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The basis of this presentation is made from a conceptualized framework designated by Bonime1 as a “culturalist view.” “It refers to a psychoanalytic approach which (1) considers personality as a product of a culture and its formation basically a process of interpersonal experience; (2) assumes that this continuing process is crucially influenced by constitutionally determined variations in styles and capacities for learning and sensory and physical activity; and (3) regards the developed personality as functioning consciously or unconsciously in terms of learned values.” (Italics mine.) The culturalist accepts, as did Freud, that anxiety is a signal of danger, but views that which is being endangered in entirely different terms, He feels that anxiety is a failure of any person's learned characterological value systems.
My purpose here is to elaborate on this factor in greater detail both in the “normal” personality as well as in the emotionally ill individual. We feel any person experiencing anxiety is correct when he views himself as being threatened, on the brink of collapse or in imminent danger. For reasons to be described later, his entire being has been challenged in some way. Until such time that he can either reinstitute those conditions which would reassure him that his value systems are operable, or until the time that he changes unworkable learned values and derives satisfaction from his changed conceptualizations, he will not feel comfortable.
Further, it is our conviction that any form of psychotherapy has at its foundation the proposition that the therapist attempts, in every ethical manner at his command, to help the disturbed individual bring a sense of realistic certainty back into his life, which has otherwise been threatened by a vast variety of circumstances. If he employs dynamic techniques, he does this through the process of substituting faulty convictions and conceptualizations with more constructive and socially operative values and goals.2