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To fear the worst oft cures the worse.
Troilus and Cressida (III, 2)
The history of Freud's antinomy concerning the problem of anxiety is now well known, if not well understood. His early conceptualization divided the reaction of anxiety into two categories.4, 5, 6 He described realistic fear, Realangst—the reaction of an organism to a real, external, apparently dangerous object or situation that mobilized the self-preservative forces of the individual. In this case, there might be an actual adversary, who would place life and limb in jeopardy. The organism is alerted hopefully with the response of fight or flight. As such, Freud felt that this reactive situation concerned the biologist or physiologist more than the psychologist. The latter would become preoccupied with the second type—namely, neurotic anxiety. For here there was no real, apparent, external danger yet the person reacted as though there had been.
Freud theorized that due to excessive repression, a “damming-up” of libido resulted. The pressure of this becoming intolerable, libido was, as Freud put it, discharged in the form of anxiety. It is not difficult to see the source of this conceptualization. In the early cases of hysteria, there were repeated instances of sexual “problems”; furthermore, anxiety states do closely imitate sexual excitement. There are other remarkable instances indicating the congruence of the two phenomena.11, 3 There is also the age-old, ineradicable myth that connects mental illness with “faulty” sexual practices, especially masturbation.