The causes of a neurosis lie in the present as well as in the past; and only a still existing cause can keep a neurosis active. A man is not tubercular because he was infected twenty years ago with bacilli, but because foci of infection are still active today. The questions when and how the infection took place are even quite irrelevant to his present condition. Even the most accurate knowledge of the previous history of the case cannot cure tuberculosis. And the same holds true of the neuroses.
