Introduction
This is a term invented by Sigmund Freud in order to conceptualize the anxiety located within neurosis, whose manifestations take the form of expectant anxiety or anxious expectation (a feeling of danger and catastrophic thinking), anxiety attack (suffocation, heart palpitations, tachycardia, sweating, vertigo) or phobias (agoraphobia; zoophobia). Unlike realistic anxiety, which can be considered a rational and understandable reaction to the perception of external danger, neurotic anxiety is the result of instinctual drives and unconscious desire, in the sense that as its etiology, for Freud, refers to frustrated sexual practices (actual neuroses) or to an unconscious psychic conflict that affects the ego (psychoneuroses).
From his earliest investigations on nervous disorders, anxiety was considered by Freud (1907) to be the “central and most delicate problem of the theory of neurosis” (p. 200), later classifying it as a nodal point or an enigma, in which all of the most...
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Pizarro Obaid, F. (2018). Neurotic Anxiety. In: Zeigler-Hill, V., Shackelford, T. (eds) Encyclopedia of Personality and Individual Differences. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-28099-8_1401-1
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