a life of its own.
So while attention is voluntary and focused on the other, it is distinct from obsession, because your attention is geared towards what others are telling you, what they're communicating to you.
Attention, therefore, has a lot to do with communication. It is a prerequisite for efficacious communication, but it is also an integral part of communication.
While obsession is the exact opposite of communication and the exact opposite of attention, obsession is a kind of attention deficit.
When you're obsessed, you divorce from reality. You are no longer fully embedded in life and in the world.
Your mind wonders. You're not in control of your mind.
So you are unable to gather information and data from the environment or from other people, and you are unable to pay attention to communication when you're obsessed.
When you're obsessed, everything is directed inwards.
When you're attentive, when you're paying attention, everything is directed outwards.
When you're obsessed, you're focused on you. You're focused on your interactions with the subject of the obsession.
When you're paying attention, when you're being attentive, you're focused on the other and not on your interactions with the other, and definitely not on you.
If you're focused on you, you're not paying attention.
When you're obsessed, you're unable to maintain attention in communication because you are too focused. You're too focused on and you're too immersed in your obsession.
Only your obsession exists. You don't.
Let me read to you the definitions of obsession and attention, and you will immediately notice the differences.
From the American Psychological Association Dictionary.
Obsession. A persistent thought, idea, image or impulse that is experienced as intrusive or inappropriate and results in marked anxiety, distress or discomfort.
Obsessions are often described as egodystonic, in that they are experienced as alien or inconsistent with one's self and outside one's control.
Though in children, this is not necessarily the case.
Common obsessions include repeated thoughts about contamination, a need to have things in a particular order or sequence, repeated doubts, aggressive or horrific impulses, sexual imagery, and this is not a complete list of course.
There is also, now it's me, not the dictionary. There's also obsession about another person. This is known as erotomania. Erotomania includes an element of obsession, an element of delusion, and an element of compulsion.
Back to the dictionary, obsessions can be distinguished from excessive worries about everyday occurrences, in that they are not concerned with real-life problems.
The response to an obsession is often an effort to ignore or suppress the thought or impulse, or to neutralize it by a compulsion, which leads, of course, to an obsessive compulsive disorder.
Now, you immediately can see that this has nothing to do with attention.
Here's the definition of attention.
A state in which cognitive resources are focused on certain aspects of the environment, and the central nervous system is in a state of readiness to respond to stimuli.
Because it has been presumed that human beings do not have an infinite capacity to attend to everything, focusing on certain items at the expense of others, much of the research in this field has been devoted to discerning which factors influence attention, and to understanding the neural mechanisms that are involved in the selective processing of information.
For example, past experience affects perceptual experience. We notice things that have meaning for us.
And some activities, for example, reading require conscious participation.
Attention, therefore, is voluntary.
However, attention can also be captured, directed in an involuntary manner, by qualities of stimuli in the environment, such as intensity, movement, repetition, contrast, and novelty.
Attention is a survival tool. It is a positive adaptation. It allows us to filter outunnecessary data, irrelevant information.
Obsession does exactly the opposite.
Obsession incorporates, forces upon us, information and data that are not conducive to survival, that are not useful and not relevant.
And the obsession is aggressive.
Obsession is a form of internalized aggression. It doesn't let us go. It denies us any control over a variety of internal processes.
And finally, it forces us to act the way a puppet master activates a marionette or a puppet.