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Neurosis may be considered the price of admission for our minds being meaning-making machines.

Neurosis is like the engine and anxiety is the squeaky brake.

Contemporary heirs have refined clinical techniques but the underlying diagnoses were named decades ago.

For most of the 20th century, neurosis was the official diagnosis for the condition that we now call anxiety. The first two editions of the DSM grouped phobias, obsessions, hysteria, and free-floating dread together under "neuroses," assuming, à la Freud, that all of them were the result of unconscious conflicts. In 1980 when the DSM-III arrived, the American Psychiatric Association replaced “neurosis” with a family of disorders: generalized anxiety disorder, panic disorder, phobic disorder, and OCD—all under the heading of anxiety. The new lexicon changed the coding more than it changed the patients. Neurosis is the engine and anxiety is the squeaky brake. I know that many of us suffer from anxiety, but let's examine how some major theorists conceived of the reasons why we are neurotic.

According to Sigmund Freud, whatever we refuse to face head-on does not disappear, but simply gets repressed from consciousness while remaining fully active underneath, later resurfacing as sundry symptoms or seemingly irrational behavior that apparently comes from nowhere. Specifically, trauma that is not consciously processed gets re-enacted rather than remembered. We do not recall the original wound so much as unconsciously re-create its conditions, often with new partners cast unwittingly in the roles of the original offenders, which explains why so many people seem unable........

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