Quotes About Neurosis

A human being in a neurotic state might very well be compared to a bewitched person, for people caught in a neurosis are apt to behave in a manner uncongenial and destructive towards themselves as well as others.

All neurotic symptoms have as their object the task of safeguarding the patient's self-esteem and thereby also the lifeline into which he has grown.

In building a path through the self to the far shore of awareness, we have to carefully pick our way through our own wilderness. If we can put our minds into a place of surrender, we will have an easier time feeling the contours of the land. We do not have to break our way through as much as we have to find our way around the major obstacles. We do not have to cure every neurosis, we just have to learn how not to be caught by them.

Our existence, and its attendant neurosis, is defined by a seemingly irresolvable contradiction: that we are outside of nature, beyond it and above it like minor deities, and yet always helplessly within it, forever defined and circumscribed by its blind and implacable authority.

Neurotics think of the past with resentment, and the future with dread; the present just doesn't exist.

For the rational, psychologically healthy man, the desire for pleasure is the desire to celebrate his control over reality. For the neurotic, the desire for pleasure is the desire to escape from reality.

If my penis were a writer/director, it would be Woody Allen - small, neurotic, and, frankly, hit or miss.

If he feels bad because he is inferior, the cure is to make himself as good as everybody else, and the way to feel really good is to make himself superior. This striving for superiority gets him into more trouble, causes more frustration, and sometimes brings about a neurosis where none existed before. He becomes more miserable than ever, and "the harder he tries," the more miserable he becomes.

She's a good poet but a very neurotic woman." "Don't the two go together?

Neurosis is no worse than a bad cold; you ache all over, and it's made you a mess, but you won't die from it.

Education, like neurosis, begins at home.

When we psychologize human suffering, we narrow our focus to the individual—perhaps in order to be less overwhelmed by the sheer enormity of human suffering, which, in the modern era, has reached a crescendo of atrocity. In doing so, we lose the connection to anything larger than our family of origin. The sense or meaning we give to pain keeps us stuck in a kind of narcissistic individualism that paradoxically fuels neurosis and emotional suffering.

Tibetan Buddhists say that a person should never get rid of their negative energy, that negative energy transformed is the energy of enlightenment, and that the only difference between neurosis and wisdom is struggle. If we stop struggling and open up and accept what is, that neurotic energy naturally arises as wisdom, naturally informs us and becomes our teacher.

Psychoanalysis can provide a theory of 'progress,' but only by viewing history as a neurosis.

All currency is neurotic currency.

But in the unconscious the repressed dreams of omnipotent indulgence in pleasure persist, as the nucleus of man's universal neurosis and his restless discontent, the cor irrequietum of St. Augustine. The infantile conflict between actual impotence and dreams of omnipotence is also the basic theme of the universal history of mankind. And in both conflicts—in the history of the individual and the history of the race—the stakes are the meaning of love.

Words, says Freud, are a halfway house to lost things; and words are only one class of the sets of symbols that make up human culture. "If we could not have schizophrenics we also could not have cultures," says LaBarre.21 Freud's analysis of word-consciousness deepens our understanding not only of language as neurosis, but also of culture as neurosis and of culture as a "substitute-gratification," a provisional arrangement in the quest for real enjoyment.

This is a land of neurotic egotists, each of whom, as soon as he finds himself among others, starts to instruct, criticize, offend, and show off his undoubted superiority.

Neurosis is the rule, not the exception', and grasping this can help us to see that we are not alone. It is also the starting point for understanding what went wrong and learning that we have a choice: we can simply re-enact the past, or we can rewrite the script.

To sit in order to cure neurosis or to develop hara42 so as not to be frightened by things is really up to each person and probably is not bad. Whether such people will be guided from there to training according to the true way of Zen discipline depends on the ability of the instructor. But, if we recall the original aim of zazen, it is correct to say that zazen has no purpose other than zazen.

Neurosis is the result of willing the spontaneous.

Neurosis is the way of avoiding nonbeing by avoiding being

Hysteria defied self-control; obsessional neurosis mimicked it.