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Writing with a rare combination of clarity and elegance of style, this psychoanalyst re-examines the nature and the function of anxiety in both sickness and health. His capacity to provoke thought and to widen understanding of the experience of anxiety is due, I think, to two main factors: (1) Aware of the value of cross-fertilization between dynamic psychology and ethology, he has set out to expose the links between the psychological and the biological characteristics of fear and anxiety. (2) Believing that pain, anxiety and symptoms in general are potential agents in the process of guarding or re-making health, he wishes to dispel the idea, current nowadays, that all anxiety and all unhappiness is necessarily irrational, abnormal and neurotic. Instead he regards anxiety as ‘a biological function necessary for survival’ (p. xii) because it evokes vigilance, heightens vitality and so ‘mobilizes energy to overcome obstacles’ (p. 6).
Having first examined and differentiated anxiety from other experiences, such as shock, fright, expectancy, guilt, depression and concern (anxiety, he remarks pithily, is concern on one's own behalf, concern is anxiety on another's behalf) Rycroft explores the parallels between the major neurotic defence techniques—obsessional, phobic, schizoid, and hysterical—and relates them to fear reactions: that is, fighting, flight and submission, which he thinks of as their biological equivalents. He justifies this link-up by suggesting that, because of their greater self-consciousness, human beings tend to ‘guard their psychological integrity as vigilantly as animals do their physical integrity’ (p. 74).
He also scrutinizes the depressions in terms of their psycho-biological foundations. Thus he describes guilt as ‘an emotion necessary for social harmony’ (p. 39) which only becomes neurotic when it is inappropriate in terms of the actual situation. From this one might extrapolate that while fear is the organism's reaction to the threat of damage and