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neurotic
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  • It appears to be a way station between neurosis and psychosis: a fractured but not disassembled psyche.†   (source)
  • It was typical Mommy neurotic behavior, and I didn't fully understand it till I learned how far she had truly come.†   (source)
  • It does brood over this ramshackle city of half a million people in a way that the neurotic poet-king probably would have appreciated.†   (source)
  • And I'm neurotic about it to this day.†   (source)
  • These things were a dime a dozen here, and everyone wore their neurosis like a badge, each carrying a certain weight, the way a particular brand of sweater or jeans had in junior high.†   (source)
  • T S. Eliot, in "The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock" (1917), has his neurotic, timorous main character say he was never cut out to be Prince Hamlet, that the most he could be is an extra, someone who could come on to fill out the numbers onstage or possibly be sacrificed to plot exigency.†   (source)
  • They have these neurotic conversations with themselves.†   (source)
  • The Colossus Neurotic?†   (source)
  • She had the heightened awareness of the deep neurotic, and might have had the position of each box carefully memorized.†   (source)
  • Sometimes I have Friday-night dinner with her family when they light candles, eat braided bread, and drink wine (the only time I can imagine neurotic Mrs. Schein allowing Kim to drink).†   (source)
  • The third and related irony is that it's the most complex and neurotic and difficult women that I am invariably drawn to.†   (source)
  • It was almost neurotically clean of anything personal.†   (source)
  • Demand to know what went wrong; make him talk and talk about it in order to calm your own neuroses.†   (source)
  • Now, on this afternoon, Jenny and I stood in an exam room with him, discussing Marley's deepening neurosis over thunderstorms.†   (source)
  • He was a reader and recognized his habit of reading as obsessive and neurotic, and told himself that if he read something less frivolous than newspapers and magazines he might indeed be better off.†   (source)
  • But many of Freud's patients experienced the conflict so acutely that they developed what Freud called neuroses.†   (source)
  • He believed he was responsible for infecting the rest of his family and was so extremely laden with guilt, and so neurotic about so many other things, that Farmer decided he couldn't send him away to compete for food again.†   (source)
  • But why so gloomy and neurotic?†   (source)
  • "You're starting to sound neurotic, babe."†   (source)
  • Only she didn't say "confused" and "screwed up," but said "neurotic" and another medical word I couldn't make out.†   (source)
  • Brother isn't really crazy yet he—he's an elaborate neurotic.†   (source)
  • We moderns bedeck and bedrape us in all sorts of meretricious togas, till a pair of fine eyes and a dashing manner pass for beauty; but when life tries the metal—when nature applies her inevitable test—the degenerate or neurotic type goes to the wall.†   (source)
  • I'd sit in front of her desk and make troubled-brow faces which I thought illustrated the deep level of neurosis I represented.†   (source)
  • Settling into his niche as a miracle worker for tough and neurotic horses, Pollard earned assignments on nearly three hundred mounts and guided them to more than $20,000 in total purse earnings.†   (source)
  • He had lived for almost twenty years without trauma, tension, hate, or neurosis, which was proof to Yossarian of just how crazy he really was.†   (source)
  • As a neurotic Jew, at least on my mom's side, I'm supposed to know all that psychology stuff.†   (source)
  • He saw Grace and Joe from a long way off and started snorting and nickering and trotting up and down the neurotic, muddy track he'd churned along the far side of the corral.†   (source)
  • It's a form of neurosis, you know.†   (source)
  • He's a nice kid, really, in spite of his home life; I mean, most kids'd grow up neurotic, what with Martha here carrying on the way she does; sleeping till four in the PM.†   (source)
  • Oh, yes, I became neurotically compulsive about cleanliness.†   (source)
  • Hoagland necessarily considered everyone a world-political creature, with a heightened persona, a neurotic cultural manner.†   (source)
  • I mean, I really like hanging with Jenny and her friends, but I'm also afraid it's making me just slightly neurotic.†   (source)
  • When it got so close that the petulant and neurotic motion of the rods and cams was audible, and when the steam escaping from half a hundred pre-war gaskets sounded like a menagerie of snakes, Guariglia stepped off the tracks and waved the cigar.†   (source)
  • Part of me knows I'm acting and thinking totally irrationally, insisting on things that are neurotic and paranoid, but at this point in my abnormal life, wouldn't that kind of wacky, abnormal behavior be considered normal?†   (source)
  • But—I don't know—I think the emphasis I put on why he was so neurotically attracted to the mot juste wasn't too bad.†   (source)
  • Advanced neurotics can be dazzling at that game.†   (source)
  • Negroes don't have much neuroses, do they?†   (source)
  • For within these confessions it will be discovered that we really have no acquaintance with true evil; the evil portrayed in most novels and plays and movies is mediocre if not spurious, a shoddy concoction generally made up of violence, fantasy, neurotic terror and melodrama.†   (source)
  • Such people, it seems to me, in what they imagine to be kindness, are capable of inflicting long and lasting tortures on an animal, denying it any of its natural desires and fulfillments until a dog of weak character breaks down and becomes the fat, asthmatic, befurred bundle of neuroses.†   (source)
  • It's just his neurosis that oughta be curbed.†   (source)
  • "I have no doubt that he is neurotic," Don said.†   (source)
  • "If Charlie is entirely dependent on Allen," Uncle Willie wrote back, "he is certainly not in a position to give rein to a temperamental or neurotic disposition.†   (source)
  • Shoba, the lady, was vain and neurotic.†   (source)
  • — nevertheless the disheveled old mystic of Das Kapital, turgid, tortured, confused, and neurotic, unscientific, illogical, this pompous fraud Karl Marx, nevertheless had a glimmering of a very important truth.†   (source)
  • The prevalence of alcoholism, marital failure, neurosis, and psychosis among guards is notorious.†   (source)
  • Was she a highly nervous, neurotic girl?†   (source)
  • You're not a country at all, you're not a government, you're a fifthrate dictatorship of political neurotics.†   (source)
  • As if there weren't enough things in the world to drive people mad, he has to take a sane man and turn him deliberately into a neurotic by keeping him a prisoner and boring him with his friendship and chatter.†   (source)
  • He had been submerged by that time for eight days; his crew were still fairly fit though various neuroses were beginning to appear, born of anxiety about conditions in their homes.†   (source)
  • You see the black side of everything—watch out, or you'll become a neurotic.†   (source)
  • Using the pool of latent energy, I built a common neurotic concept for Reich… the illusion that he alone in the world was real.†   (source)
  • If children are neurotic at all, a room like that —†   (source)
  • She was a most rare phenomenon: a woman of thirty without love troubles, headaches, backaches, sleeplessness or neurosis.†   (source)
  • First a mild neurosis about it, then a full-fledged psychosis.†   (source)
  • I believe one does not regress in neurosis.†   (source)
  • They loathe them to the point of neurosis.†   (source)
  • "It's supposed to help them work off their neuroses in a healthful way."†   (source)
  • He had also seen how numerous forms of neurosis or psychological disorders could be traced back to conflicts during childhood.†   (source)
  • Because of his researches for Misery, he had rather more than a layman's understanding of neurosis and psychosis, and he knew that although a borderline psychotic might have alternating periods of deep depression and almost aggressive cheerfulness and hilarity, the puffed and infected ego underlay all, positive that all eyes were upon him or her, positive that he or she was staffing in a great drama; the outcome was a thing for which untold millions waited with held breath.†   (source)
  • Possible complications include Dys thymia depressive neurosis, Major Depression, Psychoactive Substance Abuse, and psychotic disorders such as Brief Reactive Psychosis.†   (source)
  • It's like a neurosis," I said.†   (source)
  • If the biochemists were able to demonstrate the physical workings of neuroses (phobias, or difficulties getting pleasure from life), if they could pinpoint the chemicals and impulses and interbrain conversations and information exchanges that constitute these feelings, would the psychoanalysts pack up their ids and egos and retire from the field?†   (source)
  • Still, sometimes her neurosis was so annoying'following along behind me, checking and redoing each thing I did, taking over every task so I sometimes spent entire shifts doing nothing at all'that I wondered why she'd bothered to hire me.†   (source)
  • I chose my professors at the Institute with discrimination and care, on the basis of their legend in the Corps or the passion and neurosis they brought to the lectern, not on the subject they taught.†   (source)
  • He observed with the eye of an accountant, with unassailable accuracy but no interest in the delicious, gossipy detail, or the incongruities or neuroses of the characters he so drily introduced.†   (source)
  • I had created the beast out of my doubts and neuroses, had fattened him on my nightmare, had made him hideous with my self-loathing, had taught him my secrets of deception and manipulation, and hadnurtured him on my loneliness.†   (source)
  • I looked upon the Corps as a captive microcosm of the entire human race and thought if I could study them properly and learn all the secret rites and neuroses of the cadets, then in some profoundly inclusive way I could discover the most illuminating sanctities, dilemmas, and mysteries of the human spirit.†   (source)
  • This was a ritual, deeply rooted in the soil of inexplicable neurosis and materialistic urgency, which' I have gone through many times since when vision and invention have flagged to the point of inertia, and both writing and reading have become burdensome to the spirit.†   (source)
  • They did some really magnificent experiments during the War--induced neuroses, then altered the sensation-field, by blinding the subject, for instance, or terminating his hearing, et cetera.†   (source)
  • The neurotic in me, of course, is asking: Where's the catch?†   (source)
  • I loved the newsroom and the quirky, brainy, neurotic, idealistic people it attracted.†   (source)
  • You know, Esther, you've got the perfect setup of a true neurotic.†   (source)
  • In which case I perceive it as neurotic behaviour.†   (source)
  • Don't subject the episode to ten hours of neurotic scrutiny.†   (source)
  • The place was clean, but not neurotically so.†   (source)
  • She's also more than a little neurotic, Travis thought.†   (source)
  • She didn't like to think of herself as neurotic, but this endless analysis wasn't like her.†   (source)
  • Now, was it that she changed, or was she always neurotic and you were too young to notice?†   (source)
  • You are becoming a very fine neurotic, my friend.†   (source)
  • What you are is an intelligent, sassy, sarcastic, cynical, neurotic, loyal, compassionate girl.†   (source)
  • It wasn't until my brother and I got older that she started to get neurotic on me."†   (source)
  • I keep a good neurotic's calendar, and it's three years, to the day, since Seymour killed himself.†   (source)
  • In her case this has to do with compulsive neurotic behaviour.†   (source)
  • So you think that a seventeen-year-old girl who has sex is neurotic?†   (source)
  • He knew nothing of the mystical and neurotic.†   (source)
  • There was always a slight tension in the neurotic anticipation of taps.†   (source)
  • I will write a neat paper on the dissolvement of neurotic images from what I perceive here today.†   (source)
  • It's incredible, the ways in which neurotics compensate.†   (source)
  • "He's neurotic about having it all perfect," said a medical student who did a lot of scholbutt for Farmer.†   (source)
  • Buck-naked statue
    A Neurotic Colossus
    Where art thy undies?
    EVEN MY SUPERNATURAL POWERS of description fail me.†   (source)
  • Babette is not a neurotic person.†   (source)
  • Neurotic and insecure and suspicious.†   (source)
  • These lines were predictable because they all stretched in the same direction: from the unstable person to objects, situations, or other persons outside of the subject's field of control (or fantasy: to the neurotic there might be some difference but to the psychotic they were one and the same).†   (source)
  • "You're a Colossus Neurotic, Markowitz.†   (source)
  • Well, what's so neurotic about that?†   (source)
  • A neurotic is just such a person, who uses too much energy trying to keep the 'unpleasant' out of his consciousness.†   (source)
  • "And you," I continued with a sudden force, "laughed and said I had the perfect setup of a true neurotic and that that question came from some questionnaire you'd had in psychology class that week?"†   (source)
  • She would have asked for and gotten an unlisted number, of course , anyone tried for and acquitted of some major crime (and if it had been Denver, it had been major) would have done that , but even an unlisted number would not comfort a deep neurotic like Annie Wilkes for long.†   (source)
  • Neurotic, ha!†   (source)
  • A psychologist helping a neurotic to solve a problem and untangle a conflict, does it by means of-blank-out.†   (source)
  • Dr. Bender had failed to mention one critical point: In cardiology, you dealt with a patient who came to the office because he or she wanted or needed to; in pediatrics, you dealt with a patient who was often under the care of neurotic, know-it-all parents.†   (source)
  • …for Marlboro, Continental and Goodyear, and he realized that all the things around him, the planes taking off and landing, the streaking cars, the tires on the cars, the cigarettes that the drivers of the cars were dousing in their ashtrays—all these were on the billboards around him, systematically linked in some self-referring relationship that had a kind of neurotic tightness, an inescapability, as if the billboards were generating reality, and of course he thought of Marvin.†   (source)
  • Resting on the belief that self-mockery is an act of virtue, the shrug was the emotional equivalent of the sentence: You're Robert Stadler, don't act like a high-school neurotic.†   (source)
  • "Sorry it's a little messy," I said, looking down at the pile of unfolded, clean clothes that always stayed on the floor at the foot of my bed and trying not to think about the last time I'd had a boy in my room and how he'd laughed at my neurotic clothes folding.†   (source)
  • One minute he launches this all-out attack on the Jesus Prayer—which I happen to be interested in—making you think you're some kind of neurotic nitwit for even being interested in it.†   (source)
  • Neurotic?†   (source)
  • Neurotic, really.†   (source)
  • The man in Roomette 3, Car No. 11, was a sniveling little neurotic who wrote cheap little plays into which, as a social message, he inserted cowardly little obscenities to the effect that all businessmen were scoundrels.†   (source)
  • Somewhere, he thought, there was this boy's mother, who had trembled with protective concern over his groping steps, while teaching him to walk, who had measured his baby formulas with a jeweler's caution, who had obeyed with a zealot's fervor the latest words of science on his diet and hygiene, protecting his unhardened body from germs-then had sent him to be turned into a tortured neurotic by the men who taught him that he had no mind and must never attempt to think.†   (source)
  • …all those who pursue a zero as a value: the professor who, unable to think, takes pleasure in crippling the mind of his students, the businessman who, to protect his stagnation, takes pleasure in chaining the ability of competitors, the neurotic who, to defend his self-loathing, takes pleasure in breaking men of self-esteem, the incompetent who takes pleasure in defeating achievement, the mediocrity who takes pleasure in demolishing greatness, the eunuch who takes pleasure in the…†   (source)
  • Your code declares that the rational man must sacrifice himself to the irrational, the independent man to parasites, the honest man to the dishonest, the man of justice to the unjust, the productive man to thieving loafers, the man of integrity to compromising knaves, the man of self-esteem to sniveling neurotics.†   (source)
  • After all I've done for him you'd think Charley would have come to my aid, but he dislikes neurotics and he detests drunks.†   (source)
  • I had never heard of Rudolf Hoss before that day, but through her understated, simple eloquence she had caused him to exist as vividly as any apparition that had stalked my most neurotic dreams.†   (source)
  • The generous, neurotic man had obviously followed Eva, or rather, chased as well as he could after the children, hurrying these many blocks out of some preoccupation or reason which Sophie could not possibly divine.†   (source)
  • Not satisfied with having produced a psychotic daughter and three neurotic sons, he had to destroy his daughter's sons as well.†   (source)
  • He discovered the doctrine of hypocrisy, and discovered, best of all, that if he was neurotic it was emphatically not his fault.†   (source)
  • And if that's true of a neurotic, you see, we can hazard that it's equally true of the so-called normal psyche.†   (source)
  • It was exactly what made this Buffalo rat race so monstrous and, at the same time, so neurotically satisfying.†   (source)
  • For love of Kathleen the brothers, miserable neurotics themselves, evaded the father whose rule was otherwise in all respects absolute and absolutely corrupt.†   (source)
  • The result, of course, may be a disintegration of consciousness more or less complete (neurosis, psychosis: the plight of spellbound Daphne); but on the other hand, if the personality is able to absorb and integrate the new forces, there will be experienced an almost super-human degree of self-consciousness and masterful control.†   (source)
  • I looked at my watch; it was four o'clock, but neither of us was ready to sleep, for in that city there is neurosis in the air which the inhabitants mistake for energy.†   (source)
  • Were we, the old connoisseurs, the reverers of Europe as it used to be, of genuine music and poetry as once they were, nothing but a pig-headed minority suffering from a complex neurosis, whom tomorrow would forget or deride?†   (source)
  • 4 "In every primitive tribe," writes Dr. G6za Retheim, "we find the medicine man in the center of society and it is easy to show that the medicine man is either a neurotic or a psychotic or at least that his art is based on the same mechanisms as a neurosis or a psychosis.†   (source)
  • I might have made the most intelligent and penetrating remarks about the ramifications and the causes of my sufferings, my sickness of soul, my general bedevilment of neurosis.†   (source)
  • I see them as a document of the times, for Haller's sickness of the soul, as I now know, is not the eccentricity of a single individual, but the sickness of the times themselves, the neurosis of that generation to which Haller belongs, a sickness, it seems, that by no means attacks the weak and worthless only but, rather, precisely those who are strongest in spirit and richest in gifts.†   (source)
  • "I have thought of it—'Furthermore and beyond the psychoses and the neuroses—'†   (source)
  • There was nothing much to be done for her—a family history of neurosis and nothing stable in her past to build on.†   (source)
  • Why, Good Lord, Maud, I could talk about neuroses and psychoses and inhibitions and repressions and complexes just as well as any damn specialist, if I got paid for it, if I was in the city and had the nerve to charge the fees that those fellows do.†   (source)
  • Articulate among them would be the great Jung, bland, super-vigorous, on his rounds between the forests of anthropology and the neuroses of school-boys.†   (source)
  • Meanwhile he had projected a new work: An Attempt at a Uniform and Pragmatic Classification of the Neuroses and Psychoses, Based on an Examination of Fifteen Hundred Pre-Krapaelin and Post-Krapaelin Cases as they would be Diagnosed in the Terminology of the Different Contemporary Schools—and another sonorous paragraph—Together with a Chronology of Such Subdivisions of Opinion as Have Arisen Independently.†   (source)
  • To hold tight is the wish of every neurotic character.†   (source)
  • "Neurotic, these roach," whispered Merlyn, behind his fin.†   (source)
  • I studied tables of figures relating population density to insanity, relating housing to disease, relating school and recreational opportunities to crime, relating various forms of neurotic behavior to environment, relating racial insecurities to the conflicts between whites and blacks ….†   (source)
  • It was like struggling with some crushing physical task, something which one had the right to refuse and which one was nevertheless neurotically anxious to accomplish.†   (source)
  • I was wrong of course, morbid, stupid; this was the hypersensitive behaviour of a neurotic, not the normal happy self I knew myself to be.†   (source)
  • Miss Newton, a wrenny and neurotic old maid, with asthma, who had gradually become Eliza's unofficial assistant in the management of the house, was there.†   (source)
  • --PROFESSOR LANCELOT HOGBEN (INTERGLOSSA) (3) On the one side we have the free personality; by definition it is not neurotic, for it has neither conflict nor dream.†   (source)
  • The gaze of those marble eyes must have been the first stage in the treatment the neurotic got when he came out to the sanatorium.†   (source)
  • Persons suffering from epilepsy often have blanks when they cannot remember what they have done …… Remember that Cust was a nervous, highly neurotic subject and extremely suggestible.†   (source)
  • Married women were not allowed to teach in those days, hence most of the teachers were women made neurotic by starved love instincts.†   (source)
  • This is neurotic, I know--excuse the jargon--but to be not neurotic is to adjust to what they call the reality situation.†   (source)
  • But to plug holes in the cabin and deliberately drown herself, the hysterical impulsive freak of a neurotic girl — oh, no, Colonel Julyan, by Christ no!†   (source)
  • Then at the end of the avenue the neurotic reached the sanatorium, which graciously promised peace beyond the white columns.†   (source)
  • They link the unconscious to the fields of practical action, not irrationally, in the manner of a neurotic projection, but in such fashion as to permit a mature and sobering, practical comprehension of the fact-world to play back, as a stern control, into the realms of infantile wish and fear.†   (source)
  • 4 "In every primitive tribe," writes Dr. G6za Retheim, "we find the medicine man in the center of society and it is easy to show that the medicine man is either a neurotic or a psychotic or at least that his art is based on the same mechanisms as a neurosis or a psychosis.†   (source)
  • Anxieties for the integrity of its body, fantasies of restitution, a silent, deep requirement for indestructibility and protection against the "bad" forces from within and without, begin to direct the shaping psyche; and these remain as determining factors in the later neurotic, and even normal, life activities, spiritual efforts, religious beliefs, and ritual practices of the adult.†   (source)
  • "0 God, I could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself a king of infinite space, were it not that I have bad dreams" (Hamlet "All neurotics," writes Dr. Freud, "are either Oedipus or Hamlet."†   (source)
  • …the published psychoanalytical literature, the dream sources of the symbols are analyzed, as well as their latent meanings for the unconscious, and the effects of their operation upon the psyche; but the further fact that great teachers have employed them consciously as metaphors remains unregarded: the tacit assumption being that the great teachers of the past were neurotics (except, of course, a number of the Greeks and Romans) who mistook their uncriticized fantasies for revelation.†   (source)
  • The grocer, his clerk, and neurotic Mrs. Dave Dyer had been giggling about something.†   (source)
  • It was no good instructing the girl if she was going to talk about God in that neurotic modern way.†   (source)
  • His calls mine 'neurotic'; mine calls his 'stupid.'†   (source)
  • Just compare a real human like you with these neurotic birds like Lucile McKelvey—all highbrow talk and dressed up like a plush horse!†   (source)
  • I am so grateful to you for clearing this up—it's the sort of mistake that worries me, and proves I'm neurotic.†   (source)
  • Born of a delicate and overworked mother, and an impulsive, hard, imaginative father, who did not look with favor upon her coming into the world, Louise was from childhood a neurotic, one of the race of over-sensitive women that in later days industrialism was to bring in such great numbers into the world.†   (source)
  • When the fatal morning arrived, early in March, and the campus became a document in hysteria, he slid smoothly into Cottage with Alec Connage and watched his suddenly neurotic class with much wonder.†   (source)
  • He had been "spieler" in medicine shows, chiropodist, spiritualist medium, esoteric teacher, head of sanitariums for the diversion of neurotic women.†   (source)
  • Lot more neurotic than the women!†   (source)
  • There were days when Amory resented that life had changed from an even progress along a road stretching ever in sight, with the scenery merging and blending, into a succession of quick, unrelated scenes—two years of sweat and blood, that sudden absurd instinct for paternity that Rosalind had stirred; the half-sensual, half-neurotic quality of this autumn with Eleanor.†   (source)
  • It ended, a quarter of an hour later, in his calling her a "neurotic" before he turned away and pretended to sleep.†   (source)
  • Maud Dyer was neurotic, religiocentric, faded; her emotions were moist, and her figure was unsystematic—splendid thighs and arms, with thick ankles, and a body that was bulgy in the wrong places.†   (source)
  • Then she looked among the strangers, and found as usual, the fierce neurotics, pretending calm, liking the country only in horror of the city, of the sound of their own voices which had set the tone and pitch…… She asked: "Who is the woman in white?"†   (source)
  • Neurotic impossibilist!†   (source)
  • I present it to you as a hypothesis: Intelligence without the ability to give and receive affection leads to mental and moral breakdown, to neurosis, and possibly even psychosis.†   (source)
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