Neurosis

Neurosis were firstly formally defined (or at least in the scientific sense) by Freud as an "Inflammation of the nerves" wich makes us have some behaviors and/or thoughts uncommon, rare or not acepted by the society standar. They have in common their origins, most of them come from the consequences that an abuse of defense mechanisms (wich occur at an unconscious level) leaves on an individual (if we keep going on the psichoanalytic line); but almost all areas of psychology and those wich are very embedded in clinical psychology agree that Neurosis come when a subject loses the sense of reality, in a moderate degree.

I`ll explain this better. The truest reality is what we can agree on, we always make consensus about the world that surrounds us, in which we are involved and complicated. We agree that you`ll be reading this post in the future time when i have already written and published it, we agree that you`ll be in front to a screen of a laptop or computer, for example. But we can not ignore the fact that everyone have their own image and interpretation of the world, determinated by our internal structures and experiences, that`s is called as the sense of reality (you must understand that all this explanations are grossly simplified). Let me give you an example: you wake up too late in the morning and you have an exam, you harried up, didn`t take breakfast, and suddenly the public transport is slower than ever, you go with the worst idiots that could ever share the transport with you and it seems that everyone had their morning off or free, to make matters worse the exam was difficult and your friends do not understand why you`re so irritable. In this case we can say that you have lost the sense of reality, but not in the psychopathological way, it`s something normal when we dye the reality with our emotionality. Now take this deformation and take it to the extreme, there is Neurosis, in fact, mostly of the differents mental diseases start when a subject is incapable to distinguish the internal world of the external world, and the limits becomes fuzzy or diluted, when the reality becomes tinted too much with the emotionality or something related to the internal world, we are in front of a psichopathology, like Neurosis. But Neurosis is something lightweight and totally workable with some therapy, an individual can not only lose the sense of reality, it could come worse and the subject could lose the judment of reality, like in the case of psichosys.

This image shows us the personality structures. Some areas of psychology (such as psychoanalysis) whose object of study is always from the disease, from a subject in constant conflict with reality and with himself, assume that personalities have bases in neurosis, and from there they incline or take one or more features of those shown in the table. For expample, my personality style matches with an obsessive compulsive person and collects many hypomanic characteristics.

There are various kind of neurosis, most of them were described by Freud, like hysteria or obsessive compulsive neurosis (in nowadays called as disorder) and each one of them becomes from the abuse  of a defense mechanisms; as Freud said, they help us to front  situations that can be very harmful or difficult to face for the mind, but are also a double-edged sword, because they can lead to a neurosis if the unconscious does not control them.