If a neurosis is a compromise, if it is the easiest way out, if it serves a purpose, it must be that the individual himself has a hand in shaping that purpose.  Can it be that a breakdown which seems such an unmitigated disaster is really welcomed by a part of our own selves?  Nothing is more intensely resented by the nervous invalid than the accusation that he likes his symptoms,—­and no wonder.  The conscious part of him hates the pain, the inconvenience, and the disability with a real hatred.  It is not pleasant to be ill.  And yet, as it turns out, it is pleasanter to be ill than it is to bear the tension of unsatisfied desire or to be undeceived about oneself.  Every symptom is a means of expression for repressed and forgotten impulses and is a relief to the personality.  It tends to the preservation of the individual, rather than to his destruction.  The nervous invalid is not short-lived, but his family may be!  It has been said that a neurosis is not so much a disease as a dilemma.  Rather might it be said that the neurosis is a way out of the dilemma.  It is a harbor after a stormy sea, not always a quiet harbor, but at least a usable one.  Unpleasant as it is, every nervous symptom is a form of compensation which has been deliberately though unconsciously chosen by its owner.

=Rationalizing Our Distress.= Among other things, a nervous symptom furnishes a seemingly reasonable excuse for the sense of distress which is behind every breakdown.  Something troubles us.  We are not willing to acknowledge what it is.  On the other hand, we must appear reasonable to ourselves, so we manufacture a reason.  Perhaps at the time when the person first feels distress, he is on a railroad train.  So he says to himself, “It is the train.  I must not go near the railway”; and he develops a phobia for cars.  Perhaps at the onset of the fear he happens to have a slight pain in the arm.  He makes use of the pain to explain his distress.  He thinks about it and holds on to it.  It serves a purpose, and is on the whole less painful than the feeling of unexplained impending disaster which is attached to no particular idea.  Perhaps he happens to be tired when the conflict first gets beyond control.  So he seizes the idea of fatigue to explain his illness.  He develops chronic fatigue and talks proudly of overwork.  In every case the symptom serves a real purpose, and is, despite its discomfort, a relief to the distressed personality.

A neurosis is a subconscious effort at adjustment.  Like a physical symptom, it is Nature’s way of trying to cure herself.  It is an attempt to get equilibrium, but it is an awkward attempt and hardly the kind that we would choose when we see what we are doing.