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ONE of the main problems presented by Psycho-Analysis is that of anxiety and its modification. The various psycho-neurotic illnesses to which the individual is liable can be looked upon as more or less unsuccessful attempts to master anxiety. But side by side with these methods of modifying anxiety, which may be considered as pathological, there are a number of normal methods, and they have an enormous importance for the development of the ego. It is to some of these that we shall turn our attention in the following pages.
At the beginning of its development the ego is subjected to the pressure of early anxiety-situations. Weak as it still is, it is exposed on the one hand to the violent urges of the id, and on the other, to the threats of a cruel super-ego, and it has to exert its powers to the utmost to satisfy both sides. Freud's description of the ego as ‘a poor creature owing service to three masters and consequently menaced by three several dangers’1 is especially true of the feeble and immature ego of the small child, whose principal task it is to master the pressure of anxiety it is under.2