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That every neurotic conflict is subjectively insoluble is explained, according to Freud, by the fact that the actual conflict occupying the conscious ego is strengthened by repressed infantile conflicts. The sufferer is fighting with shadows and always strikes in the wrong direction. This explains why the actual conflict whose practical solution seems quite simple to a healthy person becomes a Gordian knot to the neurotic. The external denial becomes an inner, unconscious one. Since the patient knows nothing of the unconscious reinforcement of his commonplace external conflict, he is happy to find and cling to suitable rationalizations. Every analyst knows the tenacity with which patients strive against the application of infantile material to external conflicts—conflicts moreover, frequently unconsciously created and provoked by the patients themselves.
One of the typical symptoms of an acute neurotic conflict is the inability, in varying degrees, to come to a decision. Frequently patients are tormented by indecision to the point of considering suicide. If they do so, to be sure, they satisfy a large portion of their unconscious need for punishment. This indecision applies especially to persons who in a preneurotic or a latent neurotic condition have been accustomed to make clear and precise decisions, and who interpret the indecision accompanying the emerging conflict as a complete collapse. This is particularly true since it is typical that the indecision becomes generalized, relating not only to the limited sphere of the conflict itself, but to all decisions.
Freud has called attention with reference to the obsessional neuroses, to a chronic ambivalence leading to a high degree of paralysis of the will, which reaches its climax in an 'obsessional