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We read in the foreword of this truly amazing book that Freud's famous paragraph about the riddle of neurosis in Inhibition, Symptom, and Anxiety is a 'confession of ultimate failure'. We also read that Elizabeth Zetzel has 'confirmed that psychoanalysis has made no further advance in its quest for an explanation of anxiety'. But now the day has come and we have the final answer not only to the problem of anxiety but also to the riddles of neurosis, psychosis, of most physical illness, alcoholism, addiction, delinquency, and so on.
On the very first page we get a glimpse of how solid the background of the author's categorical statements is: 'Nowhere in the animal kingdom can pregnancy and reproduction take place unless the female is ready to mate with the equally ready male without the slightest hesitation, regret, or reluctance'. Every observer of animals knows that this is just not so.
The animal cub cannot 'conceivably feel the anxiety surrounding the question, "Are my mother and father prepared, if need be, to risk their very life in the protection of mine?"' (p. 7). However, the human infant is not that fortunate. Because every human being has had to go through the same 'basic anxiety' and because everybody chooses his mate for one of the many pathological reasons resulting from it, there is a basic reluctance in every human to accept childbearing. The poor infant 'has no knowledge of the social or legal agencies that would protect his life' (p. 5). The infant is therefore pervaded by three forms of basic anxiety: 1, the fear that he will actually be destroyed by his mother; 2, that she will not protect him from dangers to the limit of her strength, if necessary; and 3, that he may be abandoned, which is tantamount to death. All these dangers the infant can perceive and in some way discriminate. This leads of course to dire consequences. The first fear results in overstimulation of the sympathetic nervous system, leading eventually to hypertension. I