Obsessive Compulsive Disorder: an analysis of Edgar Allan Poe and the movie American Psycho

Abstract

This essay has the goal of analyzing the works “The Imp of the Perverse” by Edgar Allan Poe and the movie American Psycho, relating the two works to Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD) and its mental compulsion commonly called Confession. For the analyses, I used the theoretical bases of D’ath (2016) and Willson (2016). In this short story by Poe, a man commits a crime years ago and feels the overwhelming necessity to confess his crime even though it was very unlikely for him to get caught. Subsequently, some evidence leads us to believe that the protagonist of American Psycho, was also suffering from OCD, even from the first scenes of the movie with the uptight rituals of routine and cleaning until the obsessive thoughts and patterns and, finally, the confession scene. The impulse of confessing and reaching for the temporary relief, which can be traced to religion and the culture of confessing sins, could be the end of peace for both characters. So the question raised is: could they have stopped this overwhelming sensation and necessity to confess in any scenario?