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 has been said that a neurosis
is not so much a disease as a dilemma. Rather might it be said that
the neurosis is a way out of the dilemma. It is a harbor after a
stormy sea, not always a quiet harbor, but at least a usable one.
Unpleasant as it is, every nervous symptom is a form of compensat