1928 Internat. Jrnl. Psycho-anal. 9 17 Where an hysteric will spend endless time consciously rejecting, say, an obscene word, the obsessional will spend the same time in an agony of confusion over a simple nursery phrase.

1945 Brit. Jrnl. Psychol. 35 41 As a group, the obsessionals are distinctly more intelligent than the others.

1963 Listener 14 Mar. 474/3 The soi-disant realist was really just a neurotic old obsessional with an eye for detail.

1978 P. Porter Cost of Seriousness 43 Dangerous modes In all weather when obsessionals walk To a favourite spur above the land.

1991 R. Bocock Freud & Mod. Society (BNC) 17 It is here that psychoanalysis has had its most poular appeal, seeming to explain why some obsessionals continually need to wash their hands..or why some people are afraid to go out of the house.

1857 National Mag. 2 304 Pieces of obsessional, or siege money issued by private individuals.

1898 Mind 7 250 The author..finds that they [sc. kinds of suicide] fall into four groups—maniacal suicide, melancholic suicide, obsessional suicide and impulsive suicide.

1913 E. Jones Papers on Psycho-anal. v. 126 Krafft-Ebing maintained the independence of obsessional states.

1928 Daily Tel. 24 Apr. 7/1 A form of neurasthenia, which had produced an obsessional insanity.

1940 Mind 49 370 Thus with obsessional duties, ‘I must go and make sure I have turned out the lights, turned off the taps,..made sure of security’.

1954 M. Fortes in E. E. Evans-Pritchard Inst. Primitive Society vii. 89 There are the individuals with obsessional and paranoiac fears whose fantasies about themselves..sound like morbid caricatures of primitive beliefs.

1973 ‘R. Lewis’ Of Singular Purpose vi. 139 There was only one word to describe Paul Mercereau's interest in Van Rijk. It was obsessional.

2000 Times 3 Sept. 15/2 Both these drugs are very useful in treating obsessional traits.

1918 E. Jones Papers on Psycho-anal. (ed. 2) xxx. 515 A detailed study of the obsessional neurosis.

1983 C. R. Badcock Madness & Modernity v. 94 In the past such external supports of the superego..might have contributed to the unresolved Oedipal conflict expressing itself as a typical hysteria or obsessional neurosis.

1932 Jrnl. Royal Anthropol. Inst. 62 206 I would conclude that where the same scene is re-enacted time after time the playing out may be compared with the rituals of obsessional neurotics.

1935 Jrnl. Nerv. & Mental Dis. 81 43 Certain obsessional-neurotic character traits.

1983 Psychol. Med. 13 813/1 Not only anxiety but also hostility and depression were important elements in the emotion which obsessional neurotics experienced.