The Malleability of Suffering

If the wishes of today’s neurotics were not subject to repression, who is to say what relevance grammatically incorrect personal pronouns would continue to bear.

In his early career, Freud returned again and again to the problem of the “choice of neurosis.” If the basic aetiology of neurotic suffering is always the same—the repression of a disagreeable thought (“Now that my sister is dead, I can marry her husband”), which leads to seemingly meaningless and unwanted symptoms (“I can’t move my legs”)—then how do w…