Religion of the Obsessive-compulsive: Orphaned Internal Objects

In today's video, we are going to explore the nooks and crannies of the mind of the obsessive patient.

I'm going to put special emphasis on an eerie, sci-fi concept, orphaned, like an orphan's, orphaned internal objects.

But before I go there, many of you have written to me with questions regarding ADHD.

So, to start with, a few years ago, I suggested that there are many commonalities between ADHD and borderline personality disorder, and that narcissistic personality disorder and autism spectrum disorders share many features with ADHD.

I therefore raise the possibility that ADHD underlies all these disorders, yes, including borderline personality disorder and the resulting emotional dysregulation.

So there are quite a few videos, three of them, if I remember correctly, on this channel. There's also a compilation of these videos in the compilation playlist. What else?

And I have uploaded the compilation lately to my nothingness channel, which you can visit and watch.

Okay, so no need to ask me over and over and over again, what about ADHD? How about you searching the channel before you post comments? Thank you for your collaboration.

And apropos obsession compulsion.

My name is Sam Vaknin. I'm the author of Malignant Self-Love: Narcissism Revisited, the first book ever on narcissistic abuse, and I'm also a professor of clinical psychology, which makes me uniquely qualified to discuss obsession. Most psychologists are probably obsessed.

Okay, let's get serious. And down to brass tacks.

You are all acquainted with the concept of internal objects.

Internal objects are representations in the mind of things or people out there in external reality.

When we come across other people, when we come across material physical objects, when we come across ideas and beliefs, and so on so forth, we create representations of these things, placeholders, icons that represent these things, avatars, in our minds.

And so within the mind, there is this giant library, and each volume in the library represents another person, another memory, another belief, another idea, another collective, another experience, etc. These are known as internal objects.

Now in obsessional disorders, in disorders which involve obsession compulsion, the internal objects are actually the patient's cognitions.

Whereas a healthy person generates internal objects on the fly to represent external reality, the obsessional patient generates internal objects to represent internal reality, and especially the patient's thoughts, known clinically, as cognitions.

In the obsessional patient, cognition, cognitive processes are represented as interactions between internal objects. This is known in object relations theory as identification.

Okay.

So we have a situation where the person with obsession compulsion, and there are gradations, of course, of obsessive-compulsive disorders.

You could be just obsessive-compulsive, you could have a disorder or you could have a personality disorder involving obsession compulsion.

Obsession in principle is when your mind is infiltrated and infested with unwanted thoughts, intrusive thoughts. Thoughts you cannot control, you cannot ignore. You cannot annihilate. You cannot refrain.

These thoughts keep flooding you, attacking you, immersing you, drowning you, overwhelming you, and there's nothing you can do about it. That's obsession.

So some people try to fend off these thoughts, to counter them, to somehow harness them or even eliminate them by engaging in rituals.

And these rituals are known as compulsions.

Remember how I opened this video, or at least this segment of the video?

The obsessive patient represents this internal conflict, this battlefield, in terms of internal objects.

In his mind, there's a variety of internal objects divided to camps and they are fighting each other, like a war zone.

The obsessive patient, in a desperate attempt to regain a modicum of control over his internal landscape, his internal space, engages in magical thinking.

In the patient's magical thinking, it involves the conversion of internal objects into external ones.

It's as if the obsessive patient says the internal objects are out of control. They are unruly. They're threatening. There's nothing I can do about them. They're stronger than me.

So what I'm going to do, I'm going to convert these internal objects into external objects. I'm going to throw them out of my mind. I'm going to throw them out of my mind. I'm going to project them. I'm going to catapult them. I'm going to empty my mind of these internal objects because they are not friendly.

And so this is magical thinking.

The belief that anything that happens in your mind has any validity in the outside world, that's magical thinking.

When you believe that your thoughts have impacts on other people, or when you believe that your wishes can come true in reality without any effort or investment or work, these are forms of magical thinking.

The ground of magical thinking, the foundations of magical thinking, involve the conviction that there is no difference in principle between your mind and the universe.

Whatever is happening in your mind is liable to manifest somehow, to express itself in outside reality in the world at large because they are one and the same.

Cognitions are externalized, they're projected onto the world and they become objects, this time external objects.

So the processing obsession is there is an intrusive thought. There is a thought that is overpowering and overwhelming and domineering, a kind of thought that takes over and doesn't allow any other thoughts to occur, monopolizes the cognitive processes.

So there's this kind of thought, intrusive thought.

The obsessive patient converts the intrusive thought into an internal object and then projects the internal object onto the world, pretending that it is not an internal object at all. It is actually an external object.

So cognitions are both externalized and objectified.

And yes, I can see your hands rising.

True. This is very common in psychotic disorders.

In psychosis, we have a phenomenon known as hyper-reflexivity. It's a confusion between internal objects and external ones.

When the psychotic person hears a voice and this voice is actually in his mind, it's a hallucination. The psychotic person believes that the voice is real and coming from the outside.

So the psychotic person in the process of psychosis confuses internal processes, internal dynamics, and internal objects with real life out there, external occurrences, events, people, sounds and images. This is known again as hallucination.

Obsessional people, people with obsession, compulsion disorder, do not hallucinate. It is not a situation where they lose sight of the distinction between reality and fantasy. That's not the case here.

And yet, they mistake internal objects which are tormenting them, which are persecuting them, the sadistic objects. They confuse intrusive thoughts with external objects. They externalize these thoughts and they pretend that these thoughts are coming from the outside, that their minds are infested by some external emanation, not internal one.

The problem is that the internal objects, in the case of the obsessive patient, the internal objects are affected with aggression.

In other words, the internal objects are imbued and suffused and immersed in a sea of aggression.

This process is known as cathexis, emotional investment, psychic energy, in this case aggression.

So when the internal objects are externalized, the aggression is also externalized.

This is well known in psychoanalysis, for example, where there is a process called abreaction.

Abreaction is when the patient gets in touch with repressed memories, especially traumatic memories, and all the energy of these memories erupts at the same time.

The energy of the obsessive patients' internal objects is aggression, is aggressive.

So when the patient externalizes the internal objects, he also externalizes the aggression, which is attendant upon these internal objects, which is an inseparable part of these internal objects, which colors these internal objects.

And so now, when the internal objects have become external objects, they actually become aggressive external objects. Very threatening, very terrifying, very frightening.

It is actually the patient's own aggression, but the patient is unaware of it, unable to understand and comprehend it.

All the patient realizes, all the patient thinks, is that these intrusive thoughts are very, very violent, that they're taking over, that they're out to destroy him or her.

The patient is terrified. It's a horror show unfolding and unfurling internally.

The patient believes that his or her cognitive processes are somehow compromised, somehow infiltrated and invaded by external forces which are hostile enemy forces.

And so this is the state of mind of the obsessive patient. Battlefield, a war zone, aggressive external objects are bad, they're frustrating, they're rejecting, they're uncontrollable, they're menacing.

And because they are bad, by definition, they contain the patient's aggression. The patient's aggression has been projected and externalized when the internal object had become an external one.

So at that moment, the external object is perceived as worthy of punishment or even annihilation.

It's as if the patient says, I recognize these external objects. They're bad. They're hostile. They're frustrating. They're rejecting. They're evil. They are uncontrollable, they are infiltrating my mind, they're invading it with intrusive thoughts, they're taking over, it's a form of mind control, and so I need to destroy these external objects.

At the same time, I need to restore balance, equilibrium, homeostasis and justice. And the only way to restore justice is to get rid of these objects. And then I will have inner peace.

Having punished them, the cosmic order, the cosmic structure will have been restored and reclaimed.

But here's the problem.

The patient develops aggression towards the external object that used to be his own internal objects.

So to remind you of the process, the patient converts uncomfortable cognitions into internal objects.

These internal objects create anxiety and dissonance inside their patient because they are hostile to the patient.

So the patient externalized. The patient pretends that these internal objects are actually coming from the outside, they're external.

But the internal objects that have been externalized carry with them aggression.

So now they are perceived as aggressive, as aggressing against the patient.

And the patient believes that the only way to survive is to destroy these external objects.

But there is no way to destroy these external objects except by being aggressive again.

So it's a vicious cycle. It's a vicious cycle because never mind how much aggression is exported onto the external objects.

The very fact that these external objects are aggressive triggers additional aggression in the patient.

The external objects are perceived as threatening because they decouple the internal objects from the corresponding external ones.

Let me try to explain this notion.

Imagine you have an internal object. Imagine you're an obsessive patient and you have an internal object.

And this internal object is a thought process, a cognitive process. And it's very uncomfortable. It shames you, it attacks you, it criticizes you. You can't live with it. It's intrusive. It takes over. You have no control over it. It erupts at inconvenient moments and it's very embarrassing and so forth.

What to do?

So the obsessive patient converts this into an external object.

And now the external object is aggressive, not the internal one.

But at that moment, the internal object is delinked, disconnected, detached from the external object, because the external object is aggressive, the internal object is inactive, or even if it is, it remains active, is impotent. There's no potency, there's no power, it's powerless.

So now there's a decoupling of the external object from the internal object, and the internal object becomes an orphan.

Remember, in healthy people, all internal objects, all, there's no exception, all internal objectscorrespond one-on-one to external objects. If you have an internal object of your motherinternal objects, correspond one-on-one to external objects. If you have an internal object of your mother, it's because you have had a mother. You've had an external object, a mother. If you have an internal object of your teacher, it's because you have or have had the teacher. If you have an external object of an idea or a belief, it's because this idea and belief exists out there independently of you.

In healthy people, there is no situation where an internal object does not correspond to an external object.

And when this happens, it's a process that I call offening.

Offening is when there is a ghost internal object that has been decoupled from an external object. It does not represent an external object anymore, any longer.

And so these internal objects are in a morbid limbo state akin to zombies and they're looking to find a corresponding external object.

Now the corresponding external object cannot be aggressive, cannot be hostile, cannot be an enemy or external object. The internal object cannot couple itself, cannot connect itself, cannot link itself and cannot interact with and cannot affect an external object which threatens the individual, obviously.

So the internal object remains unattached, disconnected, because all the external objects in the mind of the obsessive are imbued with aggression. They're perceived as hostile and persecutory.

So in the mind of the obsessive, there are disembodied internal objects, orphan internal objects that do not correspond to any external object and there are hostile aggressive violent threatening external objects.

Offening the situation where internal objects do not correspond to external ones.

Offening gives rise to anticipatory existential anxiety.

The internal objects cannot have any impact on the external world because they are not linked to any external object. There's no bridge between an orphan internal object and external reality. Not even an imaginary bridge. Not even a bridge of magical thinking. There's simply no bridge.

Because in the internal map of the mind of the obsessive, internal objects have no correspondence to any external object.

In other words, internal reality has no connection to external reality and therefore, the obsessive person cannot impact external reality in any meaningful way.

Orphan internal objects are solipsistic. They give rise to profound loneliness. They diminish self-efficacy because the obsessive person is unable to act in the environment and on the environment in a way which will guarantee beneficial outcomes.

When your internal objects are orphaned, when they're drifting, when they're zombified, that means you don't have a good grasp of reality. Your reality testing is shot to pieces.

Reality testing means that you have a map, a map of correspondences between your internal objects, for example, your thoughts, memories, and external objects, for example, people, or events or experiences or whatever.

There must be a linkage between out there and in here, outside and inside, external and internal, for you to be able to function in the real world.

When this linkage is broken, when this map is torn apart, when all your internal objects are strictly internal, they are encapsulated in a bubble, they are solipsistic. They don't lead anywhere they don't point anywhere they're not connected to external reality in any way shape or form.

Of course you are disabled as an agent you lose your agency and the resulting emotions, resulting feeling, is life-threatening helplessness and catastrophizing.

If you as an individual are constitutionally incapable of affecting any change in the environment, if you as an individual are incapable of communicating with the outside world, with other people, modifying their behaviors, conveying your wishes and priorities, setting boundaries. If you are not self-efficacious or efficacious in reality this is terrifying this means you're helpless this means that the worst thing may happen to you you catastrophize.

And so this is where rituals come in

When we feel really, really small and really, really, really helpless, we are actually in a state of infancy. We have regressed emotionally to the age of one year old or two years old. We are dependent, totally, on the outside because we have no access and no influence on the outside. We need to interact with reality through the mediation and intercession of other people.

So the child, the one year old child, the two year old child, interacts with reality through the agency of his mother.

Children do not conflict with reality, do not get in touch with reality, do not operate in reality directly. They do it through others, through mother, through father, through others.

And so the obsessive patient is infantilized, is regressed.

Because of the disconnect between internal objects and violent, aggressive external objects, this kind of obsessive person or patient feels terrified.

And then, like a child, like an infant, the obsessive patient seeks someone to depend on, some intermediation, some intercession, some help from the outside.

And this gives rise to rituals.

Religion is constructed exactly on this psychopathology.

In religion, helpless people, weak people, frightened people, seek the intermediation and the intercession of God.

God is a paternal figure or a parental figure.

So they regress. Religion regresses people, renders them infantile.

And as infants, they feel helpless, they catastrophize, and they depend upon parental figures in order to keep them safe and allow them to survive.

Religion is rife with rituals, ceremonies and rituals are also very common in obsession compulsion.

Actually the word compulsion is just another is a synonym it's just another word for rituals.

Rituals are a manifestation of magical thinking.

The rituals, the aim of rituals, the purpose of rituals, is to fend off, to reduce, to ameliorate, and mitigate the anticipatory anxiety.

How?

By absolving the external objects and restoring them.

Now, I have to explain this to you.

Remember that at this stage, the obsessive patient is faced with a conundrum.

There's a group of internal objects. They're orphans. They're not connected to any external reality. They're just wandering around, drifting within the mind space.

And there's a group of external objects which used to be the patient's cognitions. And these external objects are imbued with aggression. They're hostile and persecutory.

And so now the patient feels helpless because the patient cannot use his internal map of internal objects as a key to external reality. Patient has no access to external reality actually. And that's very terrifying.

At this stage the patient becomes an infant. The terror, the catastrophizing, the overpowering fear, render the patient infantile, becomes an infant.

And exactly like an infant, the patient engages in rituals. These rituals are intended to reduce the patient's anxiety by invoking some external power.

In the case of religion, it's God.

In the case of the obsessive patient, what happens is the obsessive patient removes the aggression from the external objects.

In other words, the rituals of the obsessive patient, the compulsive part of the obsession compulsion, the repeated ceremonies, repeated moves, stereotypical moves, and so on. All these are intended to take away the aggression from the external objects and in this way absolve them, they're no longer bad, they're no longer persecutory, they're no longer menacing, and restore them. Restore them essentially by internalizing.

At that point, the ritual counters, negates the threat of the external object by changing the nature of the external object from a malevolent one to a benevolent one.

The ritual as a form of magical thinking has this power, the power to absorb, to purify, to remedy, to restore, and so it changes the nature of reality. The ritual changes the nature of reality. The ritual changes the nature of reality.

When you talk to an obsessive patient and you ask the obsessive patient, why do you keep washing your hands all the time? Or I don't know, why do you keep walking in a funny way? Why do you keep having these rituals?

The obsessive patient would tell you, because if I don't keep these rituals, something really bad is going to happen. Something bad is going to happen to my wife, to my children, to me, something bad is going to happen if I don't maintain religiously these rituals, if I don't repeat exactly the same set of steps at the very moment that they need to be repeated.

So the compulsion, the behavioral aspect of obsession is about fending off, defending against evil, changing the future, impacting the inevitable, rendering it controllable.

The external objects that threaten the patient, the external objects that are aggressive and violent and may, for example, hurt or damage the patient's loved ones or business or whatever it is the patient values.

These external objects, the enemies without, they are now defanged. They are now disabled. They are now deactivated as evil bad objects. They become neutral objects.

And so now reality is less menacing, less threatening, livable, survivable. The ritual has helped to convert reality into an environment where the obsessive patient can somehow survive and function.

Exactly the role of religion.

When people pray to God, they pray to God to do something. They pray to God to effect some change.

And these changes that God supposedly will affect if God listens to their prayers, God will change reality and these changes would render reality more livable, more survivable, more benevolent, more accommodating.

That's exactly, absolutely, precisely, the way an obsessive patient thinks.

I'm going to engage in rituals, and by engaging in rituals, magically, I'm going to take away the aggression and the hatred and the violence and the anger and the envy of the external objects. They're going to become neutral and therefore powerless over me.

In a way, the obsessive patient who engages in these rituals plays the role of Jesus Christ.

Let me try to explain what I've just said. It's quite a mouthful. It's a very complicated subject even for me.

So I just said, I just explained to you that engaging in rituals takes away the aggression, the evil aspects, the threatening dimensions of external objects.

External object is bad, is violent, is aggressive, is threatening, it's hostile, and then you engage in a ritual and the external object is nothing, neutral, indifferent, definitely not hostile, definitely not persecutory, maybe even friendly.

How is this transformation affected? What's the mechanism that takes away the wicked aspects of the external object? What takes away the external object's aggression? What denudes the external object of its violence? What renders the external object innocuous, non-threatening?

Well, when the obsessive person engages in a ritual, the obsessive person takes the external object's aggression onto himself or herself. The obsessive person, through the ritual, assumes the negative aspects of the external object.

It's a very interesting reversal.

Remember that in the obsessive patient's mind, the external objects are actually projected internal objects. The obsessive person reframed internal objects as external objects in order to get rid of them, but they're still internal basically. He just doesn't know it. He's unconscious of it. He's not aware of it.

These objects that he perceives as external, they're essentially internal. They're just relabeled as external.

And so when he externalizes the internal objects, he also externalizes aggression together with the external objects.

And now, through the rituals, he is taking back this aggression from the external objects. He's taking it back.

And by taking it back, he renders the external objects non-threatening. So when the obsessive person experiences the external objects as threats, as potentially damaging, as hurtful, as painful, at that moment, the obsessive person uses ritual to take away these aspects of the external object onto himself. He becomes a sacrificial lamb. He sacrifices himself the way Jesus did, assuming the guilt, the responsibility, the shame, the violence, and the aggression and the sins of the external object.

By decathecting the external objects, by taking back the aggression, the obsessive person actually renders the external environmentnon-threatening, survivable, and solves the problem of anticipatory anxiety and catastrophizing.

But at the same time, the aggression now belongs to the obsessive patient. The aggression through the ritual has returned to its source. It is now again lodged firmly with the internal space of the obsessive patient.

The obsessive patient has absolved the external object, objects. The obsessive patient has restored the external objects as good objects. The obsessive patient got rid of its anxiety and catastrophizing by reframing the external objects as innocuous and innocent and non-threatening.

But there's a price to pay and the price to pay is that the obsessive person or obsessive patient had to reabsorb the aggression and the shame and the guilt. Reabsorbed them.

The only way to absorb the external object is to become a bad internal object, internalized object.

So, obsession has two stages and they involve splitting.

Initially, the obsessive patient says all the bad thoughts, all the intrusive thoughts, all the crazy thoughts I'm having, they're not mine. They're not mine. They're external. And so I'm all good. These external objects are all bad.

But then it's very frightening when you're surrounded by evil external objects. That's terrifying.

So there's the second phase. And the second phase the obsessive patient uses ceremony and ritual to take back the aggression and the shame and the guilt from the external objects back to reabsorb these shame and guilt and aggression but by doing that the obsessive back to reabsorbed this shame and guilt and aggression.

But by doing that, the obsessive patient becomes all bad. Now the external objects are all good and the patient is all bad.

Remember that in phase one, the patient was all good, the external objects were all bad.

Then there is a ritual and the patient is all bad. The external objects are all good. The patient acts as a sacrificial lamb, I said.

That's what I meant when I said that it fulfills the same function that Jesus fulfills in Christian dogma and theology.

The patient kind of absolves God, if you wish.

Absolving God is a critical and integral feature of all religions. God is pure. God is all good. God is magnanimous. God is forgiving. God is merciful. God is benevolent.

We are wicked. We are sinful. We are imperfect. We are flawed. We should repent.

We assume the aggression and possibly the malevolence of this external entity which is actually invented by us. It's a projection of an internal object.

So we assume its malevolence and possibly evilness and possibly wickedness and possibly aggression. We assume that.

We say, God is all good, we are all bad. It's a primitive, infantile psychological defense mechanism.

And so God is this internal object, a cognitive process, that we then externalize.

We pretend, we lie to ourselves that it is indeed an external object, that it exists, and then we split.

This external object that we had created by projecting our internal processes, this external object is perfection and we are in need of this external object in order to render the world less threatening and less hostile.

And how do we interface with this external object? How do we interact and communicate with it?

Via rituals, via prayer, via sacrifices, via ceremonies. It's the classical structure of obsessive compulsive disorder.

By internalizing the aggression, the patient actually self-annihilates as a good object.

The patient, by absorbing the bad vibes of the external objects, the patient becomes an internalized bad object. He develops a kind of primary superego to use Straits and Freud's term or a moral defense in Fairbairn's.

The patient says I'm not under any threat from the outside because now I'm the owner of all the aggression and all the violence and because I'm the owner of all the aggression of all the violence, which I've taken away from the external objects, I use rituals and magic to take away this aggression and violence and shame and guilt. And now I own all of them.

So there's no threat from the outside, but again there's a threat from the inside.

Because if you as an individual, you are the repository of so much negativity, so much evil, so much aggression and shame and guilt, then you are a bad person. You are unworthy. Something's wrong with you. You are defective and flawed.

And the cycle starts again. Intrusive thoughts, etc.

That's why Freud used the term repetition. Obsession compulsion is a cycle that cannot be broken because it has only two solutions and both solutions are dysfunctional.

The first solution the patient can say, I'm all good, reality is all bad, but that's very frightening.

And the second solution is to say, reality is all good, I don't need to be afraid, but I'm all bad. And that's also very frightening. It may cause emotional dysregulation, suicidal ideation. Who wants to feel all bad? No one does.

And so when the patient reabsorbs the aggression and the shame and the guilt from the external object, the patient himself becomes the aggressor. The patient himself or herself becomes the abuser.

Ferenczi called it identifying with the aggressor.

But in the case of the obsessive patient, when the patient identifies with the aggressor, he is actually identifying with himself, with his own aggressive, abusive self. The obsessive patient is his or her, own abuser, own aggressor, own tormentor. It all comes from the inside.

The patient renders himself or herself, all bad, so as to restore the world into its essential goodness.

And then, unable to survive, unable to accept that he or she is evil, the evil or the aggression or the shame or the guilt are projected outside and the world becomes terrified and the cycle starts all over again.

Absorbing or reabsorbing the negativity from the external objects, this solution just shifts the aggression from an external locus to an internal one.

And the aggression then finds its way back into the external objects via the agency of the internal objects with magical thinking.

So the cycle starts all over again.

The need to cleanse the world, to expunge the world periodically of this emanated projected aggression that attaches to external objects, this need gives rise to the compulsion.

Compulsion is desperate. Compulsion is an expression of helplessness.

It's like a Sisyphian work. It never ends. It never leads anywhere.

Because what to do with the aggression?

If I attribute it to the external world, I'm in danger. If I attribute it to myself, I am not worth living.

Both solutions suck. Both solutions make matters worse. Both solutions increase dissonance and anxiety. And both solutions involve very powerful, strong elements of psychosis, if left untreated with no intervention and no medication.

Obsessive compulsive disorders aggravate over time and devolve into other forms, other mental illnesses such as psychotic disorder.

The tortured landscape, inner landscape disorder. The tortured landscape, inner landscape, the tortured mind and if you wish, soul of the obsessive patient is such that he feels entrapped. There's no way out. There's no resolution. No use of rationality or magical thinking would be of any help here.

No regression to infancy orassuming the chores of an adult. Nothing. Nothing works.

Nothing works because at the core of obsession compulsion there is aggression, an aggression. Someone has to own this aggression. It belongs to someone.

And now who does it belong to? The patient or the world? The world or the patient? The patient or the world? It's like a tennis game. And the balls are the aggression.

To treat obsession compulsion efficaciously, we need to deal with the core issue of aggression and what to do with it.

Ritualizing aggression, projecting aggression, assuming aggression, autoplastic defenses, all these don't work.

The only way to get rid of aggression is to get rid of aggression.

Transforming it, transmuting it, shape-shifting it, you know, moving it around. These are not solutions. These are make-belief. It's delusional.

There needs to be an attempt to take the aggression head-on, deconstruct it, defang it, and render it impotent, take away its power, because otherwise the obsession compulsion continues for life, it's a lifelong affliction and becomes worse and worse and worse until the patient completely withdraws from reality and ultimately may become psychotic.

We also find obsessive-compulsive features, very pronounced one, in very serious personality disorders such as narcissistic personality disorder.

Magical thinking devolves easily into obsession compulsion.

And so treating obsession compulsion may have unexpected beneficial outcomes when it comes to other mental illnesses.

Now many of you who take issue with my claim that religion is a psychopathology, a form of obsession compulsion.

This is the nature of truth. It's unpleasant and uncomfortable.

But if you look in the mirror and if you reconsider religion in terms of the framework that I've just provided you with, I think you will see the similarities because religion deals with evil which is a form of aggression and religion has rituals which are very common in obsession compulsion and there is infantile belief that rituals coupled with magical thinking coupled with an intercession or intimidation of some supreme being, a parental figure, god, whatever, could somehow lead to a resolution.

And it never works. It never works. That's why religion is a lifelong practice and pursuit because it sucks as a solution.