With the truth, one cannot live. To be able to live one needs illusions, not only outer illusions such as art, religion, philosophy, science and love afford, but inner illusions which first condition the outer. The more a man can take reality as truth, appearance as essence, the sounder, the better adjusted, the happier will he be. At the moment when we begin to search after truth we destroy reality and our relation to it. Be it that we find in the beloved person in truth a substitute for the mother, or for another person, or for ourselves. Be it that, just reversed, we establish through analysis that we really love the hated person, but must displace this love upon another person, because our proud will does not permit that we confess this to ourselves. In a word, the displacements are the real. Reality unveils itself to analysis always as something displaced, psychologically untrue. This is a cognitive fact but no life principle. It is not at all a matter of putting an end to these displacements because it is impossible as the analytic situation teaches us best of all, where the patient only continues this displacement process further, in denying the actual feeling relation to the analyst, and displacing it upon other persons or situations. This displacement, if it succeeds, we regard and rightly so as healing, for this constantly effective process of self-deceiving, pretending and blundering, is no psychopathological mechanism, but the essence of reality, the—as it were—continuous blunder. This is also the authentic wisdom of the Greek Oedipus myth, whose hero would live happily in his displaced world of appearance if he were not driven by his intellectual pride, the will to truth, to expose his reality as lies, as appearance, as falsehood. He carries out his will pleasurably in the search for truth, in the overcoming of obstacles, but suffers in the content of what he finds, which brings to consciousness the denied emotions (in the case of Oedipus, for his parents).
From this conception there results a paradoxical but deep insight into the essence of neurosis. If man is the more normal, healthy and happy, the more he can accept the appearance of reality as truth, that is, the more successfully he can repress, displace, deny, rationalize, dramatize himself and deceive others, then it follows that the suffering of the neurotic comes not from a painful reality but from painful truth which only secondarily makes reality unbearable. 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. The neurotic, as distinguished from the creative man of will whom the hero Oedipus represents on the intellectual level, is not that voluntary happy seeker of truth, but the forced, unhappy finder of it. He seeks, moreover, no general objective of truth, and finds his own subjective truth, which runs like this—"I am so little and bad and weak and worthless that I cannot deceive myself about myself, cannot accept myself as a worthwhile individual."
While the average well adjusted man can make the reality that is generally accepted as truth into his own truth, the creative searcher after truth seeks and finds his own truth which he then wants to make general—that is, real. He creates his reality, as it were, from his truth. The neurotic, on the other hand, finds his subjective truth but cannot accept it as such and destroys therewith the given reality, that is, the pleasurable relation to it, as he is neither in position to make it his truth nor to translate his truth into reality.