The Symptom (n.) is not selected by the patient. The symptom happens to him. You could just as well ask when you are eaten by a crocodile, "how did you select that crocodile''. Nonsense. He has been selected.
A Symptom (n.) is the body's enforced self-restraint: the singer whose fame tempts him too high suddenly cannot sing high notes.
A Symptom (n.) can be a chaperone: the man about to marry a dubious woman he adores gets an oesophageal spasm that confines him to two cups of milk a day, three hours each — and all visits stop.
A Symptom (n.) is a process that is a mere consequence; a symbol is one that seeks to become something — and which we face is left to our judgment.
A Symptom (n.) appears only when we cannot see the other side of our nature; a fully conscious conflict would never produce one.
Symptom (n.) are not just effects of old causes but failed attempts at a new synthesis of life — seeds that fail to sprout in inclement weather.
A Symptom (n.) can only be given up in exchange for an equally intense attachment to something else.
A Symptom (n.) is at the same time a natural attempt at healing — the heartache tries to force out the tears, the snakebite raises a private disappointment to a mythological event.
A Symptom (n.) is psychogenic when choking happens only at certain meals, or only in front of certain people — a disturbance of eating under psychological, not physical, conditions.
A Symptom (n.) is the shoot above ground; the neurosis is the rhizome beneath — and dreams lead to the roots.
A Symptom (n.) appears in defiance of reason when we reject the gold the unconscious offers; make that gold, even hypothetically, the cornerstone and the symptoms vanish and we feel "unaccountably" well.
A Symptom (n.) can be a barometer: patients learn to accept theirs with gratitude, because it tells them exactly when they are straying from their own path.
A Symptom (n.) is not the illness but a signpost pointing to the cause; suppress it and another springs up in its place.
A Symptom (n.) can be a drastic illustration: the peasant's son who has climbed to the top gets all the signs of mountain sickness — and dreams of a train derailed at the back by an engine steaming ahead.
A Symptom (n.) transferred to the analyst seems an easy gain but is always a loss: the patient makes the analyst guarantor of the miracle and binds himself to him more than ever.
Symptom (n.) are what the old gods have become: we left behind only verbal spectres, not the psychic facts, so that Zeus now rules the solar plexus rather than Olympus.
The Symptom (n.) speaks in metaphor: the patient who cannot swallow cannot swallow his situation, the asthmatic cannot breathe the air at home, the vomiter cannot stomach it.
The Symptom (n.) is something that happens with no evident purpose: a man hammering a nail to hang his coat acts purposively, but one who does it because he happened to hold hammer and nail shows a symptom.