Freud defines neurosis as a way to respond to the events of life in an incorrect manner, unlike the response of the healthy man that overcomes difficulties. What form of health may we expect, then, at the end of an analysis? Can an analyst promise more than the mere replacement of neurotic misery by ordinary, banal, everyday unhappiness? Freud argues that what is achieved through an analysis is not the sexual symptom that the subject presented in the beginning, but its reduction to an incurable rest. The analysis produces a state that never arises spontaneously in the ego and this newly created state is the difference between a person who went through analysis and one who has not.
End of analysis; incurable rest; original state; health