Gillibert focuses on the function of anxiety within a system of communication between two individuals. He argues that anxiety is the fundamental, schematic, and existential link in each psychic couple, the existential link by which a couple remains a couple. He illustrates his thesis with clinical material concerning the communication of anxiety between patient and analyst, and with a literary example, the communication of anxiety between Macbeth and Lady Macbeth. Anxiety is linked to impossible representations of death, to a break in narcissistic continuity. Even Kierkegaard's own experience of anxiety in the rupture of his relationship with Regina Olsen must be viewed analytically as a source of his philosophical focus on anxiety.