ABSTRACT
The emotions that literature deals with bear a close analogy to symptoms in the neuroses or nervous diseases. Every emotional conflict, every repressed love is an incipient neurosis, and often the sufferings described in books are full-fledged cases of neuroses. The writer may show how the character cures himself of his neuroses by being made aware of the unconscious forces struggling within him, or how the sufferer affects a recovery by sublimation, or how he succumbs to his disease. Literature records many fully developed cases of neuroses. Every sufferer then in literature is a partly or fully developed case of neurosis; at least an emotional disturbance due to sex causes, akin to the neurosis, is always present. The true neuroses are neurasthenia and anxiety neurosis, which formerly was included under neurasthenia, but which Freud set off as a separate class. Literature abounds then chiefly in the psychoneuroses and especially anxiety neurosis.
