[Robert Urbanek]

Whatever happened to the word “neurotic,” a term popular in the 1960s and 1970s, describing people prone to anxiety and obsession? Woody Allen mined comedy gold as the hapless neurotic, the Jewish New Yorker constantly obsessing about love, art, death, the existence of God, the fate of the universe, and the meaning of life.

As depicted in popular culture, the neurotic sought relief in psychoanalysis, a form of therapy that has faded in favor of medication as the treatment for most mental illnesses.

But who today claims to be neurotic? I hardly hear that word anymore. Has it gone out of fashion?

[Puffer Fish]

I wonder if it was connected to personality traits specific to ethnic Jewish or Italian people.
Since those ethnicities are no longer such big percents of the population, maybe the meaning has lost importance.

[late]

"That it means little now, to most Americans, is evidence of how strongly language drives the perception of mental struggle, both its sources and its remedies. In recent years psychiatrists have developed a more specialized medical vocabulary to describe anxiety, the core component of neurosis, and as a result the public has gained a greater appreciation of its many dimensions. But in the process we’ve lost entirely the romance of neurosis, as well as its physical embodiment — a restless, grumbling, needy presence that once functioned in the collective mind as an early warning system, an inner voice that hedged against excessive optimism.

In today’s era of exquisite confusion — political, economic and otherwise — the neurotic would be a welcome guest, nervous company for nervous days, always ready to provide doses of that most potent vaccine against gloominess: wisecracking, urbane gloominess.

“I still use the term in my practice once in a while but it doesn’t really say much,” said Dr. Barbara L. Milrod, a professor of psychiatry at Weill Cornell Medical College. “We now have far more useful and specific ways of describing maladaptive behavior.”

If chronic Facebook or Twitter posting is not an exercise in neurosis, then nothing is.

“I think some of the qualities we once attributed to neurotics have simply been normalized,” said Peter N. Stearns, a historian at George Mason University in Fairfax, Va., and author of the forthcoming book “Satisfaction Not Guaranteed: Dilemmas of Progress in Modern Society.” “I don’t have hard evidence for this, but just look around and observe how we live. We’ve become so accustomed to people with continual worries and fears that it’s made the category obsolete.”

THE classic neurotic is still with us, all right — but with a lot more company, and everyone trying to talk over one another. “Put it this way,” Dr. Milrod said. “These are ridiculous times, and if it all makes sense to you, there’s probably something wrong.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/01/sunday-review/where-have-all-the-neurotics-gone.html