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Two basic aspects of the individual's functioning are: (a) mediating and dealing with information from his outer world so as to enable him to master or adapt to it, (b) managing anxiety, which is always linked with the charging and discharging of drives. These two aspects, termed here the adaptive and the defensive ones respectively, may be considered as leading to the development of successively changing strategies during an individual's ontogenesis, each strategy indicative of his relationship to both the outside world and his inner drives. Psychologists have frequently separated the two aspects and attempted to understand only one of them, thus neglecting the other. An omission of the defensive aspect e.g. characterizes Piaget's work, which is aimed at understanding the development and functioning of human intelligence. By way of analogy I would suggest that psychoanalytic theory, possibly because of its close link with pathological functioning, has failed to create a quite tenable theory of adaptive functioning and regulation. This paper aims at contributing in some degree to the important task of understanding the adaptive and defensive aspects of the individual within a common frame of reference.
Previously I have presented (Nilsson, 1973) a systematic description of action systems utilized by the individual in his adaptation to his environment or the world. In the present paper I take up this theoretical framework again with the intention of extending it to include the concept of anxiety. In so doing a link is forged with certain ideas of the psychoanalyst Max Schur's (1953)(1958), finding as I do obvious similarities betweeen the essential 'evaluation and reaction' levels within the ego as conceptualized by him, and the adaptive action levels or systems I have described. It is worthy of note that whereas Schur derives his theoretical system from an analysis of how the individual deals with anxiety, I base the adaptive action levels to be described on