Subscribe
Share
Share
Embed
For five years The Healthy Compulsive Project has been offering information, insight and inspiration for OCPD, obsessive-compulsive personality, perfectionism, micro-managers and Type A personality. Anyone who’s ever been known to overwork, overplan, overcontrol or overanalyze is welcome here, where the obsessive-compulsive personality is explored and harnessed to deliver what it was originally meant to deliver. Join psychotherapist, Jungian psychoanalyst and author Gary Trosclair as he delves into the pitfalls and potential of the driven personality with an informative, positive, and often playful approach to this sometimes-vexing character style.
Hello everyone, Gary Trosclair here, psychotherapist, Jungian psychoanalyst, and author of the Healthy Compulsive Project book, blog and podcast. Since summertime may be the only time you get to read, today we’re going to talk about two books and films which both make for good reading, can show us something about ourselves, and inspire us to do well. Good literature does that. Swedish novelist Fredrik Backman’s books, I think are especially good at that. He’s taken an interest in mental health issues and writes about them so well you forget he’s helping you to understand them. His novels, A Man Called Ove, and Britt-Marie Was Here, both portray the pitfalls and positive potential of the obsessive-compulsive personality. I’ve found them both entertaining and encouraging.
So join me for episode 94 of the Healthy Compulsive Project Podcast: Two Novels about Perfectionists Sure to Entertain and Inspire You.
Rarely does an example of obsessive compulsive personality disorder come across so purely as it does in Swedish novelist Fredrik Backman’s moving novel A Man Called Ove. The novel has also been made into a film, and the story succeeds in both mediums. (Since I first wrote this there is now a new, English version with Tom Hanks, which is also quite good. They renamed it A Man Called Otto.) It reveals the lovable underside of the compulsive personality, and it also shows how tragic it is when compulsivity comes to define the personality exclusively.
I loved reading and watching it and I’ll tell you why. But first meet Ove.
Contents
A Man Called Ove: Grumpy Yet Endearing
Trading Music for Machines
Tragedy: Ove Loses His Soul
Redemption and the Compulsive Personality
A Man Called Ove: Grumpy Yet Endearing
Ove is a grumpy, middle-aged guy who’s lost both his job and his beloved wife Sonja in the space of six months. Without them he’s lost now, too.
Ove is radically practical, militantly frugal, and combatively caring. He’s all about doing the right thing. Rules. Laws. Ordinances. He always drives the speed limit. As Packman writes, “Ove does things the way they’re supposed to be done.” He’s never taken a sick day in his life.
Ove, of course, always thinks he’s in the right. He can’t question whether he’s gone too far. This is one of the dangers of the compulsive style: because you believe you’re fighting for The Good, you can’t see when you’ve turned to the dark side.
And as so often happens to people with a compulsive style, he often forgets what the rules are for in the first place. It’s the principle that counts. Like if someone overstays the 24-hour parking rule in the guest lot. It doesn’t matter that it’s otherwise empty. It could get filled if everyone stayed there more than 24 hours.
He inspects the housing development he lives in every morning at 6 AM. “He checks the status of all things by giving them a good kick.” He oozes disdain for the rabble who don’t share his sense of decency and responsibility.
Trading Music for Machines
But what’s just as important as what Ove does do is what he doesn’t do. He swaps his gramophone for a diesel generator and no longer listens to music. I can’t think of a better metaphor for the compulsive style gone bad; the capacity to savor beauty is traded for machinery, the capacity get things done.
Backman chooses to tread lightly on the tragic side of the story: the standoff with his long-time buddy over his choice of car, the many people that he hurts, and perhaps worst, his inability to live without his wife. It’s not just that she was so wonderful. It’s more because of his failure to develop as a whole human being who can feel and relate on his own.
Tragedy: Ove Loses His Soul
I won’t tell you what happens in A Man Called Ove, but I will tell you that Backman romanticizes Ove’s need for his wife in order to feel anything close to normal. Backman treats this as lofty and admirable. And while he closely notes Ove’s suffering at being separated from his wife, he tries to convince us that it’s OK that Ove never cultivated his own capacity to appreciate beauty or people.
Carl Jung would say Ove had projected his anima onto her, his soul, his own feminine side with its capacity for connection, emotion, receptivity, and the capacity to appreciate beauty. She lived it all out for him. They had a division of labor. She took charge of conversations. They sort things in the apartment between his and hers; hers are all homey or lovely, his are all useful.
And once she was gone, his soul was gone too. “Things don’t work when you’re not at home” he tells her in one of his many graveside conversations. “He was a man of black and white. And she was color. All the color he had.”
Redemption and the Compulsive Personality
Backman conveys the humanity underlying the rigidity and perfectionism of the compulsive personality. You see a grumpy old guy, but you can also see that underneath he is committed to doing right by people, even though that commitment has become painfully skewed.
Part of the beauty of the story is that his new neighbor, Parvaneh, a middle-eastern woman pregnant with her third child, can see through him to his core. She finds him amusing, and she craftily challenges him to drop his defenses. To the extent possible, she brings out the best in him. I wish we could all do that.ove obsessive compulsive personality disorder
What makes the story so popular is its depiction of a man who is interpersonally challenged making some slight progress in his relationship with humanity. There is some redemption. He’s 59. It’s never too late.
Ove is simultaneously endearing and enraging, but still realistic, a compelling example of the beauty and tragedy of the compulsive personality. Sometimes we can see ourselves more clearly by seeing our tendencies in someone else first. Backman’s Ove offers us this opportunity.
__________
Britt-Marie Was Here. So what? What difference does it make if a 63-year-old divorced woman with obvious psychological and interpersonal challenges shows up in a small, dying town?
Lots.
(Britt-Marie was also made into a film.)
Why You Should Read Britt-Marie Was Here
I’m recommending this book (originally in Swedish) to readers of my blog partly because I think you’ll find a lot in common with its protagonist:
She lives by her lists. “She has to keep a separate list to list all the lists. Otherwise anything could happen. She could die. Or forget to buy baking soda.”
She’s overly conscientious. Even when it’s not in her interest.
She’s perfectionistic. She never writes in ink for fear of making an intractable mistake.
She’s rigid and doesn’t like change. Dinner is at 6. No matter what.
She’s stubborn and determined. “One doesn’t just give up.”
She’s neither playful nor spontaneous. That would be irrational and of course she would never be irrational.
(Unfortunately just about every reference to Britt-Marie online says that she has OCD, Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder. She probably does. But what everyone seems to miss is that she certainly meets the diagnostic criteria for OCPD, Obsessive-Compulsive Personality Disorder. OCPD occurs more frequently, and is more pervasive and often more destructive, yet is less recognized. Part of the mission of this blog is to help people recognize OCPD as different from OCD so that those who have it can get proper treatment. See my post about the differences here.)
I’m also recommending the novel because I believe that the experience of reading it can move us in a positive direction.
I’m not a literary critic, I’m a psychotherapist. I sometimes make suggestions about literature and film because they can help shift us to the healthier end of the compulsive spectrum--so that our "being here" can make a positive difference. And for me, that's the kind of shift that makes great literature and film.
Here are five reasons to read Britt-Marie Was Here:
1. Britt-Marie helps us to understand our own battle between desire and “common sense.”
Britt-Marie often has feelings—physical and emotional--that she fends off with “common sense.” She would never say “that’s beautiful,” or “that’s poetic,” and rarely allows herself to touch or be touched--even though she longs to do so. She’s sided with “common sense” in this battle for so long that she no longer has her own dreams—literal or figurative.
We witness this painfully and wonder why she can’t permit herself such innocent luxuries.
As if we didn’t do the same.
We come to see that “common sense” isn’t necessarily good sense.
2. Britt-Marie will help you laugh at yourself.
As most of us do, Britt-Marie has ideas about how things should be. When these ideas aren’t your ideas, you can see how amusingly absurd they are:
Forks. Knives. Spoons.
In that order.
Britt-Marie is certainly not the kind of person who judges other people. Far from it.
But surely no civilized person would even think of arranging a cutlery drawer in a different way from how cutlery drawers are supposed to be arranged?
We’re not animals are we?
We laugh. As if we didn’t do the same. Maybe her story will help you take your story about how things should be just a little less seriously.
3. You’ll see the fatal flaw in the compulsive’s misunderstanding of what people want from us.
Britt-Marie spends much of her energy making sure that others don’t think badly about her. Her guiding mantra is “What would people think?”
She speaks formally and sets about proving that she is a clean, civilized person. Not a barbarian or criminal.
She seeks a job because she’s become totally isolated. If she were to die no-one would know, and her corpse would leave a horrible stench in the apartment building. What would people think of her then?
She’s the people-pleasing type of compulsive, yet she’s still astonishingly good at offending others. Her husband says she’s socially incompetent.
This is because she’s confused about what people want from her.
When she goes to get a job and meets the counselor at the employment office, she calculates that she should say something nice to her. So, she tries. But thinking that honesty is what people want, she miscalculates:
You have a very modern hairstyle.
What? Oh. Thanks…
It’s very courageous of you to wear your hair so short when you have such a large forehead.
She just doesn’t get that people aren’t as interested in how honest or clean or organized she is, as in what sort of friend she might be.
This is the classic misunderstanding that most compulsives fall into: they think that people want perfection, not connection.
Her new friend, appreciating her quirks, tries to enlighten her: “That is why I like you, Britt. You are also human.”
4. You’ll see Britt-Marie develop the potential benefits of her compulsive personality.
Despite her quirks Britt-Marie is able to do good. In fact, only someone with her special quirks—including dogged determination--could save the day and pull off the feats she does.
Everyone likes Kent [her husband] when they first meet him. It takes years to see his bad side. With Britt-Marie it’s the other way around.”
At first you might say she’s rigid and harsh. But her perseverance and conscientiousness turn out to have redemptive value.
I won’t tell you just what happens in the story, but I will share what goes on inside of her:
Something within her decides, against her most reasonably protesting common sense, that this is a good point in Britt-Marie’s life to stand her ground a bit.
Compulsion, in this instance an internal urge of the most noble kind, finally overrides self-conscious “sensibility,” and makes Britt-Marie a heroine. Her capacity to act on these urges independently and productively awakens, and it serves both her and her new community.
In a brave throwback to 1960’s humanistic psychology, Britt-Marie says that in the months away from her husband she has been “self-actualizing.” Her compulsions come to serve a purpose, rather than drive her meaninglessly.
5. Britt-Marie just might inspire you to reach for positive change when things are bad.
Britt-Marie suspects she’s in one of those periods that people call “life crises.” But she’s avoided change her entire life, and she’s mostly skeptical about the possibility of it ever getting better.
She woke up in great spirits. Another day. This alone should have immediately made her suspicious, because little good can come out of waking up all enthusiastic like that.
But something else in her opens to the possibility of positive change.
She loves her balcony and the flower boxes she nurtures there. The plants in the boxes that she has rescued and replanted over time have become symbolic for her. She takes them with her when she leaves her husband and the Big City for a small dying town:
The balcony boxes may look as if they only contain soil, but underneath there are flowers waiting for spring. The winter requires whoever is doing the watering to have a bit of faith, in order to believe that what looks empty has every potential. Britt-Marie no longer knows whether she has faith or just hope. Maybe neither.
The compulsive life can grow flat. Depression is common.
But she begins to realize both that that strategy will lead nowhere, and that change can actually be good.
Britt-Marie’s quirks force her into a heroic quest, leaving her familiar, comfortable home in search of…well…herself? That’s what heroes and heroines usually find. In her case her actualization includes finding her self-reliance while at the same time using her strengths to support community.
She becomes less judgmental and even opens up enough to experience the passion of soccer, a religion of undying hope. She jumps up in expectation and exultation for her team and returns to the ground a changed woman. Something has come alive in her.
She becomes the unlikely heroine savior of a small town that’s closing down because “it’s no longer profitable.” This town may represent the fruitless life Britt-Marie had come to inhabit, and the possibility of new life emerging.
Britt-Marie was here. She found herself and made her mark.
***
Of course, this is all naïve and unrealistic.
Or is it? This is an important question for compulsives. With a deep devotion to what we like to think of as “common sense,” most of us rarely make time for such inefficient indulgences as fiction, especially not such a fantastical variety of fiction.
And that’s part of the problem. We’re too busy preventing the inevitable fall of civilization that would happen if we let things get out of order to allow ourselves to have experiences that can truly move us.
It’s emotions that move us to a better place. Not common sense.