Children gratify many of their desires simply by imagining them gratified.  Much of the difficulty of later life might be avoided if the little child could be taught to work for the accomplishment of his pleasures rather than to dream of them.  The normal child gradually abandons this “pleasure-thinking” for the more purposeful thinking of the actual world, but the child who loiters too long in the realm of fancy may ever after find it hard to keep away from its borders.  His natural interest in sex, if artificially repressed, is especially prone to satisfy itself by way of phantasy.

=Turning back to Phantasy.= In later life, when the love-force for one reason or another becomes too strong to be handled either directly or indirectly in the real world, there comes the almost irresistible impulse to regress to the infantile way and to find expression by means of phantasy.  After long experience Freud concluded that phantasy lies at the root of every neurosis.  Jung says that a sex-phantasy is always at least one determiner of a nervous illness, and Jelliffe writes that the essence of the neurosis is a special activity of the imagination.

Such a statement need not shock the most sensitive conscience.  The very fact that a neurosis breaks out is proof that the phantasies are repellent to the owners of them and are thrust down into the subconscious as unworthy.  In fact, every neurosis is witness to the strength of the human conscience.  No phantasy could cause illness.  It is the phantasy plus the repression of it that makes the trouble, or rather it is the conflict between the forces back of the phantasy and the repression.  The neurosis, then, turns out to be a “flight from the real,” the result of a desire to run away from a difficulty.  When a problem presses or a disagreeable situation is to be faced, it is easier to give up and fall ill than to see the thing through to the end.  Here again, we find that nervousness is a regression to the irresponsible reactions of childhood.

=Maturity versus Immaturity.= We have been thinking of the main causes of “nerves” and have found them to be infantile habits of loving, rebelling, repressing, and dreaming.  We have tried to show that these habits are able to cause trouble because of their bearing on that inevitable conflict between the ancient urge of the reproductive instinct and the later ideals which society has acquired.  If this conflict be met in the light of the present, free from the backward pull, of outgrown habits, an adjustment is possible which satisfies both the individual and society.  We call this adjustment sublimation.  This is rather a synthesis than a compromise, a union of the opposing forces, a happy utilization of energy by displacement on more useful ideas.  But if the conflict has to be met with the mind hampered by immature thinking and immature feeling; if the demands of the here-and-now are met as if it were long ago; if unhealthy and untrue complexes, old loves and hates complicate the situation; if to the necessary conflict is added an unnecessary one; then something else happens.  Compromise of some kind must be made, but instead of a happy union of the two forces a poor compromise is effected, gaining a partial satisfaction for both sides, but a real one for neither.  The neurosis is this compromise.