Quotes About Neurosis

I have frequently seen people become neurotic when they content themselves with inadequate or wrong answers to the questions of life.

Anything can be settled by an intellect that is not subject to the control of feeling—and yet the intellectual still suffers from a neurosis if feeling is undeveloped.

Whoever protects himself against what is new and strange and thereby regresses to the past, falls into the same neurotic condition as the man who identifies himself with the new and runs away from the past.

Before the beginning of this century, Freud and Josef Breuer had recognized that neurotic symptoms—hysteria, certain types of pain, and abnormal behavior—are in fact symbolically meaningful. They are one way in which the unconscious mind expresses itself, just as it may in dreams; and they are equally symbolic.

Ne înÅŸel?m dac? credem c? inconÅŸtientul este ceva inofensiv … Desigur, el nu este primejdios în orice condiÅ£ii; dar de îndat? ce apare o nevroz?, acesta e un semn c? în inconÅŸtient exist? o acumulare de energie, adic? un fel de înc?rc?tur? care poate exploda … S?p?m cumva ca s? d?m de o fântân? artezian? ÅŸi risc?m s? ne izbim de un vulcan.

More accurately, the ego is in fact supplemented, not replaced, by the self. For the aim of both Gnosticism and therapy is, once again, the integration of ego consciousness with the unconscious, not the rejection of either one for the other: When, in treating a case of neurosis, we try to supplement the inadequate attitude (or adaptedness)

The things that come to light brutally in insanity remain hidden in the background in neurosis, but they continue to influence consciousness nonetheless. When, therefore, the analysis penetrates the background of conscious phenomena, it discovers the same archetypal figures that activate the deliriums of psychotics.

Jung believed that there was a natural and proper path of development for each individual; and that neurosis might actually be a valuable signal which indicated when, through intellectual arrogance, a false set of values or an evasion of responsibilities, a person was straying too far from his own true path.

man does not live very long in the infantile environment or in the bosom of his family without real danger to his mental health. Life calls him forth to independence, and he who gives no heed to this hard call because of childish indolence and fear is threatened by a neurosis, and once the neurosis has broken out it becomes more and more a valid reason to escape the battle with life and to remain for all time in the morally poisoned infantile atmosphere.

This peculiar psychotic material cannot be derived from the conscious mind, because the latter lacks the premises which would help to explain the strangeness of the ideas. Neurotic contents can be integrated without appreciable injury to the ego, but psychotic ideas cannot. They remain inaccessible, and ego-consciousness is more or less swamped by them. They even show a distinct tendency to draw the ego into their "system.

Everything that accentuates this cleavage makes the patient worse, and everything that mitigates it tends to heal the patient. What drives people to war with themselves is the intuition or the knowledge that they consist of two persons in opposition to one another. The conflict may be between the sensual and the spiritual man, or between the ego and the shadow. It is what Faust means when he says "Two souls, alas, dwell in my breast apart." A neurosis is a dissociation of personality.

In cases of neurosis and psychosis, the unconscious attempted to compensate the one-sided conscious attitude. The unbalanced individual defends himself against this, and the opposites become more polarized. The corrective impulses that present themselves in the language of the unconscious should be the beginning of a healing process, but the form in which they break through makes them unacceptable to consciousness.

This increase in self-knowledge is still very rare nowadays and is usually paid for in advance with a neurosis, if not with something worse.

Loss of roots and lack of tradition neuroticize the masses and prepare them for collective hysteria. Collective hysteria calls for collective therapy, which consists in abolition of liberty and terrorization. Where rational istic materialism holds sway, states tend to develop less into prisons than into lunatic asylums.

When the neurotic complains that the world does not understand him, he is telling us in a word that he wants his mother.

The wider the gap between conscious and unconscious, the nearer creeps the fatal splitting of the personality, which in neurotically disposed individuals leads to neurosis, and, in those with a psychotic constitution, to schizophrenia and fragmentation of personality.

Here a critical attitude is justifiable, especially when we consider the oft-repeated observation that the moment of the outbreak of neurosis is not just a matter of chance; as a rule it is most critical. It is usually the moment when a new psychological adjustment, that is, a new adaptation, is demanded.

If we follow the history of a neurosis with attention, we regularly find a critical moment when some problem emerged that was evaded.

it would be a serious misunderstanding to confuse the existence of problems with neurosis. There is a marked difference between the two in that the neurotic is ill because he is unconscious of his problems. . .

If you want to cure a neurosis you have to risk something. To do something without taking a risk is merely ineffectual . . .

The patient married during the course of her treatment with me, but not without a violent resistance to this step. The cause of her neurotic resistance came to light only after many months, and there is not a hint of it anywhere in these dreams. They are without exception anticipations of the difficulties she is to have with the analysts to whom she has come for treatment.

The very use of the term "mental illness" (rather than, say, "neurosis", "insanity", "nervous breakdown", or other euphemisms) can be seen as an effort to move certain kinds of psychological distress into the biomedical realm.

anyone who attempts to do both, to adjust to his group and at the same time pursue his individual goal, becomes neurotic.

A psychoneurosis must be understood, ultimately, as the suffering of a soul which has not discovered its meaning. But all creativeness in the realm of the spirit as well as every psychic advance of man arises from the suffering of the soul, and the cause of the suffering is spiritual stagnation, or psychic sterility.