Table 1.

Primary obsessions reported by 145 patients with OCD.

Category	Description
Contamination	Thoughts or mental images related to the doubt of having come into contact, even indirectly, with substances considered dangerous or disgusting
Harm	Thoughts or mental images related to potential harm to oneself or others - whether material, financial, or emotional- resulting from one’s own inattention, carelessness, or omissions
Superstitious	Thoughts or mental images related to negative events that may happen to oneself or others in the future if certain behavioral rules are not followed or if their negative effect is not neutralized
Somatics	Excessive preoccupation with parts of the body or physical appearance (dysmorphophobia)
Aggressive	Thoughts, mental images, or impulses to harm loved ones or oneself, despite not wanting to do so
Homosexuals	Thoughts, mental images, fantasies, or impulses with homoerotic content, which induce in the heterosexual individual the doubt of being a latent homosexual
Relational	Doubts about the adequacy of one’s partner and one’s feelings toward them; thoughts, mental images, fantasies, or sexual impulses toward individuals other than one’s partner, which trigger in the individual the obsessive doubt of not being in love with their partner
Religious or moral	Thoughts or mental images with blasphemous content, such as profanities, insults toward the deceased, sexualized fantasies toward sacred images, etc.
Sexual and pedophilic	Thoughts, mental images, fantasies, or sexual impulses toward inappropriate individuals such as relatives, animals, children, etc
Order and simmetry	Need for symmetry, uniformity or exactness. A sense that something isn’t done in the “right way”

Adapted from Abramowitz et al., 2006.