¹neurotic

adjective neu·rot·ic \nu̇-ˈrä-tik\

medical : having or suggesting neurosis

: often or always fearful or worried about something : tending to worry in a way that is not healthy or reasonable

Full Definition of NEUROTIC

: of, relating to, constituting, or affected with neurosis(see neurosis)

— neu·rot·i·cal·ly \-ti-k(ə-)lē\ adverb

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This most fastidious of pianists sounds anything but neurotic when he plays Mozart. —Richard Coles, Times Literary Supplement, 15 Nov. 2002
Maybe it's because novelists don't talk much about each other. Maybe this is because novelists secrete a certain BO which only other novelists detect, like certain buzzards who emit a repellent pheromone detectable only by other buzzards, which is to say that only a novelist can know how neurotic, devious, underhanded a novelist can be. —Walker Percy, “An Interview With Zoltán Abádi-Nagy,” 1987 in Signposts in a Strange Land, 1991
In our own time, the most perfect examples of such biography … are the matchless case-histories of Freud. Freud here shows, with absolute clarity, that the on-going nature of neurotic illness and its treatment cannot be displayed except by biography. —Oliver Sacks, Awakenings. (1973) 1990
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noun neu·rot·ic \nu̇-ˈrä-tik\

medical : a person who has a neurosis

: a person who is always fearful or worried about something

: one affected with a neurosis(see neurosis)

: an emotionally unstable individual

See neurotic defined for English-language learners

More than any rebirth, one senses in the England of 1911 a civilization's unconscious death wish, vividly present in the author's glimpses of the poet Rupert Brooke, that squeaky-clean neurotic, a casualty waiting to happen. —Thomas Mallon, New York Times Book Review, 27 May 2007
As a claustrophobe—perhaps the only kind of neurotic out of place in New York—I find nothing in the city more terrifying than a stalled subway car. —John Tierney, New York Times Magazine, 19 Mar. 1995
You are too much something for a tubercular neurotic who can only be jealous and mean and perverse. —F. Scott Fitzgerald, letter, 2 Dec. 1939
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