The Contributions of Experimental Psychiatry to the Art of Healing

In the beginning was the Word—and that word may well have been: Anxiety. Since then, the concept of anxiety has grown almost as protean as love and has similarly been stretched to encompass myriad sets of meanings. These have ranged from a Dionysian quest for all the zests of living (as in, “I am ever anxious to try something new,”3) down through the separation of Bowlby (“Why did my mother dessert me?”), the quiet desperations of Thoreau (“Where is my Walden?”) and the agonized perplexity of Kafka (“Of what, oh my masters, am I guilty?”), to the primal Kierkegaardian despair of life as but a short stop from hope to doom (“Tremble, ye unthinking; for the Black Angel is a-wing.”) Freud attributed anxiety to a marginal apprehension of possible dangers stemming from unconscious “sexual or aggressive libido”—a less discerning and therefore, until recently, a predictably more popular formula.4 Our thesis here, however, is that all of these apprehensions of angst are but surface perturbations over man's truly fundamental terrors—profound dreads which, like the head of Medusa, man assiduously avoids scrutinizing directly for fear of returning to lifeless stone. But we physicians, as champions of man—and protected, as was Perseus, by the shield of Athena, goddess of Wisdom—must nevertheless here reflect on these monsters