Whatever our starting point and however tortuous path we have followed in the study of neuroses, we will eventually come to realize that the disorder of the personality is the cause of the disease. Every neurosis, whatever its symptoms, is a character neurosis.Therefore, we must work theoretically and therapeutically towards a better understanding of neurotic character structure. One point that needs to be emphasized is that neuroses are caused by cultural factors.This clearly shows that neuroses arise from disturbances in human relations. The neurotic drive is the compulsive drive.The obsessive-compulsive drive is characteristic of neuroses and arises from feelings of loneliness, helplessness, fear, etc., and from feelings of hostility to others.More than this, they represent the means by which the patient copes with life, and they seek chiefly security rather than satisfaction; their compulsions arise from the anxieties that lurk behind them.

I call obsessive drives neurotic tendencies or tendencies. If psychoanalysis is not primarily about relating our present troubles to past experiences, but about understanding the interplay of elements in our present personality, then we can know and change ourselves with little or no help from the adept. Neuroses arise as a result of the collision of different tendencies. Conflict arises between contradictory neurotic tendencies.At first they concern only the patient's ambivalent attitudes towards others, but eventually they will also include the patient's ambivalent attitudes towards himself, his ambivalent qualities and ambivalent values.

My observations: The first is that the patient is completely ignorant of the apparent contradictions in his heart - when I point this out to them, they avoid it and seem to have no interest in it (after many such experience, I realized that their avoidance was a reflection of their aversion to the analyst's attempts to resolve their conflicts) -- and finally, their panic at the sudden recognition of the conflict (a reaction that made me realize that I was Playing with dynamite. The patient has a reason for wanting to avoid talking about his conflicts: they are afraid that their power will tear them apart)

The patient goes to great lengths to "resolve" conflicts, or rather, to deny their existence and create an illusion of harmony. The initial attempt was to gloss over part of the conflict and allow its opposite to prevail. The second attempt is to avoid others.Loneliness is part of the basic conflict, an initially ambivalent attitude toward others; it also represents an attempt to resolve the conflict, since maintaining an emotional distance between the self and the other seems to render the conflict ineffective . The third attempt is very different from the above two.Instead of avoiding others, the patient avoids himself, his whole actual self appears unreal to him, and in place of the real one he creates in his mind an ideal self-image in which the conflicting parts take on a different form. , no longer as a conflict, but as different aspects of a rich personality.The need for perfection is an attempt to conform to an idealized self-image; the desire for admiration can be seen as a demand for validation from others that one is that idealized image.The greater the gap between this image and reality, the more unsatisfied the need for praise will naturally be.Of all attempts at conflict resolution, this idealized imagery is perhaps the most important, because it has a profound effect on the entire personality.But in turn it creates a new inner rift, which needs to be stitched up again.

A fourth attempt, chiefly to close this gap, but also to surreptitiously erase other conflicts, is externalization, in which the patient sees inner activities as events outside the ego.If an idealized image means being a few steps away from your actual self, externalization changes your real self beyond recognition.Externalization again creates new conflicts or greatly intensifies old ones, especially between the ego and the outside world. The above four tendencies are the principal attempts of the patient to resolve conflicts, partly because they seem to operate so often in various neuroses, and partly because they lead to violent changes in personality.

Of course, there are other methods for patients, but they do not have the general significance of these types.For example: Arbitrary self-righteousness, the main function of this self-righteous attitude is to suppress inner doubts; rigid and rigid self-control, the function is to attempt to force the divided inner world together by willpower; cynicism, By contempt for all values, nature cancels out conflicts with regard to ideals. Consequences of unresolved conflicts: fears of all kinds, wasted energy, moral damage, feelings of hopelessness due to complicated emotional entanglements. At the dynamic center of my theory of neurosis is the fundamental conflict between three attitudes: approaching, confronting, and avoiding.On the one hand, the patient fears that the personality will be split, and on the other hand, he needs to maintain the function of unity, so he desperately tries to resolve the contradiction.Although he created an artificial balance, he created new conflicts at the same time, so there is a need to continue to find further remedies to erase these new conflicts.Every step of this effort to avoid division and seek unity only makes the patient more hostile to others, more helpless, more fearful, more alienated from himself and others; Even more distant.The patient finally loses hope and seeks compensation in the abuse, which in turn intensifies his sense of hopelessness and creates new conflicts - such is the frightening picture of the development of a neurosis and of the character structure it produces. of pictures.