Discussion

Dr. Hurvich has focused our attention upon anxiety as viewed by Charles Brenner and Max Schur in papers published in 1953. As a clinical event, anxiety, the way it is viewed and worked with in the analytic situation, has always occupied a role of central importance. After rereading these papers, and reading Dr. Hurvich's penetrating, lucid, and scholarly presentation, the special role anxiety continues to play in all psychotherapeutic encounters is amply affirmed.

As Dr. Hurvich has pointed out that the two papers are very different in their objectives. Brenner is trying to trim any excess that has a questionable theoretical justification so what remains of value to him is anxiety reduced to its role of a signal affect which brings about the active mobilization of defence. Schur is attempting to include anxiety in its many forms, holding onto Freud's earlier, pre-1926 views, as well as further explicating his 1926 contribution. Schur in his efforts to integrate Freud's two views of anxiety, provides a model that encourages inclusion of what may initially seem to be disparate notions. I remember, as a student listening to Schur as teacher, having the feeling that he always was trying to find a way to include his students' ideas into the substance of the classroom discussion. I have found Schur's papers on anxiety extremely useful for furthering my own understanding of complex clinical issues involving patients' struggles to apprehend, encompass, and define their experiences with this affect. In reflecting on Dr. Hurvich's paper, I realize that Schur's synthetic efforts have had an inviting effect in mobilizing my attempts to appreciate patients' struggles to understand and make sense of their anxieties.

In his 1953 paper and then again in his 1964 paper on symptom and character formation Schur explicitly defines the ego's biphasic response to anxiety as he understood Freud to mean it, “after such a