The question asked in the title is a moral one: how can the amount of time, money and energy which psychoanalysis requires be justified in a world of mass suffering and potential mass disaster? A reply which affirms the benefits which analysis provides for the individual is insufficient. But each individual cure increases the sum total of human freedom in the world and each new insight about human motivations could become effective when desperate danger might make the masses willing to strive for self-control. Neuroses are seen as unsuccessful attempts to achieve that intensification of the inner life of man that might be required in the building of a world which must increasingly prevent the discharge of drives through external activity. The significance of their cure and study transcends therefore the benefits reaped by the individual.