a-general-introduction-to-psychoanalysis-sigmund-freud

is over for him. After a while, however, he receives a small accident
insurance, and learns to exploit his injury by begging. His new existence,
though most undesirable, is based upon the very thing that robbed him of his
former maintenance. If you could cure his defect, he would be without a
means of subsistence, he would have no livelihood. The question would arise:
Is he capable of resuming his former work? That which corresponds to such
secondary exploitation of illness in neurosis we may add to the primary
benefit derived therefrom and may term it a secondary advantage of disease.
In general I should like to warn you not to underestimate the practical
significance of the advantage from illness and yet not to be too much
impressed by it theoretically. Aside from the previously recognized exceptions,
I am always reminded of Oberländer's pictures on "the intelligence of animals"
which appeared in the Fliegende Blätter. An Arab is riding a camel on a
narrow path cut through a steep mountain side. At a turn of the trail he is
suddenly confronted by a lion who makes ready to spring. He sees no way
out, on one side the precipice, on the other the abyss; retreat and flight—
both are impossible; he gives himself up as lost. Not so the camel. He leaps
into the abyss with his rider—and the lion is left in the lurch. The help of
neurosis is as a rule no kinder to the rider. It may be due to the fact that the
settlement of the conflict through symptom development is nevertheless an
automatic process, not able to meet the demands of life, and for whose sake
man renounces the use of his best and loftiest powers. If it were possible to
choose, it were indeed best to perish in an honorable struggle with destiny.
I still owe you further explanation as to why, in my presentation of the theory
of neurosis, I did not proceed from ordinary nervousness as a starting point.
You may assume that, had I done this, the proof of the sexual origin of
neurosis would have been more difficult for me, and so I refrained. There you
are mistaken. In transference neurosis we must work at interpretations of the
symptoms to arrive at this conclusion. In the ordinary forms of the so-called
true neuroses, however, the etiological significance of sexual life is a crude
fact open to observation. I discovered it twenty years ago when I asked
myself one day why we regularly barred out questions concerning sexual
activity in examining nervous patients. At that time I sacrificed my popularity
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