Mawson's book situates anxiety and its containment as the foundation of psychoanalytic thought; with anxiety and containment receiving primacy, kinship is sought with philosophical iterations of those concepts. In particular, the book looks at the ancient Greeks and then proceeds to Heidegger and the work of Daseinsanalysis. Here, the nature of being is explored and existential anxiety is dealt with in a way not typical of psychoanalysis. Clinical suggestions here ask for a deeper understanding of existential anxiety, through a deeper engagement with what it means to be alive. To be clear, a fear of death could be more than just a repetition of infantile experiences of parental absence, but rather, an essential part of being human, and thus not entirely shaped by early development.

It follows that to elucidate this existential component of anxiety, one must explore the nature of existence itself, and not reduce