You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Anxiety as Symptom and Signal is a compilation of eleven essays that presents various theoretical perspectives on aspects of the phenomenon of anxiety: as a symptom that causes dysfunction, as an adaptive mechanism in evolution and as it arises in all of the various treatments that are described as ‘psychoanalysis’. Although it contains pieces that cover
evolutionary biology, the neurosciences, and genetics and temperament, this is a book edited by psychoanalysts for psychoanalysts. The goal of the book, as described in the preface, is to acquaint the analyst/reader with interdisciplinary approaches to anxiety, with the idea that in order for psychoanalysis ‘to continue to be both a relevant theory of the mind and a clinically effective treatment’ (p. ix), such an interchange of ideas is essential.
The book contains a large, though not exhaustive, amount of information from different fields. The editors have succeeded in communicating the current range of our understanding of anxiety in one volume. What is also high-lighted is how difficult it will be to integrate these different models. As Morton Reiser notes in the epilogue, ‘For the most part we are faced with two incompatible (biological and mental) domains of data, causing pragmatic observational problems’ (p. 171). Further, as Scott Dowling implies in his lovely essay on the ontogeny and dynamics of anxiety in child-hood, the various authors and the perspectives that they represent in the text do not define ‘anxiety’ in the same way at all. He argues that what is described as ‘anxiety’ in animals is better labelled ‘undifferentiated unpleasure of distress’ (p. 83), and that ‘Human anxiety awaits the formation of mental representations and a rudimentary differentiation of self from other’. In reading this book, it is clear that not even all of the psychoanalysts agree.
Unfortunately, this is a very uneven book, which would have benefited from a stronger edit