that no living being adjusts itself easily and smoothly to new conditions. The principle of the minimum of effort (“Prinzip des kleinsten Kraftmasses”) is valid everywhere.
A sensitive and somewhat inharmonious character, as a neurotic always is, will meet special difficulties and perhaps more unusual tasks in life than a normal individual, who as a rule has only to follow the well-established line of an ordinary life. For the neurotic there is no established way, for his aims and tasks are apt to be of a highly individual character. He tries to follow the more or less uncontrolled and half-conscious way of normal people, not fully realizing his own critical and very different nature, which imposes upon him more effort than the normal person is required to exert. There are neurotics who have shown their increased sensitiveness and their resistance against adaptation in the very first weeks of life, in their difficulty in taking the mother’s breast, and in their exaggerated nervous reactions, &c. For this portion of a neurotic predisposition it will always be impossible to find a psychological ætiology, for it is anterior to all psychology. But this predisposition—you may call it “congenital sensitiveness” or by what name you like—is the cause of the first resistances against adaptation. In such case, the way of adaptation being blocked, the biological energy we call libido does not find its appropriate outlet or activity, and therefore replaces an up-to-date and suitable form of adaptation by an abnormal, or primitive, one.
In neurosis we speak of an infantile attitude or the predominance of infantile phantasies and desires. In so far as infantile impressions and desires are of obvious importance in normal people, they are equally influential in neurosis, but they have here no ætiological significance, they are reactions merely, being chiefly secondary and regressive phenomena. It is perfectly true, as Freud states, that infantile phantasies determine the form and further development of neurosis, but this is not ætiology. Even when we find perverted sexual phantasies of which we can prove the existence in childhood, we cannot consider them of ætiological significance. A neurosis is not really originated by infantile sexual phantasis,
