Neurosis and the Human Condition – Despair and Realization

Believing that neurosis – perceptual distortion or difficulty of adaptation – is part of the individual is psychoanalytic determinism; it is the idea that innate and unconscious traumas and biological characteristics determine our activities.

The human being is a possibility of relationship with biological needs to be met. It is born free and limited. Possibilities of exercising motivations are its characteristics, as much as they are established by its relational contexts, understood as family, society, and culture.

One is born free to be what one is: a being in relation to others and to the world, with a structuring nature towards others, their desires, fears, and commitments, situated and established in societies, in times, creating realizations, as well as contradictions. I remember here Kafka’s Prometheus:

«There are four legends about Prometheus:

»According to the first, he was chained to a rock in the Caucasus for having betrayed the gods by telling their secrets to men, and the gods sent eagles that ate pieces of his liver, though it always recovered.

»According to the second, Prometheus, tormented by the pain of bird pecks, pressed himself deeper and deeper into the rock until he became one with it.

»According to the third, his betrayal was forgotten over the course of thousands of years; the gods have forgotten, the eagles have forgotten, he himself has forgotten.

» According to the fourth, the event became irrelevant. The gods grew tired, the eagles grew tired, the weary wound closed.

»The rock remains unexplained. The legend tries to explain the unexplainable. As it arises from a background of truth, it must end again unexplained».

In the dynamics of life, contradictions and encounters create limits that are accepted or not. When they are denied, no acceptance of reality begins to be structured, no acceptance of what exists, and in this way signs of omission (fear) and refusal are established, as well as positions and choices determined by these relational contingencies.