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A new pamphlet of mine, Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety, is now being published. It shakes up much that was established and puts things which seemed fixed into a state of flux again. Analysts who above all want peace and certainty will be discontented at having to revise their ideas. But it would be rash to believe that I have now succeeded in finally solving the problem with which the association of anxiety with neurosis confronts us.
From Freud's earliest studies of the aetiology of the neuroses, until the end of his life the twin problems of neurotic anxiety and defence were never far from his mind. Again and again he grappled with them, and on the various tentative solutions he offered rest his successive theoretical formulations. Since Freud's death, moreover, theories of anxiety and defence have continued to be the foundation-stones of psychoanalytic psychopathology; and it is through their espousing differing views on the nature and origins of these conditions that the several distinctive schools of psychoanalysis have come into being.
In Freud's earliest formulations there is no hint that anxiety arises from loss or threat of loss, or that defensive processes are evoked in conditions of intense anxiety. Only little by little, and mainly towards the end of his life, did Freud advance such views and, in so doing, bring his ideas on anxiety and defence into relation with his ideas on mourning which, until then, had been a significant but quite distinct strand in his thinking. A principal result of his new formulation was, as he rightly foresaw, to bring everything ‘into a state of flux again’.
Although Freud himself at different periods of his life adopted