Intrusive Thoughts and Fears
I hate citing things and this is a personal blog not a research paper or a news website, so if you want to know the source of any information I post, you can google it yourself. The definition of an intrusive thought is "an unwelcome involuntary thought, image, or unpleasant idea that may become an obsession, is upsetting or distressing, and can feel difficult to manage or eliminate". For example, if you have ever been chopping vegetables in the kitchen with a sharp knife and suddenly the thought of you taking the knife and stabbing it into your own hand creeps in, that's an intrusive thought. You would never really do that. So why did you think about it? Freud theorized about a similar phenomenon called "thanatos" or a "death drive". He said (and I'm paraphrasing, here) that the mind is sometimes compelled to reduce itself to a state of extinction. In other words, Freud thought that the mind wandered so far as to consider the possibility ...