The Living Bread
Wilderness of neurosis.
March 6, 2019
The history of our own time has been made by dictators whose characters, often transparently easy to read, have been full of repressed guilt, self-hatred, and feelings of inferiority. They have managed to enlist the support of solid masses men moved by the same repressed drives as themselves. The wars they have waged with one another have been the sacrifice which the cases, degraded by totalitarianism, have offered up in fanatical self-idolatry, which never completely manages to assuage the nausea brought about by the self-hatred.
-Thomas Merton, The Living Bread [1956]
The whole mechanism of modern life is geared for a flight from God and from the spirit into the wilderness of neurosis.
-Thomas Merton, No Man Is an Island [1955]
neu·ro·sis
/n(y)o͝oˈrōsəs/
noun
Synonyms:
mental illness, mental disorder, psychological disorder, mental disturbance, mental derangement, mental instability, psychological maladjustment, psychoneurosis, psychopathy.