Compulsions are often tied to obsessions. From the Wikipedia article on compulsive behaviour:
Compulsive behavior is defined as performing an act persistently and repetitively without it necessarily leading to an actual reward or pleasure. Compulsive behaviors could be an attempt to make obsessions go away.The act is usually a small, restricted and repetitive behavior, yet not disturbing in a pathological way. Compulsive behaviors are a need to reduce apprehension caused by internal feelings a person wants to abstain from or control. A major cause of the compulsive behaviors is said to be obsessive–compulsive disorder (OCD).
I don’t have OCD, but I’ve had similar experiences. These are basic sources I’m using, but words like feeling “coerced” or “constrained” by an obsessive part of my mind into compulsively performing a behaviour wouldn’t be out of place if I had try pointing out what that experience is like for me. It’s often hard to stop doing it even though it feels adverse or painful to perform the behaviour. In the language of psychology, an *obsession* is a thought, while a *compulsion* is a behaviour. A desire is definitely more like a thought than a behaviour, so here when we’re using the term “compulsive desire”, to me it’s ambiguous whether it’s a thought or a behaviour. By compulsive behaviours are typically driven by *push* motivations, obsessions to make something go away. I don’t experience dependency or addiction to a severe degree in the conventional sense of those words, which seems driven by a *pull* motivation. Addictions driven by pull motivations seem driven by a *desire* to fill an unfulfilled goal; your *pulling* something towards you to fulfill an empty goal-slot you can’t fill by other means. (This reminds me of an article in which Diana Fleischman predicts the future impact of sexbots I read earlier today.)
So when I think *compulsive desire* I imagine a desire to fulfill an addiction driven in the first place by a strong pull motivator. I know people who have experienced these compulsive desires much more deeply than I have, such as an (ex-)alcoholic friend who has been part of Alcoholics Anonymous for many years. He’s told me stories of his and others’ addictions, and it strikes me as deeper an addiction than anything I’ve ever felt. It really reinforces to me the purpose behind psychologists or alcohol and drug abuse awareness advocates urging a distinction between the technical use of *dependency*, which is common to most people and includes behaviour colloquially called “addictive”; and *addiction*, which ought to be reserved to refer to the distinctively severe behaviour I mentioned above. That that technical distinction was made in the first place shows the difference of degree between each other’s experiences. So my best guess is a *compulsive desire* is the need to fulfill an urge even though having the desire in the first place is painful.
When I read about “compulsion”, it’s definitely more than a word to me. From the dictionary.com definition of compulsion.
Compulsions are often tied to obsessions. From the Wikipedia article on compulsive behaviour:
I don’t have OCD, but I’ve had similar experiences. These are basic sources I’m using, but words like feeling “coerced” or “constrained” by an obsessive part of my mind into compulsively performing a behaviour wouldn’t be out of place if I had try pointing out what that experience is like for me. It’s often hard to stop doing it even though it feels adverse or painful to perform the behaviour. In the language of psychology, an *obsession* is a thought, while a *compulsion* is a behaviour. A desire is definitely more like a thought than a behaviour, so here when we’re using the term “compulsive desire”, to me it’s ambiguous whether it’s a thought or a behaviour. By compulsive behaviours are typically driven by *push* motivations, obsessions to make something go away. I don’t experience dependency or addiction to a severe degree in the conventional sense of those words, which seems driven by a *pull* motivation. Addictions driven by pull motivations seem driven by a *desire* to fill an unfulfilled goal; your *pulling* something towards you to fulfill an empty goal-slot you can’t fill by other means. (This reminds me of an article in which Diana Fleischman predicts the future impact of sexbots I read earlier today.)
So when I think *compulsive desire* I imagine a desire to fulfill an addiction driven in the first place by a strong pull motivator. I know people who have experienced these compulsive desires much more deeply than I have, such as an (ex-)alcoholic friend who has been part of Alcoholics Anonymous for many years. He’s told me stories of his and others’ addictions, and it strikes me as deeper an addiction than anything I’ve ever felt. It really reinforces to me the purpose behind psychologists or alcohol and drug abuse awareness advocates urging a distinction between the technical use of *dependency*, which is common to most people and includes behaviour colloquially called “addictive”; and *addiction*, which ought to be reserved to refer to the distinctively severe behaviour I mentioned above. That that technical distinction was made in the first place shows the difference of degree between each other’s experiences. So my best guess is a *compulsive desire* is the need to fulfill an urge even though having the desire in the first place is painful.