Neurotic fears may cause patients to avoid various everyday activities—such tasks as trying to control undesirable habits, or buying one's clothes, or the sexual experimentation that occurs in normal development. The analyst must be alert to point out ego syntonic avoidances and to help the patient analyze the fears that cause them. Such analysis permits the patient to undertake the shunned activity and thus to acquire increased

mastery of fear and to achieve desirable new gratifications of libidinal and aggressive impulses.