The Psychoanalytic Study of the Child. XXXI, 1976: A Developmental View of Anxiety: Some Clinical and Theoretical Considerations. Clifford Yorke and Stanley Wiseberg. Pp. 107-135.

The authors attempt to integrate diverse and conflicting psychoanalytic approaches to the clinical phenomena of anxiety by organizing a developmental conceptual frame. A developmental line is described: from diffuse somatic excitation through pervasive anxiety to signal anxiety. Such a developmental approach can then concern itself with mentalization, containment, qualitative changes, and shifts from maladaptive to adaptive functioning. In the first phase there is no "anxiety" per se, but vegetative excitation which then matures to "pervasive psychic anxiety." Then, with the emerging capacity for anticipation, unpleasurable feeling tone due to discrepancies between the expected and the actual occurs. This in turn evolves into anxiety proper. (The authors localize this earlier than Spitz did.) Such perceptual dissonance, precursor to stranger anxiety, is evidence of "mentalization." Until speech, internalization, and containment become available, signal anxiety is not considered possible. The waning of temper tantrums, a manifestation of traumatic anxiety, precedes signal anxiety. Clinical examples of children arrested at various presignal anxiety levels are examined in detail.