If man is the more normal, healthy and happy, the more he can … successfully … repress, displace, deny, rationalize, dramatize himself and deceive others, then it follows that the suffering of the neurotic comes … from painful truth… . Spiritually the neurotic has been long since where psychoanalysis wants to bring him without being able to, namely at the point of seeing through the deception of the world of sense, the falsity of reality. He suffers, not from all the pathological mechanisms which are psychically necessary for living and wholesome but in the refusal of these mechanisms which is just what robs him of the illusions important for living… . [He] is much nearer to the actual truth psychologically than the others and it is just that from which he suffers. —OTTO RANK1

• suffering
• truth
• illusions
• reality
• deception