4 - Neurosis: Excessive Anxiety

Neurosis

According to Medilexicon's medical dictionary, Neurosis is:

A psychological or behavioral disorder in which anxiety is the primary characteristic; defense mechanisms or any phobias are the adjustive techniques that a person learns to cope with this underlying anxiety. In contrast to the psychoses, people with a neurosis do not exhibit gross distortion of reality or gross disorganization of personality but in severe cases, those affected may be as disabled as those with a psychosis.

The most distinguishing characteristic of neurosis is excessive anxiety. The person is in a state of continual fear that something terrible is about to happen. For example, if someone in our home is sick or when we are uncertain of our financial security, we experience natural anxiety. However, anxiety neurosis appears without any real cause. It is often so intense that it can be described only as panic. People with anxiety neurosis may experience lingering feelings of uneasiness. Sometimes their feelings of dread become acute. Anxiety arising from a repression of hostility or sexual desires is common. The neurotic person has the tendency to overreact to many routine incidents that the average person takes in stride.

Bound anxiety is associated with a specific object, event, or situation. For example, you feel a great deal of fear whenever you are in a certain area of the neighbourhood, and you realize it is because a big dog is in one of the back yards. You have a great fear of dogs, and, therefore, you are experiencing bound anxiety. You realize the dog is the reason for your experience of fear. When a person has free-floating anxiety, the vague nature of the anxiety is responsible for much of the terror experienced by the patient. The person’s feelings are intense, but he or she has no rational explanation to account for them. One of the main functions of psychotherapy is to pinpoint the source of anxiety to make it a manageable fear. If you put a name on the problem, then you can do something about it because you understand the cause.

Because neurotic people believe there is so much anxiety in their lives, they tend to use the defense mechanism repression to hide ideas they find unpleasant. When people use repression too frequently, their contacts with the real world become limited. Neurotic people use so much energy keeping repressed anxiety under control that they have very little energy for pleasurable and productive activities.