ABSTRACT
The neurosis is a biologically moral integration, for it contains the assertion of the organism's innermost verity. The moral character of the struggle undergone by the neurotic patient with the innate conscientiousness that it attests and its characterological relationship to the basic principle of repression is too obvious to require insistence. A frequent type well illustrates these characteristics as we come to know them in the study of the neuroses. Conspicuous in the patient of this type is a certain child-like simplicity, a lack of confidence in himself combined with a readiness to exaggerate the importance of other people. We have seen that fundamental in the neurotic character is the sense of obligation, the moral sense, or the love of truth as inculcated through the stolid organic repression of natural desire, with all the suffering it entails, out of obedience—albeit an unconscious, blind, and unreasoning obedience—to organic law as decreed through biological social prohibition.
