The Ontogeny of Anxiety

Because anxiety is the cornerstone of so much psychoanalytic theory, clarity about this concept is perhaps more necessary than about any other. For this reason all psychoanalysts, including Freud himself, have found themselves turning back to it again and again, to test their theories against it, and in turn to test it against every new fact that is uncovered.

Clinically, we know that anxiety can be a most obstinate manifest symptom, persisting in spite of deeply penetrating analyses. Or it can be equally superficial, yielding easily and quickly to analytical interpretations. Furthermore, clinically we encounter anxiety as a blind, unconscious force, constituting in this form an almost ubiquitous problem. Nor is it clear why anxiety as an unconscious source of energy can sometimes be converted into many masked forms of expression which in themselves may be either healthy or unhealthy; and why in other instances it erupts through directly into frank manifestations of symptomatic fear.

All of this has led to many speculations and formulations about the different forms of anxiety and the problems they present. These formulations cover a wide variety of possibilities: the possible varying individual predispositions to anxiety; the possible gradual “structuralization” of chronic anxiety, as though the anxious state may become a petrified fossil in the nervous system as the decades of an anxiety-laden life go on; the possible influence of the stage of psychological and instinctual evolution of the individual at which anxiety first manifests itself in life; the possible differences between on the one hand the anxiety which is the fruit of more or less cataclysmic experiences, or on the other hand the anxiety which arises out of forbidden, frustrated, tormenting drives and their consequent repressed anger. Through all of these varied and tentative gropings we find a recurring tendency to seek the explanation of its adult