Neurotics are Rabble – Freud

July 18, 2025

Neurotics are a rabble [Gesindel], good only to support us financially and to allow us to learn from their cases: psychoanalysis as a therapy may be worthless.

As Freud’s colleague Sandor Ferenczi wrote, ‘one learned from [Freud] and from his kind of technique’

various things that made one’s life and work more comfortable: the calm, unemotional reserve; the unruffled assurance that one knows better; and the theories, the seeking and finding of the causes of failure in the patient instead of partly in ourselves … and finally the pessimistic view, shared only with a few, that neurotics are a rabble [Gesindel], good only to support us financially and to allow us to learn from their cases: psychoanalysis as a therapy may be worthless. [17]

https://archive.org/details/dokumen.pub_the-matter-with-things-our-brains-our-delusions-and-the-unmaking-of-/page/n1523/mode/2up?view=theater