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This paper is concerned with the nature of instinctual anxiety and discusses it with especial reference to Anna Freud's treatment of it in her book, The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defence. The writer's main enquiry is as to why the ego should be supposed, in the normal course of things, to dread the strength of its libidinal instincts. Certain external situations are obviously dangerous and as such rightly evoke anxiety in the ego. Similarly, certain attitudes of the super-ego are threatening and to be feared. But there seems no primâ facie reason why a powerful current of libidinal emotion should be felt as a threat to the ego. This could only be the case where complicating factors had set in early in life. One of these might be that a massive outflow of object-libido is felt by the ego as a corresponding impoverishment of narcissistic libido, thus causing a fear of being starved of love. Such a reaction would be referable to a traumatic oral frustration in infancy, at a time when any thwarting of love would be largely compensated by identificatory processes. Another factor might be that the sensuous and aggressive aspects of id-libido, which had become defused in the process of deflection from object- to ego-attachments, were threatening to break through the repression and overwhelm the ego, which would then react with anxiety.
Such effects as these of the vicissitudes of the libido upon the narcissistic development of the individual point, however, to a schizophrenic rather than a normal make-up; so that the existence of instinctual anxiety should by no means be accepted as a normal phenomenon.