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Anxiety has been one of the most widely studied affective entities in psychopathology, and is generally conceded to be among those least understood. However, there has been little disagreement with the concept which considers that anxiety denotes a fear connotation. The normal and abnormal functions of fear have received as much attention as anxiety. Yet, psychiatric literature, with the notable exception of that concerning physiological experimentation in reflexology and experimental neuroses, reveals a remarkable dearth of thought given to correlation of experimental data with ego defensive reactions against conditioned reflexes involving fear patterns.
The purpose of this thesis is to point out how a more definite understanding of anxiety can be realized through recognition of the functions which conditioned fear patterns serve in the economy of the psyche.
I believe that it is of paramount importance to clearly distinguish between anxiety and fear. One of the chief reasons why anxiety has generally been so difficult to understand is due to a tendency to regard fear and anxiety as synonymous affects.
A recent symposium (3) on anxiety, besides emphasizing the conflicting schools of thought on the subject, revealed that some writers confuse fear with anxiety or consider that these affects were the same. Rado would even prefer to do away with the term ‘anxiety' entirely when applied to “technical purposes”, and would consider only “the fear”. Schoenfield feels that the word ‘anxiety’ has various divergent usages in psychology and psychiatry, owing to the fact that “many definitions of it are not definitions at all; because theoretical propositions are often not subject to disproof either directly or through deducible inferences, and may have no apparent common denominator of concept or fact.”
Freud (1) pointed out that the basic difference between fear and anxiety lay in the fact that fear has an object whereas anxiety does not have one. One may dissent at this point an