What Is a Neurosis

The need to define a neurosis has developed only recently with the realization that psychic disturbances need not consist only of gross malfunctions, as was held in the latter part of the nineteenth century, but may consist of character trends of a particular nature, the sum total of which interferes with the individual's happiness. The impression of two kinds of neuroses-symptom neuroses and character neuroses-which resulted from this new conception is again misleading, for every neurosis is essentially a character disorder. This view introduces social viewpoints into a field claimed by medical psychiatry. From a social standpoint a neurosis can be defined as a deviation from the "normal" in the sense of the statistically average in a given culture. From a clinical viewpoint neuroses may be regarded as an attempt to cope with life under difficult internal conditions which center about a basic anxiety toward life in general. An attempt to bridge the difference between the socially oriented definition of neurosis and that which is clinically oriented would describe a neurosis as a deviation from the average but add that the deviation does not primarily concern the manifest behavior but the quantity or quality of basic anxiety as well as that of the deviation developed for the sake of security

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• The great escape

  Open Access•Edward J K Gitre•Journal of the History of the…•2011

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