Quotes About Neurosis

Che non si debba amare sé stessi, è una sorta di pregiudizio nevrotico tardo-cristiano.

As a consequence there are many people who become neurotic because they are only normal, as there are people who are neurotic because they cannot become normal. For the former the very thought that you want to educate them to normality is a nightmare; their deepest need is really to be able to lead "abnormal" lives.

neurosis is…a defence…or an attempt, somewhat dearly paid for, to escape from the inner voice and hence from the vocation…Behind the neurotic perversion is concealed his vocation, his destiny: the growth of personality, the full realization of the life-will that is born with the individual. It is the man without amor fati [love of fate] who is the neurotic; he, truly, has missed his vocation.

I am not altogether pessimistic about neurosis. In many cases we have to say, "Thank heaven he could make up his mind to be neurotic." Neurosis is really an attempt at self-cure…It is an attempt of the self-regulating psychic system to restore the balance, in no way different from the function of dreams – only rather more forceful and drastic.

Among the so-called neurotics of our day there are a good many who in other ages would not have been neurotic - that is, divided against themselves. If they had lived in a period and in a milieu in which man was still linked by myth with the world of the ancestors, and thus with nature truly experienced and not merely seen from the outside, they would have been spared this division with themselves.

Neurosis is the way of avoiding non-being by avoiding being.

In all of our lives, we know some boring people, but we don't want to see them on television. In our families, we have some very odd people who have odd neurosis. All of us are really strange people.

[Neurotics are] torn by inner conflicts ... Every neurotic ... is at war with himself.

It is said that those whom the gods wish to destroy they first make mad. It may well be that a war neurosis stirred up by propaganda of fear and hatred is the prelude to destruction.

It takes a lot of energy and a lot of neurosis to write a novel. If you were really sensible, you'd do something else.

Para el hombre racional, psicológicamente sano, el deseo de obtener placer es el deseo de celebrar su control sobre la realidad. Para el neurótico, el deseo de placer es el deseo de huir de la realidad".

Old Scully, who according to Jennifer, hadn't the imagination to think the worst. Something she said once, as though neurosis was an artform.

Neo-Freudian Karen Horney believed that childhood experiences resulted in our creation of a self that "moved toward people" or "moved away from people." These tendencies were a sort of mask that could develop into neurosis if we were not willing to move beyond them. Underneath was what she called a "wholehearted," or real, person.

I am looking for the novelists whose writing is an extension of their intellect rather than an extension of their neurosis.

La neurosis es siempre un sustituto de los sufrimientos verdaderos...

If such a compensatory move of the unconscious is not integrated into consciousness in an individual, it leads to a neurosis or even to a psychosis.

We should not try to "get rid" of a neurosis, but rather to experience what it means, what it has to teach, what its purpose is.

In constructing a theory which derives the neurosis from causes in the distant past, we are first and foremost following the tendency of our patient to lure us as far away as possible from the critical present…It is mainly in the present that the affective causes lie, and here alone are the possibilities of removing them.

It makes no difference that there were already conflicts in childhood, for the conflicts in childhood are different from the conflict of adults. Those who have suffered ever since childhood from a chronic neurosis do not suffer now from the same conflict they suffered from then.

For all my respect for history, it seems to me that no insight into the past and no re-experiencing of pathogenic reminiscences – however powerful it may be – is as effective in freeing man from the grip of the past as the construction of something new…no matter what the original circumstances from which they arose, [the neurosis] is conditioned and maintained by a wrong attitude which is present all the time and which, once it is recognized, must be corrected now.

Neurosis is always a substitute for legitimate suffering.

A psycho-neurosis must be understood as the suffering of a human being who has not yet discovered what life means for him

A neurosis…is not a disgrace…It is not a fatal disease, but it does grow worse to the degree that one is determined to ignore it.

Flight from life does not exempt us from the law of age and death. The neurotic who tries to wriggle out of the necessity of living wins nothing and only burdens himself with a constant foretaste of aging and dying, which must appear especially cruel on account of the total emptiness and meaninglessness of his life.