You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Phyllis Greenacre's two-part article “The Predisposition to Anxiety” (1941a, 1941b) constitutes one of those classics occasionally read during early training and then unjustly forgotten until a special occasion resurrects them from undeserved oblivion. In rereading Parts I and II in 2010, it is hard to imagine that they were written seventy years ago in 1940. In a tribute to Greenacre presented at a scientific meeting of the New York Psychoanalytic Society honoring her eightieth birthday, Arlow (1975) wrote that, in his opinion, these papers—along with her article, “On the Biological Economy of Birth” (1945a)—“stand alongside of The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defence by Anna Freud and Ego Psychology and the Problem of Adaptation by Heinz Hartmann as landmarks in the development of modern psychoanalytic thought” (p. 4).
I will try in this review to evaluate Arlow's high praise. I will first put Greenacre's papers in the context of psychoanalysis as it was during the period shortly after the outbreak of World War II.
In 1941, Freud had been dead less than two years. Although he had elaborated his structural theory, the seminal collaboration among Hartmann,