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 to civilisation as long as their moral code has gaps in it, the filling up of which is a crying need of the age. We deceive ourselves greatly if we suppose that many married women are neurotic only because they are unsatisfied sexually or because they have not found the right man, or because they still have a fixation to their infantile sexuality. The real ground of the neurosis is, in many cases, the inability to recognise the work that is waiting for them, of helping to build up a new civilisation. We are all far too much at the standpoint of the “nothing-but” psychology; we persist in thinking we can squeeze the new future which is pressing in at the door, into the framework of the old and the known. And thus the view is only of the present, never of the future. But it was of most profound psychological significance when Christianity first discovered, in the orientation towards the future, a redeeming principle for mankind. In the past nothing can be altered, and in the present little, but the future is ours and capable of raising life’s intensity to its highest pitch. A little space of youth belongs to us, all the rest of life belongs to our children.

Thus does your question as to the significance of the loss of faith in authority answer itself. The neurotic is ill not because he has lost his old faith, but because he has not yet found a new form for his finest aspirations.