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The title of this edited volume raises the clinical question, Can anxiety be viewed as a symptom, a disorganization that must be corrected, or as a signal, a potential organizer for a better solution? As a symptom, it is disruptive, requiring a different form of treatment than if viewed as a signal; an opportunity for the patient and analyst to study adaptive or defensive processes within the mind. The book's purpose is to contrast different theories of etiology and treatment of anxiety. It is divided into two sections: The first, “Anxiety As Symptom,” has papers that focus on neurobiological concepts of anxiety with phenomenological descriptions and studies that elucidate its etiology. The second, “Anxiety As Signal,” focuses on psychoanalytic meanings of anxiety in the clinical process. Included is an understanding of the absence of anxiety in some psychoanalytic patients, and how fears of engaging in an awareness of certain self- or object representations eliminates anxiety. Psychoanalytic treatment, in these cases leads to the recognition of anxiety as a positive organizing function.
In the opening chapter, Glick reviews Freudian and post-Freudian theories of anxiety. He shows the evolution in Freud's thinking from the constitutional determinants of anxiety to the 1926 revision of his theory, which outlines the hierarchy of possible anxieties (helplessness, fear of loss of object or loss of love of the object, castration anxiety, and superego anxiety) and describes