The Evolutionary Logic of the Obsessive Trait Complex: Obsessive Compulsive Personality Disorder as a Complementary Behavioral Syndrome

Abstract

Freud noted that the obsessive traits of orderliness, parsimony, and obstinacy incontestably belonged together. This observation has been unfailingly justified, but unsatisfactorily explained. Being a highly heritable pattern essentially unaffected by parental influence, it is counterfactual to continue to explain the obsessive trait constellation as a pathological signature of harsh, authoritarian parenting. Alternatively, the present paper, building upon a previously promulgated evolutionary etiological model, describes how obsessive traits work in unison to enable survival within harsh northerly climates. What appears to be a loosely federated inventory of pathology, after the application of evolutionary reasoning, becomes a coherent behavioral package, adaptive suite, or behavioral syndrome. All three of these terms, taken from behavioral biology, suggest that traits strategically covary, such that the adaptive value of each trait is enhanced by the presence of the others. In this vein, the union of anxious tension and conscientiousness drives the obsessive personality to labor incessantly. The fruits of obsessive labor are then conserved through parsimoniousness, hoarding, vigilance, and niggardliness. And so, obsessive personality is a coherent behavioral package in that the drive to work towards the acquisition of necessities is paired with the drive to conserve and defend them.

Migration Load, Ecological Opportunity, and Obsessive Compulsive Personality Disorder Etiology: Obsessive Character as an Adaptation to Seasonality

“…This model of obsessive origins is then consistent with a global evolutionary view of personality, holding that personality (1) is heritable, (2) has fitness consequences, (3) shows population variance as a result of adaptive diversification, and (4) is regulated by negative frequency-dependent balancing selection. As further work will show, the present theory better explains prevalence rates (Hertler 2014c), male-biased sex ratio, and trait coherence (Hertler 2014d) that are specific to obsessive personality. More than all this, the present evolutionary model is superior to psychoanalytic models because it is readily falsifiable.…”

The Biology of Obsessive-Compulsive Personality Disorder Symptomatology: Identifying an Extremely K-Selected Life History Variant

“…Abusing games of chance (Slutske et al 2001) and showing comorbidity with pathological gambling (Wang 2006), psychopaths are more risk prone as measured by desisting later, and thereby assuming more risk, than controls on the Newman Card Playing Task (Blair and Frith 2000;Hertler 2014a). Alternatively, obsessive participants perform exactly opposite psychopaths when similarly observed in controlled gambling tasks (Hertler 2015b). Early on, Rosenwald (1972) showed experimentally that obsessives staked less money across gambling trials.…”

“…Anxiety's status as a core temperamental feature of obsessive character is extant in the seminal writings of Freud (1908Freud ( / 1959, Pollak (1979;, Shapiro (1999) and Salzman (1985). Through these writings, one can recognize a phenomenological state of heightened tension (Hertler 2015a), hyperfocus, hyperarousal, and future-oriented fear (Hertler 2015b). The writings of Mallinger (2009), representative of recent psychoanalytic theory, emphasize high anxiety, which the obsessive seeks to bring low by alertness, control and the pursuit of predictability and safety.…”

“…In contrast with the foreshortened future orientation of the psychopath, (Hertler 2014a;Petry 2002;Sher and Trull 1994), anticipations of the future dominate the obsessive's experience of the present (Salzman 1985;Hertler 2015b). In part, the conscientious and harm avoidant obsessive uses the present moment in preparation for the future exigency (Salzman 1985).…”

“…The excess of conscientiousness among obsessives (Samuel and Widiger 2008;Widiger et al 2002) imparts a laboring propensity via the first three factors, and a sense of contract and committal via the second three factors, which combine to create an engine of labor yoked to mate and progeny with the nepotistic effect of increasing fitness through kin selection. The compulsive conscientiousness imparted by the obsessive anxious temperament (Hertler 2015b), though it may not potentiate excesses of direct parental care, may well drive indirect parental care via increases in socioeconomic status, caloric intake, shelter, and aid. Alternatively, short-term mating, in which parental effort is subordinated to mating effort, is generally antithetical to the conscientiousness factors of responsibility, traditionalism, and virtue, and the obsessive's moral inflexibility and strict scrupulosity (American Psychiatric Association 2000).…”