The World of the Compulsive* by V. £. von Qebsattel I The ProblemWHAT ALWAYS FASCINATES US in encountering the compulsive person is the unpenetrated, perhaps impenetrable, quality of his being different. Seventy years of clinical work and scientific research have not altered this reaction. Kept alive by the contradiction between the intimate closeness of the presence of a fellow man and the strange remoteness of a mode of being completely different from our own, the affect of psychiatric amazement never ceases. This excitement constantly thrusts upon us the question about the world in which the compulsive lives; for our world, in which he is found, does not seem to be his. Actually, the contradiction found in the phenomenon of the compulsive does not distinguish him from others encountered by the psychiatrist; but the lucidity with which the compulsive illuminates his own abnormality, without finding it out, and the consequently increasing paradox of his existence, only heightens, if possible, the acuity of the psychiatric affect and keeps it going with particular emphasis.The focus of our inquiry is the compulsive person in toto and primarily the special way of existing by which he is set into a specific world of being (Daseinswelt) different from our own. In this, we wish to go beyond the mere • Translated by SYLVIA KOPPEL and ERNEST ANGEL. [This article has been considerably abridged. The original paper contained three case histories. Only one is reproduced in this translation, the one which best illustrates the paper's concepts.-EDITORS] The bibliographic reference is Viktor E.