neurotics


SOME cultural archetypes leave the stage with a flourish, or at least some foot stomping. All those pith-helmeted colonialists, absinthe-addled poets and hippie gurus founding 1970s utopias: They made some noise, if not always much sense, before being swallowed by history.


Yet one modern American type is slipping into the past without a rattle or even its familiar whimper — the neurotic.


For a generation of postwar middle-class Americans, being neurotic meant something more than merely being anxious, and something other than exhibiting the hysteria or other disabling mood problems for which Freud used the term. It meant being interesting (if sometimes exasperating) at a time when psychoanalysis reigned in intellectual circles and Woody Allen reigned in movie houses.


That it means little now, to most Americans, is evidence of how strongly language drives the perception of mental struggle, both its sources and its remedies. In recent years psychiatrists have developed a more specialized medical vocabulary to describe anxiety, the core component of neurosis, and as a result the public has gained a greater appreciation of its many dimensions. But in the process we’ve lost entirely the romance of neurosis, as well as its physical embodiment — a restless, grumbling, needy presence that once functioned in the collective mind as an early warning system, an inner voice that hedged against excessive optimism.


In today’s era of exquisite confusion — political, economic and otherwise — the neurotic would be a welcome guest, nervous company for nervous days, always ready to provide doses of that most potent vaccine against gloominess: wisecracking, urbane gloominess.


“I still use the term in my practice once in a while but it doesn’t really say much,” said Dr. Barbara L. Milrod, a professor of psychiatry at Weill Cornell Medical College. “We now have far more useful and specific ways of describing maladaptive behavior.”


Some of the reasons that “neurotic” has fallen out of colloquial usage are obvious. Freudian analysis lost its hold on the common consciousness, as well as in psychiatry, and some of Freud’s language lost its power. And scientists working to define mental disorders began to slice neurosis into ever finer pieces, like panic disorder, social anxiety and obsessive-compulsive disorder — all evocative terms that percolated up into common usage, not to mention into online user groups, rock lyrics and TV shows.


In 1994, after years of nasty debate with psychoanalysts, doctors assembling the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, psychiatry’s encyclopedia of mental disorders, officially dropped the word neurosis from the book.


“The DSM is the lingua franca of psychiatry, and given what we know today the term feels old-fashioned and quaint,” said Dr. Michael First, a research psychiatrist at Columbia and a former editor of the manual. “With the general decline of value of Freud in our society, it is ultimately anachronistic.”


Still, the desire for precision and the decline of Freudian thinking do not entirely explain the disappearance of the neurotic. Psychiatrists don’t ultimately shape the language we use, after all — we all do — and neurosis has at least as much going for it as other Freudian keepers, like ego and id.


The answer may reside in the one area of social science where the spirit of the neurotic is still alive and well: research psychology.


“Neuroticism” is one of the “dimensions” of the so-called five-factor model of personality, the most studied measure in the field (other dimensions include conscientiousness and openness). It is rated using a simple questionnaire, in which people respond to statements like “I get irritated easily,” “I worry about things” and “I get stressed out easily.” Decades of research suggest that scores on those measures are relatively stable through life, and at least some of the differences in factors among people are rooted in genetic inheritance.


Over all, scores on those kinds of questionnaires have not changed much in adults in the United States since the 1950s. But recent studies have found that, among college students, neuroticism levels have increased by as much as 20 percent over the same period.


Are young people today really more anxious and troubled — more neurotic — than their parents were at the same age? Many parents undoubtedly think so (college was a long time ago), and some researchers do, too.


But another way to read those numbers is not as a measure of mental makeup but of cultural change. People of all ages today, and most especially young people, are awash in self-confession, not only in the reality-show of pop culture but in the increasingly public availability of almost every waking thought, through Facebook, Twitter and other social media.


If chronic Facebook or Twitter posting is not an exercise in neurosis, then nothing is.