Phobic Neurosis Quotes

In so doing, the idea forces itself upon him that religion is comparable to a childhood neurosis, and he is optimistic enough to suppose that mankind will surmount this neurotic phase, just as so many children grow out of their similar neurosis. ~ Sigmund Freud

[T]he accumulation of things not spelled out, not properly articulated, may result in neurosis. ~ Joseph Brodsky

Everything but happiness is neurosis. ~ Anais Nin

The difference between neurosis and wisdom is struggle. ~ Natalie Goldberg

Boredom is the only sure cure for neurosis. ~ Mason Cooley

Whining about your own, others', or the world's failings is a main element in what we usually call neurosis. ~ Albert Ellis

A neurosis defends itself by coming up with rationalizations to explain away bizarre behavior. ~ David Brin

Our neurosis and our wisdom are made out of the same material. ~ Pema Chodron

Normality is the Great Neurosis of civilization. ~ Tom Robbins

The only thing to know is how to use your neurosis. ~ Arthur Adamov

About a third of my cases are suffering from no clinically defineable neurosis, but from the senselessness and emptiness of their lives. This can be described as the general neurosis of our time. ~ Harold S. Kushner

A neurosis is wherever we are allied against our true nature. ~ James Hollis

Religion: Something comparable to childhood neurosis ~ Sigmund Freud

Old Scully, who according to Jennifer, hadn't the imagination to think the worst. Something she said once, as though neurosis was an artform. ~ Tim Winton

Education, like neurosis, begins at home. ~ Milton Sapirstein

Intelligence will be used in the service of the neurosis. ~ Sigmund Freud

Fear, anxiety and neurosis: that's just in the suitcase when you're an actor. ~ Laura Linney

We can actually put the essence of neurosis in a single word: blaming - or damning. ~ Albert Ellis

I swim in a pool of my own neurosis. I carry love, grief deeply, like an Irishman. ~ Richard Harris

Religion [is] the universal obsessional neurosis of humanity ~ Sigmund Freud

Perhaps someday everyone will have neurosis. ~ Vincent Van Gogh

I had been struck by the analogy between neurosis and romanticism. Romanticism was truly a parallel to neurosis. It demanded of reality an illusory world, love, an absolute which it could never obtain, and thus destroyed itself by the dream. ~ Anais Nin

Religion is comparable to a childhood neurosis. ~ Sigmund Freud

Even in my first analysis of a depressive psychosis, I was immediately struck by its structural similarity with obsessional neurosis. ~ Karl Abraham

Happiness is your original nature, it is YOU, minus your neurosis ~ Robert Holden

All who seek to be nobler than their constitution permits succumb to neurosis; they would have been better in health if they had found it possible to be morally worse. ~ Sigmund Freud

Neurosis is no worse than a bad cold; you ache all over, and it's made you a mess, but you won't die from it. ~ Mignon McLaughlin

Dr Allendy said that it was necessary to become equal to life, that the romantic was defeated by life, really died of it, whether by tuberculosis in the old days, or by neurosis today. I had never thought before of the connection between neurosis and romanticism. Wanting the impossible? Dying when unable to reach it? Not wanting to compromise? ~ Anais Nin

There is no denying that we are suffering from a collective neurosis and the novel which does not face this is not a novel of our time. ~ Anais Nin

Neurosis is the natural by-product of pain avoidance. ~ C. G. Jung

My dirty little secret is I don't drive at all, though I have my license and I renew it every five years. I'm phobic. I keep worrying if I drive, I'll end up killing someone. I hoped that by writing about a car crash, I might understand and heal this phobia, but I didn't! I'm still phobic. ~ Caroline Leavitt

The edge in modern painting is charged with neurosis; it meets a world that no longer confirms it but which is hostile or at best indifferent. ~ Andrew Graham-Dixon

In any discussion of religion and personality integration the question is not whether religion itself makes for health or neurosis, but what kind of religion and how is it used? Freud was in error when he held that religion is per se a compulsion neurosis. Some religion is and some is not. ~ Rollo May

The tenacity with which the neurotic adheres to any attitude is a sure indication that the attitude fulfills functions which seem indispensable in the framework of his neurosis. ~ Karen Horney

Creativity is neither the product of neurosis nor simple talent, but an intense courageous encounter with the Gods. ~ Rollo May

I started learning to sing what I liked, to experience it in a visceral way. Then it's inside. Get rid of the neurosis and then you can improvise. ~ Joe Satriani

The pride in intellect, or rather in the supremacy of the mind, is not restricted to those engaged in intellectual pursuits but is a regular occurrence in all neurosis. ~ Karen Horney

For in that city [New York] there is neurosis in the air which the inhabitants mistake for energy. ~ Evelyn Waugh

People without plants are in a state of perpetual neurosis, a state of existential wanting. ~ Terence McKenna

I am looking for the novelists whose writing is an extension of their intellect rather than an extension of their neurosis. ~ Tom Robbins

It takes a lot of energy and a lot of neurosis to write a novel. If you were really sensible, you'd do something else. ~ Lawrence Durrell

My work is not about my life history. It's not about the story of my neurosis. ~ Anish Kapoor

The scars left from the child's defeat in the fight against irrational authority are to be found at the bottom of every neurosis. ~ Erich Fromm

Wherever on earth the religious neurosis has appeared we find it tied to three dangerous dietary demands: solitude, fasting, and sexual abstinence. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche

The significant question is whether the activity pursued permits the release of tension without resolving the underlying conflict. If so, the conflict still remains, and hence the activity must be engaged in repeatedly. We then may have the beginning of compulsion neurosis. ~ Rollo May

I'm always asked if the songs that I write are therapeutic, and my answer is a quick no. In fact, it could be argued that they exacerbate my neurosis. ~ Loudon Wainwright III

A transference neurosis corresponds to a conflict between ego and id, a narcissistic neurosis corresponds to that between between ego and super-ego, and a psychosis to that between ego and outer world. ~ Sigmund Freud

Sanity is permanent, neurosis is temporary. ~ Chogyam Trungpa

This transmissibility of taboo is a reflection of the tendency, on which we have already remarked, for the unconscious instinct in the neurosis to shift constantly along associative paths on to new objects. ~ Sigmund Freud

Neurosis is the result of a conflict between the ego and its id, whereas psychosis is the analogous outcome of a similar disturbance in the relation between the ego and its environment (outer world). ~ Sigmund Freud

You can see neurosis from below - as a sickness - as most psychiatrists see it. Or you can understand it as a compassionate man might: respecting the neurosis as a fumbling and inefficient effort toward good ends. ~ Abraham Maslow

Neurosis has an absolute genius for malingering. There is no illness which it cannot counterfeit perfectly. If it is capable of deceiving the doctor, how should it fail to deceive the patient ~ Marcel Proust

People who are extremely inside their head, like he was, are caught in a neurosis that goes round and round. Then something will hook them and take them to their end and they can't control it. ~ Vincent D'Onofrio

Devout believers are safeguarded in a high degree against the risk of certain neurotic illnesses; their acceptance of the universal neurosis spares them the task of constructing a personal one. ~ Anatole France

In all of our lives, we know some boring people, but we don't want to see them on television. In our families, we have some very odd people who have odd neurosis. All of us are really strange people. ~ Jim Piddock

Meditation is to get out of your psychosis and to get out of your neurosis; it is simply to slip out of them. ~ Rajneesh

I'm phobic about the idea of being constrained. ~ Joanne Harris

treatment, phobic avoidance worsens and becomes Agoraphobia. ~ Claude Perrier

The good writing of any age has always been the product of someone's neurosis, and we'd have a mighty dull literature if all the writers that came along were a bunch of happy chuckleheads. ~ William Styron

I'd gone from unapologetically commit-o-phobic to rom-com heroine in a few months ~ Maris Black

I like people with big talents and small neuroses - not always an easy combination to find. I've discovered that if the neurosis is too big, it diminishes the talent and you wind up working too hard for what you get. ~ Mel Brooks

Tibetan Buddhists say that a person should never get rid of their negative energy, that negative energy transformed is the energy of enlightenment, and that the only difference between neurosis and wisdom is struggle. If we stop struggling and open up and accept what is, that neurotic energy naturally arises as wisdom, naturally informs us and becomes our teacher. ~ Natalie Goldberg

At times, Melete continued, it had seemed to her that this fact was what had created this behavior. Her sense of reality, in other words, had created something outside itself that mocked and hated her. But as I say, she said, those thoughts belong to the world of religious sensibility, which has become in our times the language of neurosis. ~ Rachel Cusk

I used to think romantic love was a neurosis shared by two, a supreme foolishness. I no longer think that. There's nothing foolish in loving anyone. Thinking you'll be loved in return is what's foolish. ~ Rita Mae Brown

Meditation practice is a way of making friends with ourselves. Whether we are worthy or unworthy, that's not the point. It's developing a friendly attitude to ourselves, accepting the hidden neurosis coming through. ~ Chogyam Trungpa

The problem is that the desire to change is fundamentally a form of aggression toward yourself. The other problem is that our hang-ups, unfortunately or fortunately, contain our wealth. Our neurosis and our wisdom are made out of the same material. If you throw out your neurosis, you also throw out your wisdom. ~ Pema Chodron

I rubbed my head trying to fend off the headache I was sure this conversation would bring me. ~ Hilary Grossman

The sufferings of neurosis and psychosis are for us a schooling in the passions of the soul, just as the beam of the psychoanalytic scales, when we calculate the tilt of its threat to entire communities, provides us with an indication of the deadening of the passions in society. ~ Jacques Lacan

In all of our society, but especially in Hollywood, there is an obsession with perfection that can lead to self-loathing and neurosis and all that kind of stuff. ~ Ethan Hawke

Psychologist Carl Jung, in his book Modern Man in Search of a Soul, wrote, "About a third of my cases are suffering from no clinically definable neurosis, but from the senselessness and emptiness of their lives. This can be described as the general neurosis of our time."3 Jung wrote those words in the early part of the twentieth century, but with every passing year and decade their truth has become even more glaring. Holocaust ~ David Jeremiah

I'd been conflict-phobic my entire life because I didn't want to lose my inner core of peace. ~ Doreen Virtue

Doubt is to certainty as neurosis is to psychosis. The neurotic is in doubt and has fears about persons and things; the psychotic has convictions and makes claims about them. In short, the neurotic has problems, the psychotic has solutions. ~ Thomas Szasz

I think live-in relations are for people who are not sure, and to an extent commitment phobic. ~ Sonam Kapoor

I am an atheist and I consider religions to be a form of collective neurosis. I am not an enemy of the Catholics, as I am not an enemy of the tuberculars, the myopic or the paralytics; you cannot be an enemy of the sick, only their good friend in order to help them cure themselves. ~ Diego Rivera

I actually am a phobic twitchy sort of nervous guy. ~ Billy Bob Thornton

In this type of anxiety neurosis the anxious attitude is so intimately a part of the individual's method of evaluating stimuli, of orienting herself or himself to every experience, that he or she cannot separate him-or herself enough from anxiety to comprehend the goal of avoidance of, or freedom from, anxiety. What Nancy sought was to be able to step cautiously from rock to rock without falling; the idea or possibility of not being on a precipice at all did not occur to her. ~ Rollo May

She kept reminding me she was at a wedding, which didn't really help my emotional state, if you know what I mean. ~ Hilary Grossman

Do I have to celebrate our engagement every year for nothing? I don't need practice, you know. It's starting to become cruel ~ Hilary Grossman

Haller's sickness of the soul, as I now know, is not the eccentricity of a single individual, but the sickness of the times themselves, the neurosis of that generation to which Haller belongs, a sickness, it seems, that by no means attacks the weak and worthless only but, rather, precisely those who are strongest in spirit and richest in gifts. ~ Hermann Hesse

That you find Kierkegaard "frightful" has warmed the cockles of my heart. I find him simply insupportable and cannot understand, or rather, I understand only too well, why the theological neurosis of our time has made such a fuss over him. You are quite right when you say that the pathological is never valuable. It does, however, cause us the greatest difficulties and for this reason we learn the most from it. ~ C. G. Jung

Neurosis is no excuse for bad manners. ~ Sigmund Freud

It is easier to lie to yourself than hear others tell you that tell you that you are a fool. ~ Hilary Grossman

Being neurotic seemed to be a kind of wild card, an all-purpose explanation. ~ Renata Adler

I'm a little bit phobic about stains on my clothes, so I never travel without a little packet of organic stain remover. ~ John Malkovich

Whom the gods wish to destroy, they give unlimited resources. ~ Twyla Tharp

Our greatest compatibility was in how we complemented each other's neuroses. ~ Fran Drescher

Any demand is frigid until desire, until neurosis forms in it. ~ Roland Barthes

Any inhibition must be wrong, since inevitably in the end it causes neurosis and insanity. ~ D.H. Lawrence

For the social phobic, any kind of performance - musical, sporting, public speaking - can be terrifying because failure will reveal the weakness and inadequacy within. This in turn means constantly projecting an image that feels false - an image of confidence, competence, even perfection. ~ Scott Stossel

I suspect that some apparently homosexual people are really heterosexuals who deeply phobic about the opposite sex or have other emotional problems. ~ Marilyn Vos Savant

People are so phobic and crazed about this word 'commitment.' It's weird. Everyone has taken this word to a new height of morality. ~ Chris Noth

I find it fascinating to see other people's photos on social media but I don't upload pictures myself. I don't even know how to. I'm completely digital-phobic. ~ Abi Morgan

Neurosis is the result of willing the spontaneous. ~ Otto Rank

I'm a little commitment phobic, in that I've always been someone who likes to take things one year at a time because as we all know, a year can change everything in your life. ~ Debra Messing

What allows genius to flower is not neurosis but its opposite... ordinary Sunday-school virtues such as tenacity and above all the ability to survive disappointment. ~ Joan Acocella

When you are calm, quiet and sensitive then you can expand. But when you are irritated, phobic, fearful, insensitive, and neurotic, you can't achieve anything. ~ Harbhajan Singh Yogi

Protect everything, detect everything, contain everything - obsessional society. Save time. Save money. Save our souls - phobic society. Low tar. Low energy. Low calories. Low sex. Low speed - anorexic society. ~ Jean Baudrillard

Somehow the past is a safe place to explore our collective cultural neuroses. ~ Tom Hiddleston

I have a great editor and I enjoy, in a masochistic way, being ruthless about my own performance. There's an initial point in the editing, if you're directing yourself, especially in my case, where you go, "Ouch, ouch, ouch, I can't watch this." And then, there's a point where you become hard-nosed and just take your neurosis away and go, "What's working? That's okay. That's okay. We can lose that, and lose that." You get objective about it. ~ Ralph Fiennes

The fact that compulsive drives for success will arise only in a competitive culture does not make them any less neurotic. ~ Karen Horney