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Bally discusses the effect upon man of the technical age into which he has come: his dangers and his failures (neuroses), and finally the task of the psychiatrist. Man has become 'rationalized'—his practical abilities alone are being developed, while his more human abilities, of the mind and heart (Eros), are not only neglected but discouraged. Man has become a 'working ascetic', alienating himself from his own true nature.
Democratization has come about, but the means of production and political and military power are controlled by the few. Man loses purposefulness in life. In crises he is helpless, overcome by fear. In industrial society, man's anxiety is over the functioning of society itself. This anxiety Bally calls paranoiac. Ambivalence and hate mark this type of anxiety, and it is characteristic particularly of dictatorship. Striving for individuality may become manifest in symptoms which may make those who exhibit them the elite.
Man often finds more security in the real danger inherent in war than in the ordinary anxiety of life. The feeling that life is meaningless leads to civilian disquietude. War is romanticized by dictatorship. In war, the state demands absolute authority and whoever does not identify himself with its aims is disfranchised; collective degradation of the disfranchised then follows. The author differentiates the neuropsychoses occurring during war. The psychiatrist may run into conflicts with the aims of the state, which wants gleichgeschaltete (uniformly geared) individuals. He must reconcile the demands of society and those of the individual.