A general term for a ‘nervous’ disease, i.e. a psychological disease without an organic cause. The term was first used in 1777 by Scottish doctor William Cullen. By the nineteenth century the term was in widespread use for a large variety of disorders ranging from stomach complaints to heart palpitations. Present-day usage, however, tends to conform to Freud, Sigmund’s conceptualization of it in his account of hysteria. Freud adopted the term in the 1890s and it soon became central to the development of psychoanalysis as the prime example of a type of psychological disturbance that, in contrast to psychosis, is susceptible to the talking cure. On Freud’s understanding of it, neurosis is the outward, symbolic expression of a psychical conflict in the subject’s unconscious---it manifests itself in a variety of symptoms, such as compulsion to repeat, fetishism, and so on. We become neurotic, according to Freud, as a defence against, or compromise with, an unconscious conflict. Freud also found that in conscious life the subject seems to derive satisfaction from their neurosis (which Freud referred to as the secondary gain of illness), and often exhibit considerable reluctance to ‘cure’ themselves in therapy.