An inability to adapt appropriately to internal or external reality. A breakdown of the personality created by the psyche in order to bring the personality back to its limits when it’s gone to an excess, or, in the opposite situation, to drive it to achieve its potential. Caused by excessive one-sidedness of the personality, or by the refusal by the ego to undergo one’s authentic, necessary suffering. In youth neuroses generally result from the failure to adapt to the collective; in old age, from an inability to let go of one’s youth and take up one’s second-half-of-life tasks. Jung held that neuroses were an attempt by the unconscious to cure oneself.
I myself have known more than one person who owed his entire usefulness and reason for existence to a neurosis, which prevented all the worst follies in his life and forced him to a mode of living that developed his valuable potentialities. These might have been stifled had not the neurosis, with iron grip, held him to the place where he belonged.
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The Problem of the Attitude-Type, CW 7, par. 68
I no longer seek the cause of a neurosis in the past, but in the present. I ask, what is the necessary task which the patient will not accomplish?
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Psychoanalysis and Neurosis, CW4, par. 570
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