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The paper is divided into seven sections. The first is a brief summary of Freud's theory of anxiety. From it two conclusions are drawn which allegedly summarize Freud's views: '(a) in young children it is unsatisfied libidinal excitation which turns into anxiety; (b) the earliest content of anxiety is the infant's
feeling of danger lest his need should not be satisfied because the mother is "absent"'.
The second section summarizes Freud's contribution to our understanding of guilt: it is 'the expression of the conflict of ambivalence, the eternal struggle between Eros and the destructive or death instinct', and arises from 'aggression which is changed into guilt, by being suppressed and made over to the superego'. Though the author believes that Freud's own statements 'would point to guilt arising at a very early stage of development', she reminds us that he nevertheless believed 'that guilt sets in as a sequel to the Oedipus complex'. In contrast, Abraham is quoted as connecting guilt with early cannibalistic desires.
In section three the author presents her view (contrasting it with that of Freud) that 'anxiety has its origin in the fear of death'. Klein bases her theory on analytic observations (of which only one illustration is given in the present article) and on the idea that 'if we assume the existence of a death instinct, we must also assume that in the deepest layers of the mind there is a response to this instinct in the form of fear of annihilation of life'.
Section four deals with 'persecutory anxiety' (the paranoid position) which is believed to be of paramount importance in the child's mental life in the first three months. The accompanying mental processes of introjection and projection of good and bad partial objects (breast and penis) are also described. The ideas in this section apparently represent no change from the author's previously expressed views.
Section five deals with 'depressive anxiety', guilt, and the 'reparative urge'—the chara