Her compulsion, her sense of place, grounds the series, making it as much about the characters as it is about the crimes.
On September 1 1939, "feeling the old compulsion of the sea upon her", she took a train to Dieppe but collapsed in the street there.
About the compulsions and convictions of her subjects Jamison is compassionate without being partial: "Empathy means realizing no trauma has discrete edges".
And Kelly McGonigal, a psychologist (and fitness instructor) who will teach a course on compassion and leadership at Stanford next spring, reports that more and more people are confiding to her about the "joyless compulsion" of constantly being online.
She was confused, pathologically shy, a straw on the ocean of her compulsions (to pout, to wisecrack, to love a stranger, to be six hours late, or lock herself in a room).
She was confused, pathologically shy, a straw on the ocean of her compulsions (to pout, to crackwise, to love a stranger, to be six hours late or lock herself in a room).
Even in her dreams at night, she was haunted by the pull of her compulsions.
We were able to understand many of her compulsions as ritual undoings or protections against the original terror of the traumas she had suffered.
It was as if Georgia knew that she was female as surely as she knew that the sun would rise, and so felt no great compulsion to gild the lily of her true nature.
Dostoyevsky understood the compulsion of gambling firsthand.
