Anxieties and Fluencies

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.