Examination Anxiety without Examination

Examination anxiety has mainly been investigated in patients who had difficulties in examinations. These difficulties may be excessive anxiety, inability to study, or repeated failure in examinations. But the same patients also complain of similar anxiety in situations that are far removed from examination proper. For example, Sadger's patient, in discussing a dream, gave the following description of his sexual difficulties: 'Each attempt at sexual intercourse appears to me as an examination … in my imagination a fear of the new examination remains: this means that every fresh attempt at intercourse is an examination for the unconscious and I am unable to solve this problem. Therefore I must try to deceive the woman by feigning passion which I do not feel. In the dream, I do not succeed in the deception.'1

In the following I shall describe an anxiety reaction which I found in a number of patients who did not complain of examination anxiety. One patient came to analysis for impotence, others for depression, or phobic reactions. But the analysis revealed that the patients had impotence, or frigidity, in common and that they showed a marked readiness to react with anxiety resembling examination anxiety.

Although these patients had not been aware of the form of their anxiety reaction, they were ready to acknowledge it after they had experienced it in the transference situation. It is one of my points that I do not deal with symptoms of which the patient had originally been aware, but of signs which became manifest in the analytical situation and could be analysed there, and then acknowledged by the patient as a reaction also occurring outside the consulting room. But I hope that this discussion may also throw light on the nature and psychopathology of examination anxiety proper.

2. Examination Anxiety and Castration Fear

The analytic work on the subject has been summarized by Flugel, who, however, omitted Sadger's paper.2 Flugel, following Rank