Neuroticism

“ We can understand now why a neurotic can be described in so many ways. We often hear him called an especially moral, especially ethical person, with a very active conscience; an intensely social being, unable to be satisfied with anything but a social standard; a person with "finer intellectual insight and greater sensitiveness than the rest of mankind." At the same time we are told that a neurosis is a partial triumph of anti-social, non-moral factors, and that it is a cowardly flight from reality ”

“ But the lessons which our psychologists are rapidly learning, as to the evil effects on the brain of an education that promotes self-consciousness, are sorely needed to be applied to the pathology of nervous diseases generally, and of neuralgia among the rest. Common sense and common humanity, when united with the physician's knowledge, cry out against the system under which religious parents and teachers subject the feeble and highly mobile nervous systems of the young to the tremendous strain of spiritual self-questioning upon the most momentous topics. ”

“ The patient is able to examine for himself many of the processes, such as repression and rationalisation, upon which his disorder depends, and through his power of criticism and witting control is able to influence these processes and thus do much to abolish their malign influence and set himself upon the path of recovery. The essential feature of anxiety- or repression-neurosis is that it is not only due a conflict between instinct and intelligence, but that subject of the morbid state is able wittingly to act upon factors which enter into this conflict. ”

“ Tricking Ourselves. A neurosis is a confidence game that we play on ourselves. It is an attempt to get stolen fruit and to look pious at the same time,—not in order to fool somebody else but to fool ourselves.
No nervous symptom is what it seems to be. It is an arch pretender. It pretends to be afraid of something it does not fear at all, or to ignore something that interests it intensely. It pretends to be a physical disease, when primarily it has nothing to do with the body ”

“ Pomp and ceremony, so dear to the child-mind, make their appeal to the dissociated part of the personality. The repressed instincts, hungry for love and attention, delight in the petting and special care which an illness is sure to bring. Secretly and unconsciously, the neurotic takes a certain pleasure in all the various changes that are made for his benefit,—the dismantling of striking clocks, the muffling of household noises, the banishing of crowing roosters, and the changes in menu which must be carefully planned for his stomach. ”

“ If a neurosis is a compromise, if it is the easiest way out, if it serves a purpose, it must be that the individual himself has a hand in shaping that purpose. Can it be that a breakdown which seems such an unmitigated disaster is really welcomed by a part of our own selves? Nothing is more intensely resented by the nervous invalid than the accusation that he likes his symptoms,—and no wonder. ”

“ It [285] is about time to face the truth fairly and squarely, a truth which is brought out by recent investigations in psychopathology, that no matter where the fons et origo of neurosis be, whether in self-preservation and its accompanying fear instinct, the condition of life primordial, or in the other forms of self-preservation, the formation of psychopathic neurosis with all its characteristic protean symptoms is not hereditary, but acquired. Neurosis arises within the life cycle of the individual; it is due to faulty training and harmful experience of early child life. ”

“ They have not merely asserted that nervous disorders are not physical; they have discovered what the trouble is and have found it to be discoverable and removable in almost every case, provided only that the right method is used.
Ourselves and Our Bodies. If the statement that "nervous troubles are neither physical nor imaginary but a disease of the personality," sounds rather mystifying to the average person, it is only because the average person is not very conversant with his own inner life. ”

“ In applying psychoanalysis we must grant the regressive phantasies of the patient, for psychoanalysis has a much broader outlook, as regards the valuation of symptoms, than have the above psychotherapeutic methods. These all emanate from the assertion that a neurosis is an absolute morbid formation.
The reigning school of neurology has never thought of considering neurosis as a healing process also, and of attributing to the neurotic formations a quite special teleological meaning. Neurosis, like every other disease, is a compromise between the morbid tendencies, and the normal function. ”

“ He came to the same conclusion as I that the etiology of neurosis is to be found in fear, which alone forms the basis of psychopathic neurosis. All other factors, social, professional, sexual, religious, repressions, conflicts are only occasions of the disease. [172] It is fear, and fear alone that forms the pathology of the psychopathic neurotic symptom complex.
A young lady was afflicted with ornithophobia, fear of birds, fear of chickens. The sight of a chicken set her into a panic. The patient is very timid, and this timidity can be traced to her early childhood. ”

“ Considered from the standpoint of the latter theory, neurosis seemed to be a growth which had its roots in earliest childhood, and overgrew the normal structure. Considered from the standpoint of the association-experiment, neurosis seems to be a reaction from an actual conflict, which is naturally found also among normal people, but among them the conflict is solved without too great difficulty. The neurotic remains in the grip of his conflict, and his neurosis seems, more or less, to be the consequence of this stagnation. ”

“ The neurosis has become a psychosis. The physical condition has become a mental discomfort. Normally this ensuing mind state should be in accordance with the extent of the injury to the nerve-cells and fibers. But under long-continued discipline, or influenced by emotion, the conscious mind may not recognize the neurosis; whereas, in the hypersuggestible, consciousness will translate it into entirely disproportionate suffering.
A great problem of nervous education is what the mind will do with discomfort or pain. ”

“ For the neurotic there is no established way, for his aims and tasks are apt to be of a highly individual character. He tries to follow the more or less uncontrolled and half-conscious way of normal people, not fully realizing his own critical and very different nature, which imposes upon him more effort than the normal person is required to exert. There are neurotics who have shown their increased sensitiveness and their resistance against adaptation in the very first weeks of life, in their difficulty in taking the mother’s breast, and in their exaggerated nervous reactions, &c. ”

“ In proportion as the neurotic attacks keep on recurring the formed pathological system is gaining in energy and in ease of manifestation. The psychopathic attacks with their symptoms emerge [148] at an ever diminishing intensity of stimulation. The resistance of healthy normal associations is ever on the decrease until a point is reached when all power of resistance is lost. The conscious and subconscious groups which enter into the psychopathic system, forming the neurosis, get control over the patient’s life, and become an uncontrollable, psychopathic obsession. ”

“ We have seen the mental disorder affecting modern society manifesting itself chiefly in the following forms: Mysticism, which is the expression of the inaptitude for attention, for clear thought and control of the emotions, and has for its cause the weakness of the higher cerebral centres; Ego-mania, which is an effect of faulty transmission by the sensory nerves, of obtuseness in the centres of perception, of aberration of instincts from a craving for sufficiently strong impressions, and of the great predominance of organic sensations over representative consciousness ”

“ The basis of neurasthenia, however, is often or even generally a hereditary taint, a nervous weakness inherited from the parents.
Psychasthenia is a neurosis or psychoneurosis similar to neurasthenia, characterized by an exhaustion of the nervous system, also by weakness of the will, overscrupulousness, fear, and a feeling of the unreality of things.
Neuropathy is a disease or disorder of the nervous system. Psychopathy is a disease or disorder of the mind.
Of late years we often hear people referred to as neurotics, neurasthenics, psychasthenics, neuropaths or psychopaths. ”

“ As regards the working of the intellect, it is easier to speak in a free and unembarrassed manner than respecting the other matters. There can be no doubt that, of intellectual work, that sort which exhausts and harasses the nervous system is the forced, the premature, and the unreal kind; and this it is which predisposes, among other nervous maladies, to neuralgia. It is more difficult to speak the truth about emotional influences generally, and especially about those which are concerned with the highest spiritual matters ”

“ And again, speaking of the many ways in which a neurotic taint may manifest itself, he says: “In families where there is a strong predisposition to insanity, one member will sometimes suffer from one form of nervous disease, and another from another form: one perhaps has epilepsy, another is afflicted with a severe neuralgia, or with hysteria, a third may commit suicide, a fourth become maniacal or melancholic, and it might even happen sometimes that a fifth evinced remarkable artistic talents.” ”

“ In psychopathic or neurotic diseases one should take into consideration the fact that the patients are characterized by the tendency of formation of habits which are hard to break. The patients are apt to ask that the same thing be done again and again for the simple reason that it has been done several times before. In other words, psychopathic neurosis is characterized by automatism and routine. This tendency to recurrence is characteristic of all forms of primitive life as well as of mental activities which are on the decline,—it is the easiest way to get along. ”

“ So the healthy man is virtually a neurotic, but dreams are apparently the only symptoms which he can manifest. Yet if we subject our waking hours to a more penetrating analysis we discover, of course, that they refute this appearance and that this seemingly healthy life is shot through with a number of trivial, practically unimportant symptom formations.
The difference between nervous health and neurosis is entirely a practical one which is determined by the available capacity for enjoyment and accomplishment retained by the individual. ”

“ The most fruitful source of neurotic affections and especially of what have come to be termed in recent years the psychoneuroses, those disturbances of nerve function due to an unfortunate state of mind, are the dreads or, as they have been called, the fear thoughts of mankind. Men as well as women develop, in the sense of fostering, often almost unconsciously to themselves, a dread of the ulterior significance of some symptom, or feeling, or disturbance of function, which serves to make them extremely uncomfortable. ”

“ After I had described my symptoms, the doctor smiled rather more expansively than was to my liking and said:—
“You may have a little post-nasal catarrh, but I think it is only a neurosis.”
I thought to myself that if it was “only” a neurosis it was one with great possibilities. The fact that collapses are frequent among brain-workers was not easily dismissed from [Pg 25] my mind. I feared insanity and began to picture how I would disport myself in a madhouse. ”

“ In connection with all such neurotic affections we find invariably present a feeling of unrest, hesitation, doubt, conflict, discord, uneasiness, a feeling of anxiety, conscious or subconscious, feeling of some impending evil. In all such affections we find the brooding spirit of the most powerful of all animal instincts,—the fear instinct. Neurosis is a disease of self-preservation and fear. ”

“ A sense of the dignity and high purpose of these organs is far more likely to prevent perversions—to say nothing of nervousness—than is an attitude of taboo and silence.
A certain amount of repression is inevitable and useful, but a neurotic is merely an exaggerated represser. He represses so much of himself that it will not stay down. [37] He builds up a permanent resistance which automatically acts as a dam to his normal sex instinct and forces it into undesirable outlets.
[37] "A neurosis is a partial failure of repression." Frink: Morbid Fears and Compulsions. ”

“ And if we carefully examine the kind of infantile phantasies and events to which the neurotic individual is attached, we shall be obliged to agree that there is nothing in them specific for neurosis. Normal individuals have pretty much the same kind of internal and external experiences, and are attached to them to an even astonishing degree, without developing a neurosis. You will find primitive people especially, very much bound to their infantility. ”

“ If, however, the child reacts too intensely, lingers too long in any one of these phases, he lays for himself action lines of least resistance which he may never leave or to which he may return during the strain and stress of adult life.
In either case, the neurotic is a grown-up child. He may be a very learned, very charming person, but he is nevertheless dragging behind him a part of his childhood which he should have outgrown long ago. Part of him is suffering from an arrest of development,—not a leg or an arm but an impulse. ”