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IN A PREVIOUS PAPER (1981), I HAVE SUGGESTED THAT ANXiety is the ego's response to its perception of a disturbance to its equilibrium. Anxiety is the alarm which the ego sounds in its attempt to mobilize its defenses and discharge mechanisms to reestablish balance (Freud, 1926). The intensity of anxiety depends on the degree of imbalance. Thus, anxiety can "whisper or roar" and, in extreme cases, swell to an overwhelming crescendo of terror.
Features common to anxiety are: feelings of impending danger, failure, etc., or of threat to life, to security, to sanity, and to control over aggressive and libidinal impulses. Due to these feelings of threatening dangers or loss, anxieties are rarely, if ever, free of depressive features, just as depressions rarely lack anxiety. The deep withdrawal of depressed patients is therefore frequently, if not always, loaded with anxiety. The catatonic stupor of schizophrenics is another illustration.
Balance is always temporary, precarious, and unstable. Once established, it is often jarred, disturbed, and reestablished. In addition to minor shifts of equilibrium, however, there are always changes with greater impact on the ego, and deeper reactions in it. Those minor shifts in mind and body, wavelike and incessant, in their daily course are regulated, within limits, without stormy upheavals. They are for the most part mute and their mental representations are subliminal. There are, however, functional shifts which force a total alteration of equipoise. These shifts via their mental representations are experienced by the ego as consciously disturbing emotions, as "feelings of