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November 28, 1950. AN ADDENDUM TO FREUD'S THEORY OF ANXIETY. Charles Brenner, M.D.
This paper was confined to one part of Freud's final theory of anxiety. This part, clinically of minor significance, states that anxiety might arise automatically (without ego signal) in states of excessive psychic tension (traumatic states), which occurred regularly in infancy and might occur in later life. Dr. Brenner examined the evidence for this hypothesis and suggested alternative modifications in the development of anxiety in infancy. He proposed that in the earliest period of life the infant was aware only of the emotions of pleasure or unpleasure without anxiety, but that as experience increased and other ego functions developed (e.g., memory, sensory perception), the child became able to predict or anticipate a 'traumatic situation'. This ability of the child to react in advance to danger might be considered to be the beginning of the specific emotion of anxiety, which in the course of further development might be supposed to become increasingly sharply differentiated from other unpleasant emotions.
Dr. Ludwig Eidelberg discussed a possible distinction between normal and neurotic anxiety, and asserted that the basis of Freud's final theory of anxiety was the theory of the life and death instincts. Dr. Judith Kestenberg cited certain clinical phenomena in infants which she felt were best explained by