Therefore I no longer find the cause of a neurosis in the past, but in the present. I ask, what is the necessary task which the patient will not accomplish? The whole list of his infantile phantasies does not give me any sufficient ætiological explanation, because I know that these phantasies are only puffed up by the regressive libido, which has not found its natural outlet into a new form of adjustment to the demands of life. You may ask why the neurotic has a special inclination not to accomplish his necessary tasks. Here let me point out that no living being adjusts itself easily and smoothly to new conditions. The principle of the _minimum of effort_ is valid everywhere. A sensitive and somewhat inharmonious character, as a neurotic always is, will meet special difficulties and perhaps more unusual tasks in life than a normal individual, who as a rule has only to follow the well-established line of an ordinary life. For the neurotic there is no established way, for his aims and tasks are apt to be of a highly individual character. He tries to follow the more or less uncontrolled and half-conscious way of normal people, not fully realizing his own critical and very different nature, which imposes upon him more effort than the normal person is required to exert. There are neurotics who have shown their increased sensitiveness and their resistance against adaptation in the very first weeks of life, in their difficulty in taking the mother's breast, and in their exaggerated nervous reactions, &c. For this portion of a neurotic predisposition it will always be impossible to find a psychological ætiology, for it is anterior to all psychology. But this predisposition--you may call it "congenital sensitiveness" or by what name you like--is the cause of the first resistances against adaptation. In such case, the way of adaptation being blocked, the biological energy we call libido does not find its appropriate outlet or activity and therefore replaces an up-to-date and suitable form of adaptation by an abnormal or primitive one.