Abstract
As a concept anxiety is notoriously vague: psychologists who investigate the question regularly mention the obscurity with which it is surrounded. Freud himself returned to the question again and again. In 1926, acknowledging the difficulty of finding a criterion for distinguishing false assertions about it from true, he suggested beginning with simple statements, such as ‘anxiety is something that is felt’, or ‘we call it an affective state, although we are also ignorant of what an affect is’.1 During his observations thirty years before he had found anxiety to be accompanied by fairly definite physical sensations, particularly connected with the respiratory organs and with the heart.2 But despite all the discussions that had taken place since then the question of its nature had remained as puzzling as the even more difficult one concerning the origin of neurosis; and the situation has not changed radically since his time.
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3 Anxieties and Fluencies
See Paul McReynolds, ‘Assimilation and Anxiety’, in Emotions and Anxiety: New Concepts, Methods, and Applications edited by M. Zuckerman and C. D. Spielberger (Hillsdale, NJ, 1976) pp. 35–86 and refs.
Ernest Jones, The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud (NY 1953–7) II, 442–3, quoted with further discussion by Zachary Leader, Writer’s Block (1991), p. 33 and n.
Boswell, Life of Dr Johnson edited by G. B. Hill, 1934, revised L. F. Powell (Oxford 1964–71) II, 330–1.
S. Whyte, A Miscellany, containing … remarks on Boswell’s Johnson … (Dublin 1799) p. 49.
E. J. Morley (ed.), Blake, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Lamb, Etc., being Selections from the Remains of Henry Crabb Robinson (Manchester 1922) p. 22
Jacob Boehme, Aurora. That is, the Day-Spring …,translated by J. Sparrow (1656) ch. xi, para 132.
Emerson, ‘The Poet’, Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson general editor A. R. Ferguson (Cambridge, Mass. 1971-) m, 4.
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© 1993 John Beer
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Beer, J. (1993). Anxieties and Fluencies. In: Romantic Influences. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-23118-8_3
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