Anxiety and Our Organizational Imperatives

Anxiety comes in many shapes, forms, and meanings. All mental phenomena are complex in their interaction and appear in combination or as part of other mental phenomena. It is safe to assume that no state of affect can be described or defined as if it existed in pure form. The form and meaning of anxiety differ depending on the particular relatedness to other mental activities such as memory, imagination, adaptive alertness, anger, anticipation of a dysfunction, or as the physical expression of disordered functioning itself.

I have been interested in our processes, our abilities and disabilities to order experience. Robert J. Lifton speaks of principles of psychoformative processes. At times I use the words “organizing principles” and am referring to organizing ideas, images, concepts, belief systems, emotions, symbolizing processes, sociocultural influences, and our individual style of living. These processes exist at many layers of our being. They exist as relatively stable basic concepts about ourselves in our world. They also exist at the level of immediate experience, both as stable percepts and assumptions, and in the form of a flow of images and thoughts in the process of transforming themselves into meaningful impressions.

This interest in the importance of functional organization has rather naturally brought my attention to anxieties which appear to be manifestations of difficulties in the ordering processes. This topic is so encompassing, involving so many functions, including society's organizing impact upon the individual, that I intend to do no more than to stimulate your interest in looking at the distress of psychological dysfunction from the point of view of some of the organizing formative processes. I will be