If neurotic is wanting two mutually exclusive things at one and the same time, then I’m neurotic as hell. I’ll be flying back and forth between one mutually exclusive thing and another for the rest...

[Judith Warner:] Our neurotic quest to perfect the mechanics of mothering can be interpreted as an effort to do on an individual level what we’ve stopped trying to do on a society-wide one.

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

The only thing to know is how to use your neurosis.

Both the mentally healthy and the neurotic are driven by the need to find an answer [to the problem of human existence], the only difference being that one answer corresponds more to the total needs...

Religion is an attempt to get control over the sensory world, in which we are placed, by means of the wish-world, which we have developed inside us as a result of biological and psychological necessities....

Just this past summer, I took online courses in introductory logic and law through civilization. Often the weight of history, with its facts heaped upon facts requiring complex chains of inference to sort through –...

Well, aren’t you just saying it’s better to be neurotic, sensitive, and miserable than unimaginative, adjusted and content? Is it really better?

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...

The origin of illness may be in the past, but the virulent crisis must be dynamically tackled. I believe in attacking the core of the illness, through its present symptoms, quickly, directly. The past is...

The cases described in this section (The Fear of Being) may seem extreme, but I have become convinced that they are not as uncommon as one would think. Beneath the seemingly rational exterior of our...

Neurotics complain of their illness, but they make the most of it, and when it comes to taking it away from them they will defend it like a lioness her young.

One of the symptoms of an approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that one’s work is terribly important.

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

Humility is a virtue, not a neurosis.

We will not read of that which hurts our pride or fears or ‘feelings’. We forget, or gloss over, or excuse, an experience which injured the tentacles of our personality. We forget the pscyhiatrist’s definition...

Neurosis is the way of avoiding non-being by avoiding being

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...

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.

You have to quit confusing a madness with a mission.

A neurosis is a secret that you don’t know you are keeping

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

The demons are not easily dispatched, instead attaching themselves to otherwise beautiful things, a favorite food or a love note left for you, to see how you react when they rear up.

A psychologist said to me, there are only two important questions you have to ask yourself. What do you really feel? And, what do you really want? If you can answer those two, you probably...

While writing is like a joyful release, editing is a prison where the bars are my former intentions and the abusive warden my own neuroticism.

Anyone who is truly crazy, in my book, wouldn’t be able to understand the dialectic of crazy and not-crazy. Listen, I’ve worked for the pharmaceutical companies, they have a vested belief in making you believe...