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The author discusses the importance to the problem of anxiety of the simultaneous availability of learned and instinctually patterned responses and their interlocking.
An earlier definition of anxiety (1953) is amended as follows: 'Anxiety is a reaction to a traumatic situation or to danger, present or anticipated. In this reaction we have to distinguish between the affect anxiety, which is an ego reaction, and the discharge phenomena which are also id manifestations.' The normal ego responses to anticipated danger operate to a large extent with secondary process, while the id element is what Freud probably had in mind when speaking of automatic anxiety. The term anxiety covers a complementary series, the economics of which are varyingly covered by degrees of fusion and neutralization of aggressive and/or libidinal impulses.
Considerations which are adduced and discussed for the proposed change are: the author's earlier distinction between anxiety concomitants and anxiety equivalents (1955); further evidence of discharge phenomena in preconscious processes;