One patient noted that whilst MBCT had not helped her to reduce her obsessions and compulsions, she experienced herself as reacting calmer even in difficult situations, more capable to accept her OCD as a part of her life and as being able to enjoy her life despite her struggle with OCD.
Her weird compulsion to salute herself in mirrors like some sort of impossibly twee knitted soldier.
She had a fledgling acting career and no evident compulsion to avenge herself.
Jemima's compulsion to cut herself is mentioned in five of the book's seven stories.
The saddest is Gwen's roommate, Andrea (Azura Skye), a 17-year-old recovering heroin addict and rehab veteran with a compulsion to cut herself.
Thelma Golden, the director of the Studio Museum in Harlem, who has worked with Walker on a number of occasions, told me that she admires the artist's compulsion to reveal herself.
Then she says she can't stop folding, folding being a metaphor for an unraveling, a reckoning, a compulsion to free herself, and once she's started it gathers momentum.
Most academics regard the study of creativity as what Flaherty calls "intellectually unhygienic". So Flaherty, who has herself experienced a compulsion to write, is doing it herself.
"There's a certain feeling of being safe if you have the same spot," explained Ms. Drucker, 51, a dental hygienist in Manhattan who describes herself as having "garden variety compulsions".
Yet instead of condemning such compulsions, Orlan invites them in, incorporates them into herself, thereby blurring the initial categories until they no longer hold.
