A person is neurotic when he has repressed something without having really eliminated it. Modern man thinks he has eliminated the world of values, the world of poetry, the world of moral consciousness; but he has only repressed it and is suffering from it . . . or fighting against himself. An inner conflict—this is what neurosis is.
The cause of this epoch’s malady is that is that our materialistic and amoral civilization no longer answers the deepest needs of the soul. The world tells him that feeling, faith, and philosophical truth are unimportant. His thirst for love, his spiritual loneliness, his fear of death, the riddle of evil, the mystery of God—he no longer speaks of these things; he represses them, but still they haunt him. Modern man suffers from repression of conscience.
Here lies the cause of a phenomenon which anyone can observe: our modern world is a world without conviction. Look at politics, economics, art, medicine. In the face of the urgency of the evils, men hastily seize upon superficial and often contradictory measures which merely aggravate the confusion. Ask these men the simplest questions about the real meaning of politics, economics, law, art, or medicine, the meaning and goal of life, culture, or the social order, and you will be astonished at their embarrassment. “Culture,” says Andre Malraux, “must transform itself and yet it does not know where it is going.” In every one of us today there is a deep uncertainty that stems from our inner conflict, from the that separation between our spiritual and our technological life.
Taken from: The Inner Conflict of Man; Chapter One, The Whole Person in A Broken World by Paul Tournier
