compromise, a union of the opposing forces, a happy utilization of energy by displacement on more useful ideas. But if the conflict has to be met with the mind hampered by immature thinking and immature feeling; if the demands of the here-and-now are met as if it were long ago; if unhealthy and untrue complexes, old loves and hates complicate the situation; if to the necessary conflict is added an unnecessary one; then something else happens. Compromise of some kind must be made, but instead of a happy union of the two forces a poor compromise is effected, gaining a partial satisfaction for both sides, but a real one for neither. The neurosis is this compromise.
Later Experiences
The Last Straw. The precipitating cause may be one of a number of things. It may be entirely within, or it may be external. Perhaps it is only a quickening of the maturing instincts at the time of adolescence, making the love-force too strong to be held by the old repressions. Perhaps the husband, wife, or lover dies, or the life-work is taken away, depriving the vital energy of its usual outlets. Perhaps the trigger is pulled by an emotional shock which bears a faint resemblance to old emotional experiences, and which stimulates both the repressing and repressed trends and makes the person at the same time say both "Yes,"
and "No." [38] Perhaps physical fatigue lets down the mental and moral tension and makes the conflict too strong to be controlled. Perhaps an external problem presses and arouses the old habit of fleeing from disagreeable reality. Any or all these factors may cooperate, but not one of them is anything more than a last straw on an overburdened back. No calamity, deprivation, fatigue, or emotion has been able to bring about a neurosis unless the ground was prepared for it by the earlier reactions of childhood.
[38] ] "The external world can only cause repression when there was already present beforehand a strong initial tension reaching back even to childhood."—Pfister: Psychoanalytic Method, p. 94.
The Breakdown Itself
"Two Persons under One Hat." 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; we hear a nervous invalid called selfish, unsocial, shut in, primitive, childish, self-deceived. Both these descriptions are true to life. A neurosis is an ethical struggle
between these two sets of forces. If the lower set had triumphed, the man would have been merely weak; if the higher set had been victorious, he would have been strong. As it is, he is neither one nor the other,—only nervous. The neurosis is the only solution of the struggle which he is able to find, and serves the purpose of a sort of armed armistice between the two camps.
Serving a Purpose
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. The conscious part of him hates the pain, the inconvenience, and the disability with a real hatred. It is not pleasant to be ill. And yet, as it turns out, it is pleasanter to be ill than it is to bear the tension of unsatisfied desire or to be undeceived about oneself. Every symptom is a means of expression for repressed and forgotten impulses and is a relief to the personality. It tends to the preservation of the individual, rather than to his destruction. The nervous invalid is not short-lived, but his family may be! It