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The aim of this book is to integrate current theories of anxiety. Each of its first eight chapters is devoted to an exposition of the writings of an 'important theoretician': Freud, Harry S. Sullivan, E. Jacobson, Stanley Schachter 'and other physiologically oriented theoreticians', Dollard and Miller, Eysenck, Kierkegaard, Ernest Schachtel, who is a member of the faculty of the William Alanson White Institute, and K. Goldstein. The three final chapters contain some of the author's own ideas on the subject.
The book fails of its purpose as far as the psychoanalytic theory of anxiety is concerned for two major reasons. One is that its author has failed to understand correctly certain aspects of Freud's theories of anxiety, and especially certain of the changes which he introduced in Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety in 1926. Thus, for example, the author attributes to Freud's final views on the subject the same distinction between 'realistic' and 'neurotic' anxiety that characterized his earlier formulations. He also uses the terms 'neurotic anxiety' and 'free floating anxiety' as synonymous.
The second reason for the book's failure seems to be more fundamental. The author takes no account of the fact that psychoanalysis is a method for studying the human mind which yields data concerning its functioning that are both more accurate and