The dictionary definition of neurosis gives us an interesting point of departure in considering the question of what is healthy in the context of Simple Reality. “Any of various functional disorders of the mind or emotions without obvious organic [bodily] lesions or change and involving anxiety, phobia, or other abnormal behavior symptoms.” Note that neuroses are rooted in the mind, body and or emotions. Since identification with the body, mind and emotions is precisely what we transcend in the paradigm shift, in Simple Reality we are not concerned with “fixing” neurotic anxiety but simply leaving it behind in P-B as we learn to live in the present moment, as we learn to respond rather than react to life as it is, life as we find it.
“Is not neurosis, rather, precisely the method the individual uses to preserve his own center, his own existence?” Yes it is! And what Rollo May is speaking of is what we call the false-self survival strategy which results in an almost continuous reaction. May continues: “An adjustment is exactly what neurosis is; and that is just its trouble.” The survival strategy with its pursuit of power, pleasure and material security, as May realized, is why we do not experience life as it really is or should we say could be. We experience, instead, a nightmare and hence our despair—our neuroses. Hence, it is a good thing, when our neurotic reactions no longer work, that we have the opportunity to make a different choice as to how to cope with the so-called vicissitudes of life.
Now we switch from Rollo May to Paul Tillich who has written so eloquently on the “courage to be.” Both men are concerned in their life’s work with “being” as opposed to “non-being,” reality as opposed to illusion. Leading a healthy life is then a matter of finding the courage to choose a healthy story (P-A) over a neurotic existence (P-B).
Simple Reality supports us in finding the courage to make the choice of “being” over “non-being” by providing a context, an identity and the means by which we can transcend the self-destructive conditioning revealed by our neurotic behavior. Simple Reality gives each of us the “will” that Tillich saw as an essential corollary to “courage” and the ability to leave behind a survival strategy that ironically is the source of all human suffering and is responsible, not for our survival but our pain and self-destruction.
Fear of letting go of a survival strategy that we have become dependent on and which we believe protects us actually blocks our path to freedom from suffering. The survival strategy as it was understood in Freud’s day involved seeing repression and inhibition as the common forms of neurosis. In the mid 20th century the common neurotic patter was seen as being “other-directed” or being the conforming “organization man.”
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin realized that awareness or self-consciousness was necessary for a healthy sense of what it means to be human. This affirms Freud’s suspicion that repression and the blocking of consciousness is the source of neurosis.
Theories of psychoanalysis and psychotherapy are severely limited by the narrative that contains them. P-B leads therapists such as Rollo May to conclude that “consciousness itself implies always the possibility of turning against oneself, denying oneself.” The worldview of psychologists will necessarily be a reflection of their own identity and their experience of the fragmented P-B story. For example, after World War II May thought he saw “in the souls of many Americans … disruptiveness, existential doubt, emptiness and meaninglessness.” What he saw were people as unconscious and as powerless in their delusional narrative as they are today.
Since Plato, Western humanity has been trying to explain why we suffer from existential anxiety and why we our neuroses have prevented us from creating a sustainable human community. “Like psychoanalysis, existentialism seeks not to bring in answers from other cultures but to utilize these very conflicts in contemporary personality as avenues to the more profound self-understanding of Western man and to find the solutions to our problems in direct relation to the historical and cultural crises which gave the problems birth.”
First, we have learned much from the insights of Eastern mystics who tend to be more profound in their understanding of human behavior than is Western psychology. Secondly, our problems in the West have nothing to do with our current philosophical outlook, our history or our culture; they are universal problems and inherently the same for all humanity because the human false self has existed virtually unchanged from ancient to modern times.
Fortunately, as we have already indicated in this essay, we do not have to depend on our intellect to analyze human behavior, to devise effective treatment strategies for our neuroses or struggle against the traumas of our personal or collective histories. We have only to find the courage to arise each morning with the will and the intention to choose not to continue our reactive behavior patterns, to employ the authentic power of choice that we all have to remain in the present moment.
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References and notes are available for this essay.
Find a much more in-depth discussion in books by Roy Charles Henry:
Who Am I? The Second Great Question Concerning the Nature of Reality
Where Am I? The First Great Question Concerning the Nature of Reality
Simple Reality: The Key to Serenity and Survival
