The person who is oriented towards meaning and aspires to strong values then becomes dominated by base instincts and driven by desire. Both the opposite and the counterpart of his pleasure-seeking behavior is the self-pity that underlies drug and medication abuse.

  The nothingness that a person fears is not only outside him but also deep within himself. He is gripped by fear of this inner nothingness and is running away from himself out of fear of himself. He is fleeing from solitude, because being alone means being alone with himself. And when is he usually forced to spend time alone with himself? Whenever business and busyness slow down or even stop—at the weekend, on Sunday. “Einsamer Sonntag” (“Gloomy Sunday”) is the title of a notorious, soulful hit—notorious because of the many suicides that it led to, and that were certainly not attributed to it solely by an enterprising music publisher. That’s because we neurologists know very well the syndrome that we call Sunday neurosis. This consists of a feeling of desolation and emptiness, of the vacuousness and pointlessness of life, that breaks out and appears within us precisely when the hustle and bustle of our weekday work comes to a standstill. (Compare the conclusion of a social institute in Hamburg that 58 percent of the young people they had surveyed literally “did not know what to do with themselves” in their free time. This figure does not even include sports fanatics, who must surely account for another 30 percent. The rest also preferred to attend collective events. Another survey apparently found that 43.6 percent of all cinema goers in the world only go to the cinema because they “don’t know what to do with their time.”)

  H. Plügge was able to show that existential frustration in general, but so-called Sunday neurosis in particular, can end in voluntary death, i.e., suicide. In a study of 50 suicide attempts, he proved that they were ultimately neither the result of illness, nor financial hardship, neither of troubles at work nor other conflicts. Instead, surprisingly, they could be traced back to one thing: excessive boredom—in other words, unfulfilled human longing, human struggle for a valid purpose in life. Such boredom can be deadly.

  And so Karl Bednarik may also be right when he writes: “The problem of the material hardship of the masses has turned into the problem of affluence, the problem of leisure.” Considering this issue in relation to the neurosis problem, however, Paul Polak* pointed out years ago that we should not be under the illusion that neurotic illnesses would go away by themselves when all the social questions have been resolved. The opposite would be true: only once the social questions have been resolved would the existential ones emerge into people’s consciousness: “The solution to the social question would truly liberate the spiritual problem, would mobilise it. A person would only then become free to really take himself in hand and would recognise the problematic aspects of himself, the problems inherent in his own existence.”

  As Werner Kollath was able to demonstrate, statistics show that, in the last few decades, medicine has been incredibly successful in combating infectious diseases, including tuberculosis, previously widespread and much feared, but since 1921, all these successes have been outweighed by the increase in cases of sickness and death that occur as a result of inadequate nutrition or even violence, but above all as a result of traffic accidents. However, the increase in traffic accidents is not the fault of our fast pace of life in itself, it is certainly not the fault of technology, nor the increase in road vehicles, it is the fault of the human mind that uses this technology, that misuses the technology. It is not true that it’s the faster pace of life that is making people so ill, although one could get that impression when confronted with the phenomenon of manager’s disease [burnout]. Manager’s disease is not technogenic but psychogenic. As Joachim Bodamer* has shown, nowadays, for the masses in central Europe, the car is the main criterion of their standard of living, and the average person frequently works himself to the bone just for the sake of prestige, in fact, just so that he can buy himself a car. And I can imagine that a significant percentage of those people who succumb to manager’s disease and eventually perish from it would not have been afflicted by this sickness in the first place if they had not had the egotistical ambition—driven by the motive of increasing their social standing—to pull out all the stops to buy a swanky car, even at the expense of their health. In a word, these people are potentially dying because of their cars before they even own them. People with such pride and ambition can sometimes also reach for even loftier goals. We know a foreign patient who represents the most typical case of manager’s disease that we have ever encountered. Once this man had been examined, it was evident that he was working himself to death. However, the internal medical examination had only been able to highlight the danger—but not the actual cause of illness in this case. This could only be deduced when the patient was examined by a psychiatrist, because at that point it became apparent why he had plunged himself into his work so intensely and had overworked. He was wealthy enough—he even owned a private plane—but that was just it: he admitted that he was now going all out to be able to afford a jet instead of this ordinary plane. In a certain sense, the feeling of being unfulfilled regarding an existential purpose that could make one’s life worth living—the unfulfilled feeling that we have termed existential frustration—could also be called Mrs. manager’s disease. For, just as the so-called managers don’t have enough time to rest and recover, their wives have far too much time on their hands and don’t know what to do with it—and most of all, they don’t know what to do with themselves.

  We* have defined neurosis (sensu stricto) as a psychogenic illness. As well as neurosis in the strict sense of the word, we know of other neuroses in the broader sense, for example, somatogenic, noogenic and sociogenic (pseudo-) neuroses. With all of these, we are dealing with neuroses in the clinical sense. But there are also neuroses in a metaclinical sense, as well as neuroses in a paraclinical sense. Collective neuroses belong to the last group. They are quasi-neuroses, neuroses in the figurative sense. We have already seen that neuroses in the clinical sense are not on the increase. That is to say, clinical neuroses have not increased to such an extent that they have become collective neuroses. As far as we are justified in talking about collective neuroses in the paraclinical sense, in our experience the particular collective neurosis of the present time is characterized by four symptoms:

  1. Provisional attitude to life. These days, the average person is used to living day-to-day. He learned that in the last world war, because he could only go from one day to the next, never knowing whether he would live to see the next day. But the person who lives a provisional existence doesn’t notice what he is missing—that he is, in fact, missing out on everything. He forgets how right Bismarck was when he said: “Life is like being at the dentist. You always think that the worst is still to come, and yet it is already over.” Well, we still haven’t got rid of the provisional attitude to existence that we owe to the war. People today are still in its thrall, and a—how shall I put it—mid-century mood is taking over. Its most striking characteristic is a kind of atom bomb phobia. People nowadays apparently live with an eye constantly on the future atomic bomb. Recently, there was a public discussion program on a Vienna radio station, when an ordinary woman stood up and made this statement, word for word: “As long as the threat of the atomic bomb hangs over us, it is irresponsible to bring children into the world.” The average person today is anxiously awaiting the atomic bomb. And so he slides into this attitude of “Après moi—not le déluge, but—la bombe atomique.” But just like any anticipatory anxiety, this fearful anxiety over the atomic bomb is disastrous, because, like every fear, it threatens to bring about precisely the thing that is feared.

  2. The second symptom within a pathology of the zeitgeist would be the fatalistic attitude to life. Whereas the person who has a provisional attitude to life tells himself that it is not necessary to act and take his fate into his own hands, the person with the fatalistic attitude to life says: “This is not even possible.” Again, it was in the war, particularly in the army, where men learned (or had to learn) to let themselves be swept along, let themselves be pushed, as such people tend to put it. They don’t just let themselves be pushed, they themselves also push—they push the blame for their failure onto this or that, onto internal conditions or external circumstances. The average person today is possessed by superstitious belief in various forces of destiny, and our current nihilism just continues to feed this belief in fate. By means in the form of the major Homunculisms, biologism, psychologism and sociologism, man is talked into believing that, accordingly, he is a mere automaton governed by his reflexes; a mere creature of instinct; or a mere product of blood and soil, heritage and environment or the like—in any case, he is neither free nor responsible. Either he puts the blame on the social situation in which he finds himself, or on his psychological and physical traits. Especially with regard to the psychological, we should not disguise the fact that psychoanalysis often plays into the hands of this fatalistic streak that people exhibit nowadays. At the very least, the vulgar interpretation of psychoanalysis is grist to the mill of neurotic fatalism. The person with a fatalistic attitude to life talks endlessly about base instincts, the unconscious and the id. In the service of this fatalism, he abuses and misinterprets psychoanalysis: “The ego is not the master in its own house” and “Man is a being of weak intelligence, dominated by his base desires.” These quotations from Sigmund Freud only supply arguments for neurotic fatalism. This vulgar psychoanalysis of the masses has itself been infected by nihilism. It has become the “secondary gain” of collective neurosis. In the USA, where the popularization of psychoanalysis has assumed proportions that Central Europeans can hardly imagine, the downsides are already apparent. We must bear in mind that “today, in the United States, undergoing treatment with a psychoanalyst is practically the done thing.”* “The more analysis spreads and its basic principles become common knowledge,” says Emil A. Gutheil,** “the more suspicious we should be of so-called “free” association.” These days, we can trust only very few patients to produce truly spontaneous associations. Most of the associations that a patient produces over the course of a longer period of treatment will be anything but “free”; in many cases, they are calculated to give the analyst certain ideas, which the patient assumes the analyst will welcome. This explains the fact that one finds so much material in medical reports published by certain analysts that seems to confirm the ideas of the therapist. The patients of Adlerian therapists only seem to have problems concerning power, and their conflicts appear to be caused exclusively by their ambition, their striving for superiority, etc. The patients of devotees of Jung inundate their therapists with archetypes and all kinds of anagogic symbolism. The Freudians hear confirmation from their patients of the castration complex, the trauma of birth and similar concepts. Only very few of the patient’s ideas are not thought through in advance and distorted. For example, the American psychiatrist G. R. Forrer* mentions the case of a woman who had a three-year-old son in whose presence scissors could not be used, “because little boys are frightened of being castrated.” W. G. Eliasberg** asks the moral question of “whether we perhaps have too much psychology.” Of course, by this he means psychologism. Aspects of this psychologism are spreading in the USA, including searching for the complexes, base instincts, emotions and interests behind everything human. H. Schulte* talks about the “resistance of today’s European to the claims of a rather too all-encompassing psychoanalytical picture of the world, that is presented to him from across the ocean.” However, not just Freudian psychoanalysis but also [Léopold] Szondi’s fate analysis (a term used by its proponents) plays into the hands of contemporary fatalism. In effect, it asserts no more nor less than that a person’s fate is written in their genes. Szondi himself describes his doctrine as fatalism, albeit a controlled fatalism. Today, our fate is not “written in the stars” as it was in the past, but in our genes. But our fate is still written in the stars—if not written, then printed: we can all witness this as soon as we open a daily newspaper . . . after all, a survey by the Gallup institute revealed that only 45 percent of Austrian women did not “believe in an astrological connection between their own lives and the position of the stars.”

  3. Collectivist thinking. If a person neglects to grasp a given situation in the sense of the two abovementioned attitudes to existence, the provisional and the fatalistic, then it becomes evident in the other two symptoms of the pathology of the zeitgeist that he is barely able to comprehend the person, i.e., himself and the other as a person. He really doesn’t want to stand out, he wants to submerge himself in the mass of humanity, he would like to dissolve into it. In reality, he drowns in it, he gives himself up, no longer a free and responsible being. It is obvious that we are not speaking of community here, but only of the “anonymous mass,” the crowd. The community certainly needs individual personalities—and, indeed, the other way around: every individual personality needs the community in order to find fulfilment within its structure; in other words, to be allowed to become a whole person. However, it’s all very different when it comes to the “mass of humanity”: within the mass, no individual personality can ever really come into its own or flourish. But the “mass of humanity” would also rather not have to deal with personality, because actually, personality is something that only disturbs the mass. That is why the mass fights individual personalities, oppresses them, robs the personalities of their freedom, and curtails this freedom in favor of uniformity. But what becomes of the third aspect that we tend to think about in this context? What becomes of brotherhood? Well, it degenerates, it deteriorates into mere herd instinct.

  4. Fanaticism. Just as the collectivist ignores his own personality, the fanatic ignores the personality of the other person, the “other” who thinks differently. He doesn’t allow him to matter, because, for the fanatic, only his own opinion matters, but in reality he has no opinion of his own, only so-called public opinion, and he doesn’t really have it—it has him. Fanaticism tends to politicize fanatical people, whereas exactly the opposite would be needed—not to politicize human beings but to humanize politics. On the other hand, the fanatic acts as though politics, if I may say so, is the solution to all problems; but politics cannot be the remedy for everything because it is often itself a symptom of illness. Public opinion, which we talked about earlier, takes shape in the form of clichéd catchphrases and slogans. Once thrown into the “mass of humanity,” these catchphrases and slogans trigger a psychological chain reaction that is far more dangerous than the physical chain reaction that forms the mechanism of the atomic bomb, because this mechanism would never be able to function if the psychological chain reaction did not precede it. And so we can understand how right Karl Kraus was with his words: “If humanity had no clichés it would not need any weapons.” As far as the atom bomb itself is concerned, Einstein hit the nail on the head: “The problem is not the atomic bomb, the problem is the human heart.” Insofar as we can identify the aforementioned pathology of the zeitgeist as a psychological epidemic, we should not forget one thing: somatic epidemics are typical results of war, but at the same time, psychological epidemics are possible causes of war.

  Let us now ask ourselves how widespread these collective neurotic symptoms have become. To find the answer, I asked my colleagues to conduct a survey of people who were not neurotic (in the strict clinical sense), and in which they were presented with test questions. This was the test question for Symptom 1, concerning a provisional attitude to life: “Are you of the opinion that there is no benefit in making decisions and taking your fate into your own hands, because, after all, the atomic bomb is going to explode and so everything is pointless?” The test question for Symptom 2, regarding the fatalistic attitude to life, was: “Do you believe that human beings are ultimately nothing more than the playthings of external and internal forces and powers?” The test question for collectivist thinking was: “Do you believe that the most important thing is not to stand out?” And finally, this, I must admit, rather loaded question for fanaticism: “Is it your view that someone who wants the best is justified in using any means he thinks suitable to achieve it?” Certainly, in our view, nothing is so indicative of a fanatic as the fact that for him everything is just a means to an end. His view is that the end justifies the means. In reality, it is true that, conversely, there are means that would be capable of defiling the most sacred of ends. From the results of this test, my colleagues were able to conclude that out of all the test subjects, only one person was really free of all four symptoms of collective neurosis, while half the people we tested exhibited at least three of the four symptoms. This result from our sample showed that people who are not clinically neurotic can be collectively neurotic. We can see the countercheck for our example in the results of psychiatric examinations that were performed on the accused in the war crimes trials, and which concluded that these people were clinically healthy.