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The Psychoanalysis and Neuroscience Chapter of the Argentine Psychoanalytical Association continues to meet on a monthly basis and has now been working for more than two
years. Since the beginning of 2005 we have been studying affects with the objective of integrating psychoanalysis and neuroscience. This report provides a summary of the relation between anxiety, emotional development, and genetic factors associated with anxiety disorders. A recent article by Gross and Hen, published in Nature Reviews Neuroscience (2004), was taken as a reference point, with the aim of finding a relationship with the Freudian model of “comple-mental series,” as an example of the etiological factor in all mental illness.
From a bibliographic search of The Concordance of the Standard Edition (Guttman, Jones, & Parrish, 1980), we observed that throughout his work, Freud referred to anxiety in no fewer than 125 entries under the heading of affect, showing different aspects of the subject. Summing up briefly, we found it to be important that anxiety, for Freud, was an affect suffered by the ego. It reveals itself as unpleasure, when faced with an unknown object. It produces a fear of being destroyed or harmed by an internal or external force. This brief definition in some way supports the concepts expressed by Gross and Hen. They consider anxiety to be a mental state that is elicited in anticipation of a potential threat or danger. According to these authors, there are abnormal development factors that explain the origin of anxiety. This affect can be understood as being the result of individual traits, which interact with genetic factors and early environmental experience—something similar to that which Freud (1917) studied in the “complemental series” as a constitutional factor plus