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In delineating the kinds of anxiety characteristic of the stages of attachment and of the separation—individuation process, Dr. Schecter (1980) pinpointed missing someone who is loved as the key to the understanding of anxiety. Love, for the infant, he notes, “means the security of empathic responsiveness to his needs by the mothering one.” Both the mothering one and the analyst are characterized as providing the steady holding environment which enhances the integration of the self.
Whereas Dr. Schecter emphasizes the importance of the relationship per se, I want to consider the relationship in terms of its developmental function, that is, the promotion of structuralization, and to reconceptualize the key to the understanding of anxiety as any danger to the integration of the self.
Dr. Schecter alludes to this view when he differentiates traumatic anxiety from signal anxiety: with traumatic anxiety, “the ego is overwhelmed or disorganized….” And later on he notes that “resistance often functions in the service of maintaining a sense of self-constancy and continuity, warding off a sense of discontinuity in one's identity.”
Following this line of thinking, I will approach the question of anxiety from a structural point of view, That is, I will consider the developmental roots of anxiety from the perspective of the