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A COUNTING COMPULSION
TO THE UNCONSCIOUS
A CONTRIBUTION MEANING OF T r k 1
BY
LEO H. BARTEMEIER
DETROIT
It is a fact of our common observation that an occasional compul-
siveness in counting is one of the manifestations of the psychopathology
of everyday life. En route to the theatre, for example, many persons
remain uneasy and only become more comfortable after they have
counted their tickets again although they know they have the correct
number. It is not uncommon for us to note the occasional Occurrence
of compulsive counting in patients who consult us for other reasons
which are far more important to them. I t is rather rare, however, for
a counting compulsion to be one of the principal complaints which
brings a person to analysis, so that only infrequently do we have the
opportunity to investigate the significance of such a problem quite
extensively. Inasmuch as counting is itself intimately related to our
psychological conceptions of time and space, whatever additional
information we can gain about compulsive counting may throw further
light on these phenomena, about which our knowledge remains incom-
plete. This communication will confine itself to the probable aetio-
logical factors in a counting compulsion and its significance in the
psychic economy of a young married woman who came into analysis.
Only a few articles on this subject have appeared in the psycho-
analytical literature. Freud (1895)wrote briefly about a woman who
‘became obliged to count the boards in the floor, the steps in the
staircase, etc.-acts which she performed in a state of ridiculous
distress. She had begun the counting in order to turn her mind from
obsessive ideas of temptation. She had succeeded in so doing, but the
impulse to count had replaced the original obsession.’
HArnik (1924)referred to Reik and to Rdheim, who had emphasized
the sadistic element in counting and the r61e of dominating, controlling
and taking possession of objects through this process. R6heim had
observed that the Seri Indians, who had a most primitive economic
system, were interested in the undigested, and therefore again diges-

Read before the Annual Meeting of the American Psychoanalytic

Association, at Richmond, Virginia, on May 5, 1941.
30 I
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302 LEO H. BARTEMEIER

tible, parts of fruit which they collected. Harnik's patient recalled a

competitive game with her two sisters, in which they counted the
undigested currants in their faeces. He saw in this action both the
anal-erotic interest and the taking possession of objects through
counting.
Fenichel (1932) thought that perhaps the deepest meaning of
compulsive counting was a defence against wishes to kill, ' for counting
things insures that none of them are missing '. He said that counting
itself had the meaning of taking possession, of mastering.
Berta Bornstein (1930) described the development of a counting
obsession during the analysis of a child. I t appeared as a defence
against her death wishes towards her siblings.
Schilder (1936) stated that ' counting and dividing into parts have
a very close relation. To divide into parts means tearing and destruc-
tion. . . . Aggression is obviously not merely derived from oral and
anal tendencies. I t serves the purpose of orientation and self-assertion
in the world.' He believed that ' counting is among the fundamental
functions of the ego.' In one article (1938) he presented ' seven cases
of obsessional neuroses in which definite organic signs reminding of
symptoms observed in epidemic encephalitis were disclosed by neuro-
logical examination.' He concluded that ' compulsion neurosis
cases of this type show a particular relation to numbers and
counting .'
The patient whose problem I will now describe was an attractive
and intelligent woman of twenty-six. Two of her maternal uncles
had been addicted to alcohol, her father's brother was regarded as very
peculiar, and she had known from her seventeenth year that her father
also ' counted things '. Her own counting had antedated this dis-
covery. She had a brother eleven months her senior and two sisters
who were five and ten years younger than herself. Her counting
compulsion, which had been present for a number of years without
causing her much distress, became so markedly exaggerated soon after
her marriage that it seriously interfered with her thinking and her
attention. As her counting was gradually replaced by the eruption
of anxiety, she came for treatment with the complaint that she was
' losing her mind '.
Her marriage to a man who was closely attached to his mother
precipitated her neurosis, because it reactivated her intense infantile
conflicts involving her brother and her mother. Her husband repre-
sented her rival sibling, who had been strongly preferred by their
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A COUNTING COMPULSION 303

mother because he was a boy. Her hatred of her brother, therefore,
was derived primarily from her envy of his penis together with his
lack of affection for her. We shall see later how she attempted to cope
with this problem.
The patient was unable to recall the onset of her counting and
believed that it had developed insidiously. She was certain, however,
that for years she had been counting for some part of every waking
hour. At times she felt quite desperate about it because she was so
helpless t o stop it. Whenever she was unable to achieve the number
she was striving for, she became perplexed and anxious and would
begin her counting anew. Although her compulsion annoyed her
because it interfered with clear thinking, she invariably experienced
the same satisfaction in completing her calculation and she was always
very determined about it. The object of her striving was usually the
number sixty, which she regarded as ' truly even and most perfect '.
She said that the numbeftwelve was equally satisfying. It was her
custom t o count by ones to twelve, or to imagine she had already
done so, and then to reach sixty in multiples of twelve. In executing
this calculation she counted on her fingers by flexing them almost
imperceptibly. Beginning with the little finger on the right hand she
counted to five, and then, starting with the little finger on the left
hand, she continued on to ten. Finally, ?he counted each little finger
again. In this way she arrived a t twelve. She would then move both
her little fingers simultaneously, counting the pair of them as twelve.
She repeated this motion with the succeeding pairs of fingers and, as
each of these also represented twelve, she arrived at sixty as she
counted her thumbs. She remarked that she always felt pleased when
sixty was in her ' grasp '.
I t will be observed from this description that her counting to
twelve signified the counting of the hours as they are indmted by the
numerals on a timepiece, and that the movements of her fingers, like
the niovements of the clock-hands, were made almost imperceptibly.
She completed the counting of twelve on the same fingers with which
she began it, like the hands of the clock which return to their starting
point in completing the cycle of the hours. The number sixty repre-
sented the number of minutes in an hour and the number of seconds
in a minute. The involving of both her hands represented the move-
ment of the -two clock-hands, and the way in which she used her
hands in counting to twelve had a speclfic significance which I will
discuss shortly. We observe that through her system of counting she
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:::4 LEO H. BARTEMEIER

was magically measuri~igtime, and that the specific method she had
devised for accomplishing this was derived from the mechanism of a
clock. In her counting she was making time. She did not need ;;
clock. We are reminded, in this connection of Schilder's (1935)
quotation from a schizophrenic patient who said : ' My head is R
clock, an apparatus. I make the time, the new time as it should be.'
My patient always said she represented the number twelve, and once
remarked that she ' often felt tight inside like a clock, which, with one
more turn, will burst its spring '. That she was partially aware tliirt
her tension was derived from her sadistic impulses, was indicated bj'
her statement during the same analytic hour that some great destruc-
tive force seemed to be working inside her and carrying her to somt
unknown place.
Her unconscious phantasy of measuring and regulating time,
through her counting of numbers, was a defence and simultaneously a
discharge of her sadism in minute quantities. Counting in numerical
units of one released small fractions of this impulse, and after a certaiii
quantity had been discharged she could increase the rate of discharge,
in what, to her, signified larger quantities, that is, multiples of twelve.
We are all familiar with the maxim that when one feels very angry
it is best to count to ten before speaking. 'This connection between
counting and anger suggests an unconscious recognition that counting
i n these circumstances may dissipate a partial quantity of afiect, so
that the later utterance is apt to be less devastating. Freud (1933)
has told us that thinking is an experimental dealing with small
quantities of energy', and the same may be said of the compulsive
counting which had, in part at least, replaced the thinking of the
patient I have been describing. Her counting represented her attempt
t o master her instinct by discharging it in sufficiently small quantities
to prevent the outbreak of anxiety. This had evidently worked quite
well for a number of years, but soon after her marriage, which brought
an intensification of her instinctual impulses, her defence was no
longer adequate.
Counting to twelve was especially satisfying to this patient because
the idea of the number twelve represented a combining of one and
two, that is, male and female, and therefore ' complete ' and ' even I.

'The synchronous movements of her fingers, which accompanied her

counting, unconsciously signified handling something in order to
make up for her being deprived of the possession, the sight and the
control of a desired object. Her counting, therefore, was not only a
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A COUNTING COMPULSION 305

defence and a discharge of her sadism but a magical possession of her
brother's penis as well.
During the course of the analysis the patient was encouraged to
verbalize her counting, and as she did so the word ' faeces ' began to
be interspersed among the numbers and then fleeting imagery of
intercourse with the analyst emerged. She became concerned lest
each time the word faxes appeared the images of intercourse would
also recur. An interpretation that faxes and numbers were synony-
mous and that her frigidity was evidently associated with the discharge
of her sadistic impulses resulted in the following information. She
said that after retiring for the night she was often unable to sleep and
was restless. After counting for an hour or so she would experience
an urge to defaxate, and, after accomplishing this, she was able to fall
asleep almost immediately. Without knowing why, she was most
careful on these occasions to conceal her behaviour from her husband.
The sedative effect of her deftecation immediately suggests that it
was a substitute for a satisfying intercourse and that it also served the
release of her anal sadism. Inasmuch as it eliminated the necessity
for further counting, we may conclude that her counting served as a
method of discharge for both her anal-erotic and anal-sadistic impulses.
Furthermore, defaecation was that which she could make alone without
the help of anyone else. It was llke her magical making of time and
upon its completion she always had the feeling of great accomplish-
ment. She was a person who had special pleasure in defaecating and
one who had often played with her faeces as a child. That her counting
also involved oral sadism as well was suggested by her remark that
her counting was ' time-consuming and by the fact that her speech
I,

was markedly inhibited.

The origin of her compulsive counting was connected with her
peculiar reaction to time during the years of her childhood. Her
counting of numbers, which represented an active measuring and
regulating of time, stood in sharp contrast to the helpless and utterly
futile feelings she had experienced during her earlier years that time
passed so slowly and seemed so endless. She had feIt oppressed by
time. School terms seemed like eternity, and even a t their end she
had the unpleasant feeling that the summer vacation was stretching
out before her endlessly. Her attitude was obviously the reflection of
her intense unhappiness during those years, in which she felt so forlorn,
so alone and so unloved. She remembered, too, that as a child she
often phantasied the death of one person after another in her W y
21
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306 LEO H. BARTEMEIER

and later she wondered if she would eventually come to feel in the
same way about her husband and any children to whom she might
give birth. She felt as helpless about these death wishes, which she
also imagined as extending throughout her future, as she did about
the endlessness of time, and obviously the former were displaced and
projected upon the latter and time came to stand for death. As a
child she often wondered anxiously what was to become of her. During
her analysis she recognized that her feeling of anxiety was a repetition
in a more severe form of those earlier apprehensions. This displace-
ment and projection of her death wishes on to time made it necessary
for her to attempt a mastery over this substitute, and in this way,
we imagine, her magical measuring of time through her counting was
developed. During brief periods in the early part of her analysis,
when she was free from anxiety, she would think : ' If time would
only stop now, my horrible fear would never return.' In other words,
if her destructiveness would cease she would never need to experience
anxiety again. For many years she had always thought that time
should stop between twelve and three on Good Friday, and again we
see the connection she made between time and death. During her
pre-adolescence she thought that had she been born in a different
age things might have gone better for her and there might have been
something for her. During her analysis she dreamed she was living
in the time of Christopher Columbus. Her wish to have been born in
a different age represented her wish t o have been born a t an earlier
time and in place of her brother. During her school years, arithmetic
had always been her most difficult subject, whereas her brother was
an excellent mathematician and even devised his own systems for
calculating. The patient thought this was due to his natural ability
inasmuch as he was a boy. We see then, that her counting was an
unconscious identification not only with her father but also with her
brother.
In another type of counting in which this patient frequently
engaged, she was not intent upon reaching a certain arithmetical goal.
Instead, she directed her attention to a certain few of her movements,
which she counted aimlessly by ones until she was otherwise distracted
or interrupted. The compulsive element in this type of counting was
less evident, for there was never any manifestation of anxiety or even
the least feeling of uneasiness when it was discontinued. In this
respect it more nearly approximated to normal counting.
Among the various movements which she counted, those connected
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A COUNTING COMPULSION 307

with her breathing occupied her the most frequently. She emphasized
that she did not count each respiratory phase, but that she reckoned
the complete cycle as one. While counting her breathing she experi-
enced the feeling of pushing her whole body forward and backward
synchronously with each respiratory excursion.
Although the patient had a moderate halitosis, she was irrationally
concerned about the malodour of her breath. She scrubbed her
tongue with a tooth brush before the analytical hours and chewed gum
during them. If, by chance, I opened the window a t the end of the
period she was convinced I did so because of the ofiensive odour of
her breath. These facts suggest the idea that her breath had the
unconscious significance of flatus and her phantasy of forward and
backward bodily motion accompanying her respirations is indicative
of their sexual nature. This anal dramatization of the sexual act was
a portrayal of the primitive conception sometimes found among
children, which has been described by Jones (1911). According to
this notion, flatus, ' on account of the idea of penetration to a distance,
is sometimes conceived of by children as constituting the essential
part of coitus. . . . ' We now understand why the patient laid stress
on the two phases of respiration and why she counted them together
as one. In doing so, she was defending herself against her painful
feelings of incompleteness as a girl and a t the same time obtaining a
satisfaction of an ancient wish.
Combining the two movements into one was not only her way of
representing herself as her brother and herself in one person, but it
was also her magical way of converting two into one, that is, female
into male. That the movements of her body were substitutes for
penis movements was also evident in her counting each complete
stroke of her fingers as she masturbated and each movement of her
body during intercourse. This substitution of the whole for a part
was likewise clearly expressed in her statement that she also counted
the spaces between trees, posts and bushes, provided they were large
enough for her to enter them in the upright position. In her counting
of specific movements, she was attempting to overcome her intense
penis envy. Her counting again was a defence and a gratification.
A few events from her analysis indicate how she had expressed her
wish in different ways. When she was a small child she often referred
to her brother and herself as ' we and Joseph '. This substitution
reveals how unhappy she was about the close relation which existed
between her mother and hcr brother and how she felt excluded. In
21.
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308 LEO H. BARTEMEIER

her childish speech she represented hcrself in her brother's place with
her mother and expressed this by the term ' we ', whereas she simul-
taneously put her brother in her own place-alone, unloved, and
excluded. During her analysis a t times, when she was present i n a
mixed group, she imaginarily combined two persons of the opposite
sex into one, representing this unit as twelve. Inasmuch as she also
thought of herself as standing for twelve, we see that this meant a
denial of her castration. In a dream she was the man analyst having
intercourse with herself as a woman. Her husband was sometimes
awakened to find her lying on her abdomen working her body vigorously
forward and backward in her sleep like a man in intercourse.
1.1 a third type of counting this patient directed her attention to
square, oblong, or otherwise symmetrical objects with sharp and well
defined lines and angles, such as doors, windows, panels, mouldings,
patterns, pavement squares and legs of furniture. She counted the
edges or outsides of these objects and never the centres. It was usually
her aim to count to sixty in multiples of twelve, although this was
not invariably her rule. This type of counting was characterized by
certain imaginary movements which she performed synchronously
with her counting. She imagined that her eyes, like pencils, were
tracing out the edges of the objects as she counted them or that she
was pressing out the objects with her fingers. She often said that the
process was more a tracing or a pressing than a counting. Her own
description reveals that while it was principally concerned with the
discharge of her sadistic impulses, it represented a spreading out of
the original method of defence. Counting no longer sufficed in itself,
and imaginary eye and finger movements became necessary. This
was particularly well illustrated in one analytical hour in which she was
silently counting the moulding and the door frame in the analytic
room, After this had been going on for several minutes and she was
unable to interrupt it, she was strongly encouraged to do her counting
out loud. As she did this, her counting was soon replaced by a phantasy
in which she was pulling off my nose, tearing off my ears, plucking out
my eyes, scratching my face and finally disembowelling me with her
hands. In this forni of counting, the edges of objects having sharp and
well-defined lines and angles were selected because of their libidinal
significance, while the touching activity of her eyes and the pressing
movements of her fingers gave partial expression to her castrative and
other destructive impulses.
The study of the counting compulsion of this patient brings into
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-4 COUNTING COMPULSION 309

bolder relief some of the facts previously reported by other investi-

gators and it also adds some new details not hitherto described. The
duodecimal system of counting which she employed was not only
derived from what she had learned about telling the time but also
represented an archaic method of reckoning. The displacement and
projection of her sadism on to the concept of time was abundantly
overdetermined by her early life experiences. The real or phantasied
movements which she executed synchronously with her compulsive
counting had more significance than the counting itself. It was a fact
of her life history, in her earlier years, that, although she was younger
than her brother, she excelled him in her muscular co-ordination.
She had learned to walk sooner than he had, she climbed more easily
and with greater accuracy of movement and, because of these accom-
plishments, she had won approval from her mother. In her attempt to
deal with her penis envy, she therefore chose a method of expression
which had once afforded her the feeling of being more competent than
her hated rival. When, in the course of her lengthy and stormy
analysis, these problems had been worked through, her counting
compulsion gradually disappeared almost completely.

REFERENCES
BORNSTEIN, B. (1930). ' Zur Psychogenese der PseudodebilitAt ', I&.
2.Psychoanal., 16, 394 f.
FENICHEL, 0. (1932). ' Outline of Clinical Psychoanalysis ', Psychoaid.
Quart., 1, 623.
FREUD, S. (1895). (Trans. 1924.) ' Obsessions and Phobias ', Collected
Papers, I, 132.
(1933). (Trans. 1933.) New Introductor-y Lectures on Psycho-
Analysis, I I 7 .
H ~ R N I KE., (1924). ' Der Zahlzwang und seine Bedeutung fur die
Psychologie der Zahlenvorstellung ' (Author's Abstract), Znt. 2. Psycho-
anal., 10, 212 f .
JONES, E. (1911). ' On ' ' Dying Together " ', Essavs in Applied Psycko-
Analysis (1923), 105.
SCHILDER, P. (1935). ' Psychopathologie der Zeit ', Imago, 21, 266.
- (1936). ' Zur Psychoanalyse der Geometrie. Arithmetik
und Physik '. Imago, 22. 389 ff.
(1938). ' The Organic Background of Obsessions atid
Compulsions ', Amev. J . Psychiat.. 94, 1397 ff.
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