Lecture XXXII: Angst Und Triebleben (Anxiety and Instinct).1

This chapter brings out some new aspects of the subject of anxiety, which are not, however, regarded as yielding a final solution to the problem, everything still being in the flux of a process of transformation. It opens with a recapitulation of Freud's first lecture on anxiety published sixteen years ago. In that lecture anxiety was found to be an affective state, ultimately the precipitate of an inherited specific manifestation analogous to the ontogenetically acquired hysterical seizure. The occurrence which left the trace of this significant affect was the experience of birth, for which reason anxiety was presumed to be of a toxic nature.

A contrast is established between objective and neurotic anxiety: objective anxiety is an apparently reasonable reaction to danger, such as expected injury from the outer world, and is characterized by a condition of heightened sensory attention and motor tension. The reaction, which is a repetition of the old trace, either takes the form of a mere alarm signal, soon bringing about a quick adjustment to the new danger situation by flight or defense, or the primary reaction predominates and persists, and the reaction in toto spends itself in the development of anxiety, in which case the state of affect becomes deadening and, of course, futile. Neurotic anxiety, on the other hand, is based on the presence of three conditions: first, in the case of anxiety neurosis,—a free floating general anxiousness, so-called expectation anxiety; second, in the case of phobias,—anxiety fixated on specific ideational contents, in which the relation to external danger, though still recognizable, is greatly exaggerated; third,—anxiety which accompanies symptoms in hysteria