Nikola Tesla washed his hands three times in a row. He had to walk around the house three times before entering. When he ate, there must have been exactly 18 napkins on the table. He had a terrible aversion to women’s earrings. In fact, he found it difficult to tolerate anything that was round, especially jewellery. He suffered from obsessive-compulsive disorder, or OCD, experts say. Although it usually develops there by the age of 40, it did not break out in full force in Tesla until his old age. She was not treated for it. People have been experiencing the symptoms of OCD for centuries, but it is only in the last few decades that people have been trying to understand its causes. For the two to three per cent of people who have to live with them, the symptoms have always been distressing.
Diance was 25 years old when she was sitting in church and was suddenly struck. She never found out why she was filled with anxiety at that very moment, but she remembered seeing a woman in a V-neck sweater in front of her at the same moment.
For years afterwards, she couldn’t bear to see people wearing V-neck sweaters or clothes that might reveal more intimate parts of the body. She was obsessed with the idea that she wanted to see their sexual organs and that they knew it, so she felt uncomfortable.
If the man sitting across from her crossed his legs during the conversation, she was sure it was because she was staring at his crotch. If the person touched the collar of her blouse with her hand, she was sure that the person was looking at her breasts, which would hurt her deeply, and she would try to hide her breasts.
Although she had eight brothers and a sister at home, she trusted no one. She was ashamed of her supposedly sinful thoughts, but she solved the problem by praying for forgiveness and started avoiding friends and relatives.
She had more problems with them than with acquaintances and strangers. She could simply look away from them, but not from those close to her. Moreover, she used to embrace her relatives happily, but now she could no longer do so because her brain was telling her that she was embracing them with impure thoughts and causing them pain. She didn’t even think about a date. She was no longer able to touch anyone, to hug anyone.
She slowly disappeared from family photos. She avoided family gatherings or withdrew, saying she was tired. No one knew what was wrong with her, and she, in her own shame, remained silent as a grave until she could bear the compulsions no longer. At the age of 35, she tried to commit suicide. And then, ten years after the first symptom, she was diagnosed.
Not that she hadn’t sought professional help before, it’s just that for five years no one even thought about obsessive-compulsive disorder because it was overridden by the depression that often accompanies it.
Diance chose Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) among the many therapies. She was told that an obsession is not an indication of how awful she is and what terrible things she will do to someone, but that an obsession is exactly what it is: an obsession.
For example, she and her therapist watched what people were doing while talking. How they naturally sit down and cross their legs because it is more comfortable, not because they are compelled to do so by her thoughts. Or how they touch their collars quite spontaneously, not because they are offended by her gaze and want to hide from it. Slowly, she made progress and returned to society, although she still had to fight the compulsions.
The thought you can’t get rid of
Nikola Tesla preferred to avoid the things that made him anxious. For example, he refused to sleep in a room whose number was not divisible by three because he was obsessed with the number three. He hated his hair and refused to touch it. He was equally afraid of germs and tried to avoid dirt. He did not want to shake hands. He washed his hands often and three times in a row.
He couldn’t help himself. Obsessive thoughts “kidnap you. You pray for them to go away, but they won’t, at least not for long, or not of your own volition”, Dr Jaffrey M. Schwartz explained in simplistic terms why those suffering from obsessive-compulsive disorder, or OCD, simply do not “let go” of their thoughts.
Their mind gets stuck and refuses to move anywhere. It obsessively revolves around the same thought. It persists and will not give way. One is not stubborn, determined, unyielding or anything like that, one simply cannot get rid of the intrusive thought. He cannot stop it, annihilate it, drive it away. He is trapped in its grip and is increasingly tense because of it.
The anxiety within him grows until it becomes unbearable. He needs to release it, and usually the only way to release it is to do something, and to do it repeatedly.
For example, Nikola Tesla, who was obsessed with the number three, walked around the house three times before entering it, or washed his hands three times. He could have constantly checked whether the water was shut off or not. The action is irrational, but one simply has to do it to release the tension within oneself.
When an obsessive thought is followed by a compulsive action, one feels relief. But not for long. The same thought hijacks his brain again and the cycle repeats.
For example, many people are haunted by the idea of hurting someone. The person who is convinced that he is going to hurt someone on the road is constantly driving along the same route to make sure that he has not run over anyone. He can drive along it ten times and his brain still won’t be sure that he hasn’t really run over anyone.
A woman had a similar problem to Tesla, but she was obsessed with the numbers 5 and 6. If she saw a car with a number plate in front of her that also had one of them on it, she immediately pulled over and waited for the car to drive off. Such a drive was long and tiring.
A man feared acid contamination from batteries. If anyone thought that such an obsession was the least strenuous because there was little chance of infection, they would be mistaken. Every time he heard a car in an emergency, the man turned his car around and followed it. So he would go to the scene of a traffic accident, take a bucket out of the car, fill it with water, pour baking soda into it and start scrubbing the pavement, just in case the acid from the batteries might have spilled on it.
The writer Charles Dickens also reportedly showed signs of a milder obsessive-compulsive disorder. Whenever he entered a hotel room, the first thing he would do was rearrange the furniture. At home, he would check his children’s rooms every morning and leave messages telling them what needed tidying and clearing.
His obsession with cleanliness was also reflected in his attitude towards women and in some of his literary characters, such as Little Dorrit.
The obsession with order and cleanliness could have originated in his childhood, biographers have speculated. Because of his poverty, he moved frequently with his parents and had no control over his environment. When he grew up, he wanted to have full control over it.
Thought, anxiety, action
But the fact is that no one knows what causes obsessive-compulsive disorder. To understand it, one scientist is studying the brain. According to this, a biological theory, in OCD the communication between the front part of the brain and the cerebral nucleus is defective, so that when a message arrives in the right place, the brain does not “switch off”.
A person checks whether the water is closed. When he is sure that it is, the brain should become deaf to messages to check what is happening to the water. But they don’t. Because of a breakdown in the communication circuitry, the human brain continues to be told to check whether the water is closed. And he does, ten, twenty or more times.
An important role in communication is played by a neurotransmitter called serotonin, or the happiness hormone. It is thought to regulate everything from anxiety to sleep and memory. How? By carrying messages from one cell to the next until the message reaches its final recipient.
It’s a long road, but easy for ordinary people. The first cell sends a message to the second, which passes it on to the third, and so on to the target, and all cells hear the message loud and clear because there is enough serotonin from the start of the message to the final recipient.
People suffering from OCD are thought to have problems with their serotonin levels. Somewhere along the way, a little of it gets lost, so not all cells hear the message well. Why does serotonin run out? Supposedly because of two genetic mutations. They cause a particular cell to use too much serotonin for itself and leave too little in the space between the two cells reserved for passing on messages, so that the next cell can hear the message too, to put it a bit more simply.
Others suggest that OCD may be inherited, as it often affects more than one member of a family. The only problem is that in identical twins, not both people have the disorder, so genes alone cannot be responsible for its development.
As always, when experts don’t know what’s going on, they conclude that a combination of neurobiological, genetic, behavioural, cognitive and external factors probably play a role in the development of OCD. As no one knows what causes OCD, they also treat symptoms differently. Some experts advocate the use of drugs that affect the biochemical balance in the brain, others prefer therapies.
According to cognitive theory, OCD symptoms occur because a person learns negative thoughts and behaviour patterns from life experiences. Because they have been learnt, they can be unlearned through cognitive therapy, according to the proponents of this theory.
Behavioural theorists explain that he just needs to learn to understand his thoughts properly, rather than over-interpreting them and attaching such a fatal meaning to them that he becomes obsessed with them.
Obsessive-compulsive disorder could also be caused by illness, parental influence during childhood or stress. While it is not clear how, and other theories are not clear how OCD is thought to work, everyday stress and strain seem to have at least an impact on the frequency and severity of OCD outbreaks.
The only thing that experts today more or less agree on is that OCD does not develop because of some repressed childhood trauma, and they have reached this conclusion more or less because psychoanalysis has failed to eliminate or alleviate the symptoms of OCD.
Is the General crazy?
Today, there are many forms of obsessive-compulsive disorder, but in the 19th century, people usually lumped their symptoms together into one simple observation – the odd man out. This is what they said about Thomas Jonathan Jackson, better known as Stonewall Jackson.
He was an outstanding general. He was an indispensable ally of General Robert E. Lee, commander of the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia, during the War of Secession, which broke out between the Southern and Northern States on 12 April 1861 and ended with the defeat of the South four years later on 9 April.
Jackson’s lost battles quickly faded into obscurity, while his won battles brought him a small cult status. He dazzled soldiers with his military tactics, but left them almost speechless with his habits.
One day, General Richard Ewell was sent to help him. When he arrived at his destination, he received only one order from Jackson: if you are attacked, defend yourself. Jackson was so obsessively secretive that he did not even reveal his military plans to the generals he worked with, let alone to the soldiers.
Richard Ewell turned to Colonel James A. Walker: “Have you ever thought that General Jackson is mad?” “I tell you, sir, he’s crazy as the night … I tell you, sir, he is mad.”
Colonel James A. Walker had a bad experience with it from his days as a cadet at Lexington Military School in Virginia. Thomas Jackson was teaching philosophy and artillery there at the time. He first court-martialled James A. Walker and then got him kicked out of the school. When Walker threatened to kill him, he ordered him to be arrested, but the order was never carried out.
Jackson’s colleagues were not on his side at the time. In the ten years he spent at Virginia Military Institute, his obsession with order and discipline brought more cadets to court-martial than any other professor.
On top of that, he was an extremely bad teacher. He memorised the material and then crushed it in the classroom. If a cadet asked him to explain, he would repeat the same words again. If he dared to ask him again, he would accuse him of insubordination and punish him.
The cadets didn’t like him. They found him strange, inhuman and unapproachable. He almost never laughed, and when he thought something was funny, he would burst into unrestrained cackles. He was desperately hair-brained and insisted on discipline so obsessively that he was called a lunatic.
One class even tried to get him out of the service on leaving school, and the authorities did the same, but he stayed at the school until the end of 1859, when he had to go with the cadets to Harpers Ferry to intervene in the riots that broke out when the armoury was attacked.
Jackson was revered in his church. Since his return from Mexico in 1849, he has been obsessively religious. He never went anywhere without his prayer book and prayer table, not even on the battlefield. During the Civil War, he said a quick prayer before every battle.
But that was the least of the problems. The bigger one was that he was possessed by a terrible fear that his body had been hijacked by evil spirits and that they now had control over him. This obsession was also reflected in his perception of the civil war. Although he knew very well why it had broken out, in his mind it had turned into a struggle between good and evil.
He, who lived in the south and owned six slaves, was of course on the side of the good. In his own eyes, he was a crusader fighting against the dark forces of evil. But only during the week. If possible, he avoided fighting on Sunday, the Lord’s Day.
The obsessively disciplined hypochonder
But that was just one of his obsessions that made people increasingly believe he was crazy. For example, he feared black pepper like the plague. He believed it made his left leg hurt.
He often threw his arm in the air while riding and walking. He believed that this helped to keep the blood flowing properly, relieving the pressure on his arm and improving his balance. He also rode with his arm in the air during the first battle at Bull Run, when something, a throw or a piece of shrapnel, flew up and buried itself deep inside him.
The surgeon thought at first that a finger would have to be amputated, but fortunately he kept all five so he could push them back up into the air. The thought that his body was out of balance haunted him all his life, so he did everything he could to put it back in order.
So he always stood rigid and upright to keep the internal organs in place, one above the other. If he sat down, the classification would break down, so he sat only when he had to, for example in the saddle. Otherwise, he preferred to lie down, perfectly flat, of course, although he did not sleep much.
But he gave himself so much more to do with his stomach. He was constantly complaining of indigestion, but he kept to a strict diet. He ate raspberries and cereal or corn bread and drank milk. He sucked lemons all the time, even when he was aiming at the enemy, because he thought they relieved his problems. He also treated them by placing a towel dipped in ice water on his stomach.
The latter was also a cure for visual impairment. To improve his supposedly failing eyesight, he would stick his head into a bucket full of ice water and hold his eyes open until he could hold his breath. This, of course, had no effect on the frequent inflammation of his tonsils. They became sore of their own accord and eventually had to be removed.
He also complained of hearing problems, rheumatism, cold feet and nervousness, and often mentioned “a slight misalignment of the spine”. Today, some doctors say he was plagued by a diaphragmatic hernia, while others say that at the age of 30 he was simply a hypochondriac with obsessive-compulsive disorder.
But he was an obsessively disciplined hypochonder. Because everything was so wrong with him, he took obsessive care of his body: he regularly ran and jumped on the treadmill, shouting loudly because he believed it increased his lung capacity.
Eccentric fanatic
But it is true that the disease has been with him since early childhood, even though he has always been healthy. At the age of two, he lost his sister to typhoid fever, followed three weeks later by his father. The day after his death, he had a sister, Laura Ann, and his mother had a third child, who now had to survive alone.
She sold everything they owned, paid off their debts and moved the family into a rented one-bedroom flat. At the age of six, Thomas remarried, but now there was even less room for the children – Thomas and his sister went to live with their uncle, and his older brother Warren with other relatives.
As if that wasn’t enough, a year later my mother died during her fourth childbirth. Thomas was now an orphan, growing up with a cold uncle, and not to forget the pain of loss, he lost his brother Warren to tuberculosis at the age of 17.
It is not clear whether Thomas Jackson became a hypochondriac and obsessive man then or before, but he was certainly a “fanatic” to his classmates at West Point Military Academy, full of “eccentric” ideas and inhumanly persistent.
He was only accepted at the school when someone else resigned because he was too good for it. He more or less taught himself at his uncle’s school, so in 1842, when he started his studies at the age of 18, he was one of the worst students in his year. Four years later, he graduated as the 17th best of 59 cadets. His classmates joked that if they had one more year of study ahead of them, he would surely have graduated as the best, because he had worked like crazy.
It was a coincidence that he finished school just as the US-Mexican war was starting and he was sent to the battlefield. He followed orders consistently, except when he didn’t.
For example, he obediently fired on Mexican civilians when ordered to do so, even though he thought it was wrong, and at other times he refused to order the withdrawal of his troops because it would be more dangerous than continuing to shell them. On reflection, his superiors concluded that his assessment of the situation was more cautious than theirs and did not punish him.
Later, he himself never followed their example: he knew no extenuating circumstances when it came to duty. He was as hard as diamond. His nephew, who accompanied him in the war, never saw him show an ounce of understanding towards anyone. “I cannot recall a single instance of him overlooking or mitigating a punishment if he believed it to be just and in accordance with the law …”
There was “no room for emotion or pity”, his nephew argued, and many of his gestures indeed showed it. He once had most of his officers arrested because he felt that they had not done their duty satisfactorily. He never thought twice before punishing someone and perhaps ruining their career just because they disagreed with him.
Once a soldier asked him if he could visit his dying wife. “Man, man, do you love your wife more than your country?” Jackson said, before turning on his heel and walking away. The man was not allowed to say goodbye to his wife, but one day a mother came up to Jackson and asked if her son was around. He had the soldier looked for and allowed him to spend some time with his mother.
Death by obsession?
He obviously had a different attitude to mothers than to wives, even though he himself was married. His first wife, Eleanor Junkin, died in childbirth just a year after he married her, aged 29. He married Mary Ann Morrison three years later, and had a perfectly normal marriage with her whenever he was at home.
Their first daughter, Mary Graham, lived only a few weeks, and their second, Julia, survived her youth but was hardly known to her father. Born in the middle of the war, she lost him before she was six months old. His wife took exemplary care of her and their home, so he did not inhumanely drive her, as he did himself and the soldiers who had to march almost to their last breath.
He was relentless with them, but never abandoned them. During the battle, he was reportedly as cold as a bugger. He did not seem to notice the bullets and shrapnel flying around him. Once, when General Bernard Elliott Bee watched him leading his then still brigade, he is reported to have said: “There stands Jackson, like a true wall of defence …”.
The Defensive Wall, or Stonewall, may be its nickname, but the story is supposedly just one of those that stuck to it, even if it wasn’t exactly true. But he was special even without them.
General Lee respected him, but disliked him. Jackson was hard to like because he didn’t talk to anyone. He was extremely withdrawn. During the war, he only excelled when he planned his own battles, and when he had to work with other generals, he faded away because he was too obsessively secretive.
He made no secret of the fact that he owned six slaves, although he was unusual in that role too. Three of the slaves were given to him by marriage. One of them, Hetty, raised his wife Anna and was like a surrogate mother to her. Her two rambunctious sons drove the family carriage.
He bought three slaves himself. The first, Albert, was the one who asked him to buy him, allowing him to earn money and buy his freedom. The second slave he bought when she was 4 years old. She was a girl with special needs and he took her in after her elderly guardian begged him to take care of her because she could no longer do it herself. A third slave, Amy, was sold to settle debts. She herself begged him to buy her and get her out of “trouble”.
When Albert and Amy fell ill, Jackson took them in and cared for them, but not only for his slaves. He set up what he called a Sunday School for everyone in the county, teaching them to read the Bible, even though it was strictly forbidden to teach slaves to read in Virginia. He was threatened on several occasions by townspeople in the street for this, but he did not close the school, which he financed himself.
Here his proverbial steadfastness was positive; on 2 May 1863 it was negative. The Battle of Chancellorsville was fought against the much stronger forces of the North. Jackson, by a series of surprise attacks, succeeded in cutting off a whole wing of the enemy army from the main body.
Late in the afternoon, with his horse, which was much too small for him, but which he wanted to ride, he wanted to check the positions of his troops himself. The guards did not recognise him. They fired at him and hit him in the right arm, left wrist and left elbow.
His left arm had to be amputated. It was buried near Chancellorsville and inscribed on the tombstone. But this place was not only fatal for the arm. There were complications after the amputation, but it seems that it was not the arm that buried him, but one of his old obsessions.
Without consulting a doctor, he demanded that an ice-wet towel be placed on his abdominal cavity, because he had to continue to diligently take care of his digestive problems. His weakened organism was no match for the cold. He contracted pneumonia.
He fought for another week and on 10 May 1863 he died at the age of 39. General Robert E. Lee said at his deathbed, “You have lost your left arm, but I have lost my right.”
Now everyone was mourning him. In fact, many were even convinced that without him, they would lose the war. “As sure as we exist, Jackson is mad,” one of his officers once told a colleague. No one else has said that now.
Dove, my love
Well, Nikola Tesla has been considered so smart since his student days that it’s no longer good for him. He was obsessed with puzzles as a child, but then he memorised whole books and slide rules on top of that. He learned languages casually, after sleeping only a few hours a day.
When he started his studies at the Graz Polytechnic Institute, he became obsessed with electromagnetic fields and hypothetical AC motors that would work. For six years he could not stop thinking about them. “I had so much energy,” he said later. For him, it was “a matter of life and death. I knew that if I failed, I would burn out.”
He was so obsessed that he could no longer keep up with his studies and his professors warned his father that he would end up in the ground if he didn’t get some rest and sleep. Tesla preferred to relax by gambling and became addicted to it, wasted his tuition fees, dropped out of school and suffered a nervous breakdown. It was his first, but by no means his last, nervous breakdown.
He was as brilliant in the future as he was in his youth, but he never developed a flair for business. So, by 1912, he had accumulated a series of disappointments and defeats and finally retired from the world.
Now other obsessions have intensified. Alongside his obsession with cleanliness, the number three and round objects, he was constantly counting his steps. Before he started to eat, he would tap his food. Then he counted his mouthfuls. He claimed to be hypersensitive to sounds.
The older he got, the stronger the obsessions became. Among other things, he became obsessed with pigeons. He had no wife and no sex life, although it is not clear whether he was asexual or just did not allow anything to distract him from his experiments, as he claimed.
But now he has become obsessed with the white dove of his choice. He claimed to love it almost as much as anyone loves a human being. One night, he later explained, a white dove visited him. She flew in through the open window of his hotel room and told him that she was dying. In her eyes he saw “two grains of fierce light. Yes, it was real light, extremely powerful, blinding, blinding light, a light more powerful than any I have created with the most powerful lamps in my laboratory”.
He was holding his dove in his arms when it died. He knew at that moment that his life’s work was finished, he later explained.
The Crepe Belt
Nikola Tesla’s compulsive-obsessive disorder was probably joined by another, but 23-year-old Johanna H had only one problem in Budapest in 1895. Happily married and with no desire for adventure, she was obsessed with the thought of cheating on her husband, probably with someone she had just met or seen. She was so deeply convinced of this that if someone she had just met had told her that he had slept with her, she would have believed it at first sight.
Her obsession was eating her up when she came up with a solution: she made herself special knickers out of thick canvas so no one could get to her, and asked her husband to lock her up when he went out. If a man came to visit, her husband had to keep reassuring her afterwards that she had nothing to do with him. Four hypnosis sessions with a psychiatrist to try to cure her had no effect, and she stopped attending them.
But at least her psychiatrist did not describe her as “partly mad”, which was the term used by the Frenchman Esquirol for Mad’lle F in 1838. The thirty-four-year-old was haunted by a seemingly innocent thought: she was afraid that she would accidentally carry away something that was not hers.
When she went to visit her aunt, she deliberately took off her apron to avoid accidentally putting something in her pocket. That’s how it started, and then it just escalated. When she got home from her aunt’s, she rubbed her soles for ten minutes to make sure that she didn’t accidentally leave anything on them that didn’t belong to her. Then she checked the slippers herself and handed them over to the maid to be checked a hundred and once by her.
Then she brushed her hair in a non-dolligated manner, in case anything had got caught in it. After all that, she shook her hands violently and rubbed her fingers until she was sure that there was really nothing left between them that wasn’t hers. When she had done all this, she was completely exhausted.
Like most OCD sufferers, Mad’lle knew that what she was doing was pointless, but she couldn’t help it. If she could, she would. For those who truly have OCD suffer from intrusive thoughts and do not enjoy their obsessions in the slightest.
