This study investigated the role of magical thinking in obsessive-compulsive disorder
(OCD). Magical thinking was defined as the belief that having a thought may actually
cause or increase the likelihood of an event happening to self or others. Cognitive
and psychoanalytic models of OCD (Salkovskis, 1985; McFall and Wollersheim,
1979; Freud, 1909) have hypothesised that magical thinking or a sense of inflated
personal influence may play a significant part in the phenomenology of OCD. Other
authors such as Tallis (1995) have suggested how a sense of inflated personal
influence might lead to the perception of excessive responsibility and guilt which also
feature significantly in cognitive theories of OCD. Previous research findings from
studies on the phenomenology of obsessions (Kulhara and Prasad Rao, 1985) and
from the cognitive literature (Shaffan, Thordarson and Rachman, 1996) have
suggested that this belief may play an important role in OCD. A questionnaire
tapping magical thinking was developed for use in this study adapting methods used
in a previous study to assess magical thinking in children (Viken and Clausen, 1988).
The questionnaire consisted of 32 items looking at various aspects of magical
thinking. A pilot study was carried out to evaluate the feasibility of this
questionnaire. In the main study an adapted version of this questionnaire with 16
items was used to assess magical thinking in a group of adults with a diagnosis of
OCD and a control group of normal adults. There were 20 subjects in each group.
The main hypothesis was that magical thinking would be higher in the obsessional
sample than the control group. The results are presented and discussed in relation to
previous research findings
