Psychoneurosis

Mental disease without recognizable anatomical lesion, and without evidence and history of preceding chronic mental degeneration. Under this head come melancholia, mania, primary acute dementia, and mania haUucinatona. Cent. Diet. "Neurosis," in its broadest sense, may include any disease or disorder of the mind, and hence all the forms of insanity proper. But the term "psychoneurosis" is now employed by Freud and other European specialists to describe that class of exaggerated individual peculiarities or idiosyncrasies of thought towards special objects or topics which are absent from the perfectly normal mind, and which yet have so little influence upon the patient's conduct or his general modes of thought that they cannot properly be described as "insanity" or as any form of "mania," especially because ordinarily unaccompanied by any kind of delusions. At most, they lie on the debatable border-land between sanity and insanity. These idiosynerasies or obsessions may arise from superstition, from a real incident in the patient's past history upon which he has brooded until it has assumed an unreal importance or significance, or from general neurasthenic conditions. Such, for example, are a terrified shrinking from certain kinds of animals, unreasonable dread of being shut up in some enclosed place or of being alone in a crowd, excessive fear of being poisoned, groundless conviction of irredeemable sinfulness, and countless other prepossessions, which may range from mere weak-minded superstition to actual monomania.

Defined under Insanity in Black's Law Dictionary.