The Meaning of Anxiety: By Rollo May, Ph.D. New York: The Ronald Press Co., 1950. 376 pp.

The author states, "Anxiety is the apprehension cued off by a threat to some value which the individual holds essential to his existence as a personality'. From this definition he develops his ideas about normal anxiety, neurotic anxiety, and fears. The orientation of the book is primarily that of the school of analysts whose theories are evolved from the cultural point of view. This frame of reference enables the author to pay tribute to Freud for his original work, but to dismiss his discoveries with comments about the Victorian period of culture in which Freud lived. It seems necessary for these authors to repeat that Freud's awareness of the biological environment of the individual was simply a result of his having lived in an era of great biological discoveries. If only he had been born later, then he would have created a more 'modern' form of psychoanalysis. It is implied by the author that most analysts are veering away from freudian concepts to more 'progressive' ideas, such as those formulated by Fromm, Horney, Sullivan, whose conceptions of anxiety are reviewed with those of Kierkegaard and Kurt Goldstein, with a discussion based almost entirely on the idea that cultural factors arouse anxiety.

That the threat of frustration of a biological urge does not cause conflict and anxiety, unless that urge is identified with some value essential to the existence of the personality, is naïvely illustrated by case histories of people who have active, heterosexual lives but still have anxiety; also conversely, in instances of people without adult sexual activity who have no anxiety. Several grossly inadequate case histories are presented. On the basis of four to eight hours of personal interviews with thirteen unmarried, pregnant girls, Rorschach studies, social workers' interviews, and three questionnaires, the author concludes that rejection by parents does not provoke anxiety if the child does not have a subjective image of a good mother (which would provok