#psychology #existentialism # [[Epistemic status]] #shower-thought #to-digest # Changelog ```dataview TABLE WITHOUT ID file.mtime AS "Last Modified" FROM [[#]] SORT file.mtime DESC LIMIT 3 ``` # Related > [!NOTE]- Related # TODO > [!TODO] TODO # Neurosis >~ [[Ernest Becker]] >Neurosis has three interdependent aspects. In the first place it refers to people who are having trouble living with the truth of existence; it is universal in this sense because everybody has some trouble living with the truth of life and pays some vital ransom to that truth. ![[DALL·E 2022-08-06 20.00.58 - A man meditating under a grayish sky harassed by bats flying around, he is strongly holding his head with both his hand, as if stroke by a terrible he.png]] >We can see that neurosis is par excellence the danger of a symbolic animal whose body is a problem to him. Instead of living biologically, then, he lives symbolically. Instead of living in the partway that nature provided for he lives in the total way made possible by symbols. One substitutes the magical, all-inclusive world of the self for the real, fragmentary world of experience. ![[DALL·E 2022-08-06 20.02.11 - A man meditating under a grayish sky harassed by bats flying around, he is strongly holding his head with both his hand, as if stroke by a terrible he.png]] >This apparent egocentricity originally is just a defense mechanism against the danger of reality…. [The neurotic] seeks to complete his ego constantly… without paying for it. >What typifies the neurotic is that he “knows” his situation vis-à-vis reality. He has no doubts; there is nothing you can say to sway him, to give him hope or trust. He is a miserable animal whose body decays, who will die, who will pass into dust and oblivion, disappear forever not only in this world but in all the possible dimensions of the universe, whose life serves no conceivable purpose, who may as well not have been born, and so on and so forth. He knows Truth and Reality, the motives of the entire universe. ![[DALL·E 2022-08-06 20.03.04 - A man under a grayish sky full of thunder, he is strongly holding his head with both his hand, as if stroke by a terrible headache, digital art.png]] >If neurosis is sin, and not disease, then the only thing which can “cure” it is a world-view, some kind of affirmative collective ideology in which the person can perform the living drama of his acceptance as a creature. >In other words, the neurotic isolates himself from others, cannot engage freely in their partialization of the world, and so cannot live by their deceptions about the human condition. He lifts himself out of the “natural therapy” of everyday life, the active, self-forgetful engagement in it; and so the illusions that others share seem unreal to him # External links