The Neurotic Supply: Why Replacing Thoughts Won’t Cure Neurosis

 

1. The Hydra of the Mind: A Fight You Can’t Win

Most of us live in cities. From a distance, we look like particles in motion—expanding and contracting around buildings, caught in cycles of work, rest, and repetition. A city is alive, but also sick. It breathes neurosis.

Neurosis is its hidden pulse: anxiety, guilt, remorse, endless worry about past, present, and future. The city doesn’t just house us—it trains us to worry.

And at the heart of this urban neurosis lies a familiar monster: the Hydra of the mind. Cut off one anxious thought, and two more grow back.

If your mind were a garden, each new worry would be another weed sprouting among the flowers. The cruel trick of neurosis is this: the harder you fight your thoughts, the stronger they grow.

Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) teaches us to challenge irrational beliefs with tools like reframing negative thoughts, identifying cognitive distortions, and testing fears against evidence. But what if the problem isn’t the thoughts themselves, but the mind’s addiction to producing them?

For the neurotic, solving one worry isn’t the cure—it’s just clearing the stage for the next performance. Because the problem isn’t the specific fear, but the need for fear itself.

2. Two Hungers, One Engine: The Absurd Loop

The narcissist feeds on applause; the neurotic feeds on alarm.
One hoards praise to keep the ego inflated; the other hoards problems—often where none exist—to keep anxiety alive.

Both run on the same engine: an endless loop of psychic supply.

Their hungers are not random quirks. They are strategies—two sides of the same coin—to avoid the unbearable emptiness of life: what Albert Camus called the Absurd.

Camus defined the absurd as the clash between humanity’s craving for meaning and the universe’s cold, silent indifference. To face this directly is terrifying. So instead, the narcissist and the neurotic construct smaller, more manageable universes where they are the center.

The narcissist builds a world where they are the sun, warmed by endless validation—as a model, a point of reference, or an object of envy and conspiracy.

The neurotic, on the other hand, builds a world of constant storms, where worry itself becomes a purpose. Meaning is derived from anxiety; the act of worrying becomes a motivation, as if carrying the responsibility of salvation for oneself or others.

In both cases, the thought of being the center—whether of attention or suffering—fills the void. Their supply is not merely pathology; it is an existential defense. As long as the abyss of the absurd remains unbearable, they will keep feeding the engine: applause for one, problems for the other.

3. Why Thought Replacement Fails

CBT is often like replacing a broken part in a machine—a machine with many other failing parts, powered by a faulty engine. And to make matters worse, the operator secretly enjoys hearing it puff and struggle.

Take away one negative idea, and the mind latches onto another. Solve that, and yet another dread slithers in. The content doesn’t matter. The structure demands something to gnaw on—like someone who secretly delights in the wheeze of their own broken machine.

Why the enjoyment? Because the operator has grown attached to the struggle. The noise, the malfunctions, the endless tinkering—they provide a strange sense of purpose, even identity. In psychology this is called secondary gain: the hidden benefits of a symptom, the comfort of a familiar misery.

This is why replacing parts rarely solves the problem. The operator isn’t simply trying to fix the machine—they’re invested in keeping it broken.

To be fair, CBT is evidence-based and effective in the short term for many people. But for the long term, and for deeply neurotic minds, thought replacement may only touch the surface. A mere band-aid on a deep and bloody wound.

Here’s the Lacanian mic-drop:
The symptom—recurring anxiety, guilt, remorse, compulsions, and self-doubt—isn’t an error in the system; it is the system’s solution.

The neurotic doesn’t suffer by accident. They suffer by design—because the suffering shields them from the real question:

What would I be without it?

4. The Dark Payoff (Jouissance)

Here’s why people cling to their neuroses: misery is predictable. It grants the illusion of importance—the sense that we matter, that we might save the world, our family, our children, or at least prove ourselves to parents or society.

Take the parent who obsesses over their child’s safety (regardless of the child’s age). Each anxious thought drains them, yes—but it also anoints them: protector, savior, the lone barrier between order and disaster. Without the worry, what would remain? Just another fragile human, adrift in a world they cannot control.

Lacan called this jouissance—the twisted satisfaction coiled inside suffering. We don’t want pain, but we prefer its familiarity to the vertigo of freedom. Better the devil you know than the abyss you don’t.

Neurotic supply is no accident. It’s armor. A calculated refusal—a way to keep playing the game so we never have to ask: What lies beyond it?

5. The Way Out (Not Through)

Real change doesn’t come from swapping thoughts. It comes from answering:

  • What does this worry feed me with?

  • What truth am I avoiding by clinging to it?

  • Who would I have to become to release it?

The goal isn’t to kill the Hydra. It’s to realize your hand holds its leash—and perhaps even harness its fire.

Because you can battle the Hydra forever, but it won’t die. Not until you ask why your hand keeps offering it meat.

Hit me with your thoughts:
Has cognitive therapy worked for you? How long before old thought patterns returned?
Comments are open.


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Anxious Cat: The Case of Q

Image
Everybody who has had pets knows that they all have unique personalities, fears, and desires, and in some cases, they can experience emotions such as shame, guilt, playfulness, and anxiety. I have been living with a cat for some time now. During this period, I have learned to understand him beyond his normal behavior; I can recognize when he is anxious. In Lacanian psychoanalysis, anxiety arises from the delicate and ever-shifting interplay between three fundamental registers of human psyche: the Imaginary, the Symbolic, and the Real. The inherent tension and potential for disruption within their interconnectedness generate anxiety. Here's a brief breakdown: The Imaginary: This realm encompasses identification, the ego, and the formation of the self through specular images and identifications with others. It is where we develop a sense of bodily unity and coherence, primarily during the mirror stage, when an infant recognizes themselves in the mirror. This sense of self, however,...
Read more

Unmasking Evil: The Truth Behind Our Darkest Desires

Image
Evil, as an action, could be a thought, but that is usually forgotten, a damned intranscendent mental Sin. In general, evil is only evil when it becomes action and comes out of us as a manifestation of our darkness. But, as an action, it is not inherently evil; rather, it is evil only in relation to other actions or, better yet, perceptions of actions—interpretations. Above all, evil is a function of one's relationship with one's manque, the fundamental lack that structures one's desire. Most of the time, what is evil is not determined by an external reaction, but by the accusation of one's inner Other, nor by the moral codifications that attempt to define it. Rather, evil’s true weight emerges in the subjective coordinates of one's own lack, in how one's act situates itself in relation to this void that constitutes one. In Lacanian psychoanalysis, the subject is always structured around the manque-à-être—the lack of being. It is this absence that fuels desire, ...
Read more

The Cat F. and her object of desire

Image
There is a toy the cat I live with, F., loves. A small, insignificant object by itself—a hair band—but for her, it is everything. She plays with it, run with it, and then—loses it. Again and again, it disappears under the sofa. At first, I thought it was mere accident, an unfortunate consequence of her wild enthusiasm. I would retrieve it (with difficulty, moving the whole big and heavy sofa), place it back in front of her, and she would resume the game. Then I noticed something strange: F. was not merely losing the toy—she was hiding it, pushing it carefully under the sofa and then wait. Not searching for it, not retrieving it herself, but waiting for it to come out, like a mouse. This is the game. Not the toy, not the having of it, but the not having it—the game of waiting. Lacan taught us that desire is not for the object itself, but for the dream of having it, and the wonderful things that it will make us feel. The objet petit a , that little elusive remainder, is not what we want...
Read more