69

VIII

An Analysis of Anxiety

It is time to take stock. What we are seeking, it is ap-
parent, is an insight which shall reveal the nature of
anxiety, an “either-or” which shall distinguish truth
from error in regard to it. But this is difficult of attain-
ment; anxiety is not a simple thing to grasp. Thus far we
have arrived at nothing but contradictions, from among
which no unbiased choice was possible. I now propose to
order it otherwise; we will bring together in unpreju-
diced manner everything that can be said about anxiety,
while renouncing at the same time the expectation of
achieving an immediate synthesis of the problem.

Anxiety, then, is in the first place something felt. We
call it an affective state, although we are equally ignorant
of what an affect is. As a feeling it is of most obviously
unpleasurable character, but this is not by any means a
complete description of its quality; not every state of
unpleasure (Unlust) may we call anxiety. There are other
feelings of unpleasurable character (mental tension, sor-
row, grief), and anxiety must have other characteristics
besides this quality of unpleasure. Shall we ever succeed,
one cannot help asking, in understanding the differences
between these various affects of unpleasure?

Of the feeling of anxiety we can after all learn some-
thing. Its character of unpleasure seems to possess a
particular note of its own–a thing difficult to demon-
strate but none the less probable, nor would it be at all

70

surprising if it were so. But in addition to this special
characteristic so difficult to define, we perceive more defi-
nite physical sensations, which we refer to specific organs,
as accompanying anxiety. Since the physiology of anxiety
does not interest us here, it will suffice to draw attention
to specific examples of these sensations, such as those
referable to the respiratory organs and the heart, which
are the most common and the most definite of them.
They are evidence that motor innervations, efferent proc-
esses, take part in the total phenomenon of anxiety. The
analysis of the anxiety state gives us, then, as its attributes:
(1) a specific unpleasurable quality, (2) efferent or dis-
charge phenomena, and (3) the perception of these.
The second and third of the foregoing supply in them-
selves a distinction from similar affective states, such as
for example grief and sorrow, for of these latter, motor
manifestations do not form an integral part; when such
are present, they are definitely distinguishable as not
constituting essential constituents of the total phenome-
non but consequences of or reactions to the emotional
state in question. Anxiety, therefore, is a specific state
of unpleasure accompanied by motor discharge along
definite pathways. In accordance with our general out-
look, we shall believe that an increase of excitation un-
derlies anxiety, an increase which on the one hand is
responsible for its unpleasurable character and on the
other is relieved through the discharge referred to. This
purely physiological summary will scarcely satisfy us,
however; we are tempted to presume that there is an
historical element present which binds the afferent and
the efferent components of anxiety firmly together; in
other words, that the anxiety state is the reproduction

71

of an experience which contains within itself the requisite
conditions for the increase in stimulation just mentioned,
and for its discharge via given pathways; and it is in virtue
of this, therefore, that the unpleasure element in anxiety
acquires its specific character. As the prototypic experi-
ence of such a sort, we think in the case of the human
being of birth, and on this account we are inclined to see
in the anxiety state a reproduction of the trauma of birth.

In doing so we have claimed nothing which would as-
sign to anxiety an exceptional position among affective
states. For we hold that other affects as well are repro-
ductions of past experiences of a character vital to the
organism, experiences possibly even antedating the indi-
vidual; and we draw a comparison between these, as
universal, specific, congenital hysterical attacks, and the
seizures of the hysterical neurosis, later and individually
acquired, the genesis and significance of which as memory
symbols have been made clearly manifest by analysis. It
would of course be most desirable to be able to demon-
strate the validity of this conception for a number of
other affects, but at the present time we are far from being
in a position to do this.

The tracing back of anxiety to the birth experience
needs justification in the face of certain obvious objec-
tions. Anxiety is a reaction characteristic of probably all
organisms, certainly of all the higher ones, but birth is
experienced only by mammals, and it is open to question
whether for all of these birth has a traumatic significance.
There is, therefore, such a thing as anxiety without a
prototype in birth. But this objection takes us from psy-
chology into biology. Precisely because anxiety, as a re-
action to situations of danger, has a biologically indis-

72

pensable function to fulfill it may have been contrived
in different organisms in different ways. We do not know,
moreover, whether in creatures at a further remove from
man anxiety has the same content, afferently and effer-
ently, as in the human being. All this does not prevent
it from being the case, therefore, that anxiety, in the
human being, takes the birth process as its prototype.

If this is the structure and origin of anxiety, the ques-
tion then arises: What is its function? On what occasions
is it reproduced? The answer seems obvious and in-
escapable. Anxiety arose as a response to a situation of
danger; it will be regularly reproduced thenceforward
whenever such a situation recurs.

But there is more than this to be said. The motor im-
pulses accompanying the original anxiety state had proba-
bly as much meaning and utility as the muscular move-
ments of the initial hysterical attack. If one would
explain the hysterical seizure, one needs only, indeed, to
look for the situation in which the movements in ques-
tion were part of the behavior appropriate to that situa-
tion. Thus, during birth, it is probable that the directing
of nerve impulses to the organs of respiration has made
preparation in advance for the functioning of the lungs,
the acceleration of the heart beat tended to counteract
the accumulation of toxic substances in the blood. This
teleology of function is of course absent from the sub-
sequent reproduction of the anxiety state as affect, just
as it is also lacking in the recurrent hysterical seizure. If
therefore the individual encounters a danger situation
new to him, his responding with the anxiety that con-
stitutes the reaction to an earlier danger, instead of with

73

the reaction appropriate to the present one, may easily
become inexpedient. The suitability of the reaction re-
appears, however, if the danger is perceived as imminent
and forewarning of it given through the outbreak of
anxiety. The anxiety can then be immediately replaced
by more appropriate measures for dealing with the
danger. Two possibilities with regard to the appearance
of anxiety, therefore, may at once be distinguished: the
one, inappropriate and inexpedient, in response to a new
situation of danger; the other, a useful one, as a means
of giving warning of and averting such a situation.

But what is a “danger”? In the act of birth there is an
objective danger to the preservation of life; we know
what that means in the reality sense. But psychologically
it has no meaning at all. The danger attending birth has
still no psychic content. For certainly we cannot imagine
as existing in the fœtus anything which in the least ap-
proaches any sort of knowledge of the possibility of death
as an outcome. The fœtus can be aware of nothing be-
yond a gross disturbance in the economy of its narcissistic
libido. Large amounts of excitation press upon it, giving
rise to novel sensations of displeasure; numerous organs
enforce increased cathexes in their behalf, as it were a
prelude to the object-
cathexis soon to be initiated; what
is there in all this that can be regarded as bearing the
stamp of a “danger situation”?

Unfortunately, we know far too little of the mental
make-
up of the newborn to be able to answer such a
question directly. I cannot even vouch for the usefulness
of the description I have just given. It is easy to say that
the newborn infant will repeat the affect of anxiety in

74

every situation which reminds it of the birth situation.
The real question, however, is by what and of what it is
reminded.

There is left us hardly any other course to pursue than
to study the occasions on which the infant or the slightly
older child gives evidence of a readiness to develop anx-
iety. In his book, The Trauma of Birth, Rank has made
a very vigorous attempt to demonstrate a relationship
between the earliest phobias of the child and the impres-
sion which the birth experience has made upon it, but
I cannot consider the attempt a very happy one. Two
criticisms can be brought against it, of which the first is
that it makes the assumption that in the process of birth
the child has been the recipient of sense impressions,
particularly visual ones, the renewal of which may evoke
the memory of the birth trauma and therewith a reaction
of anxiety. This assumption is entirely unproved and
very improbable; it is not credible that the child has pre-
served any other than tactile and general sensations from
the act of birth. If, then, the child later shows a fear of
small animals which disappear into holes or come out of
them, Rank explains this reaction as its perception of
an analogy which, however, would not strike the child.
Secondly, in appraising these later anxiety situations
Rank holds responsible the memory either of the happy
existence within the uterus or of its traumatic disturb-
ance, entirely according to the necessities of the case,
thus throwing the door wide open to arbitrariness of in-
terpretation. Individual instances of this childhood anx-
iety flatly contradict the Rankian principle. If the child
is brought into darkness and solitude, we should expect
that it would welcome this restoration of the intrauterine

75

situation; and if the fact that in precisely these circum-
stances the child reacts with anxiety is ascribed to the
memory of the interruption of that happy state through
birth, one may be pardoned for failing to appreciate the
appositeness of such reasoning.

I am forced to the conclusion that the earliest phobias
of childhood do not permit of being directly traced to
the impression made upon the child by the act of birth,
and that they have thus far, in fact, defied all explanation.
A certain predisposition to anxiety on the part of the
infant is indubitable. It is not at its maximum immedi-
ately after birth, to diminish gradually thereafter, but
first makes its appearance later on with the progress of
psychic development, and persists over a certain period
of childhood. When early phobias of this sort continue
beyond such a period, they give rise to the suspicion of
a neurotic disturbance, although their relationship to
the definite neuroses of later childhood is in no wise
clear.

Only a few instances of the expression of anxiety in
infancy are intelligible to us; we shall have to keep to
these. Thus, the three situations of being left alone, being
in the dark, and finding a strange person in place of the
one in whom the child has confidence (the mother), are
all reducible to a single situation, that of feeling the loss
of the loved (longed for) person. From this point forwards
the way is clear to an understanding of anxiety and to
the reconciling of the contradictions which seem to be
connected with it.

The memory picture of the person longed for is cer-
tainly cathected in very intense degree, probably at first
in hallucinatory fashion. But this is without result, and

76

now it appears as if this longing were transformed into
anxiety. It decidedly seems as if this anxiety were an ex-
pression of helplessness, as if the still very undeveloped
creature did not know what else to do with his longing.
Anxiety thus seems to be a reaction to the perception of
the absence of the object, and there at once spring to
mind the analogies that castration anxiety has also separa-
tion from a highly valued object as its content and that
the most basic anxiety of all, the “primal anxiety” of
birth, arises in connection with separation from the
mother.

The next consideration takes us beyond this emphasis
upon loss of the object. If the infant longs for the sight of
the mother, it does so, surely, only because it already
knows from experience that she gratifies all its needs with
out delay. The situation which the infant appraises as
“danger,” and against which it desires reassurance, is
therefore one of not being gratified, of an increase of
tension arising from non-gratification of its needs—a situ-
ation against which it is powerless. I believe that from
this standpoint everything falls into place; the situation
of privation, in which stimuli reach an unpleasurable
magnitude and intensity without an ability to cope with
them psychically and thus provide for their discharge,
must represent to the infant a situation analogous to the
birth experience, a repetition of the danger situation;
what the two situations have in common is the economic
disturbance brought about by an increase in stimuli de-
manding some disposition made of them, this common
factor hence being the very essence of the “danger.” In
both cases the reaction of anxiety appears, a reaction
which still in the infant proves to the purpose since the

77

discharge of the anxiety via the respiratory and vocal
musculature now calls the mother to the infant’s side,
just as earlier it aroused respiratory activity to get rid of
internal stimuli. More than this sign of danger the child
does not need to have preserved from birth.

Along with the experiencing of the fact that an external
and perceptible object may put an end to the danger
situation reminiscent of birth, there takes place a dis-
placement of the content of the danger from the economic
situation to that which occasions it, namely, object loss.

The perception of the absence of the mother now be-
comes the danger at the appearance of which the infant
gives the signal of anxiety, even before the economic situ-
ation which is feared has arisen. This change represents
a first great step in advance in the economy of self-
preservation, and includes at the same time the transition
from the automatically unpurposed creation de novo of
anxiety to its purposeful reproduction as a signal of
danger.

In both respects, alike as an automatic phenomenon
and as a safety signal, anxiety proves to be a product of
the psychic helplessness of the infant which is the obvious
counterpart of its biological helplessness. The striking
coincidence that both birth anxiety and the anxiety of the
infant alike claim separation from the mother as their
prerequisite needs no psychological interpretation; it is
simply enough explicable biologically by the fact that
the mother, who in the beginning had satisfied all the
needs of the fœtus through her body mechanisms, con-
tinues after birth as well to exercise in some measure this
same function, although by other means. Intrauterine
life and early infancy form a continuum to a far greater

78

extent than the striking cæsura of the act of birth would
lead us to believe. The psychic mother object replaces
for the child the biological fœtal situation. Hence we
should not forget that during intrauterine life the mother
was not an object, and that there were no objects at all
at that period.
It is easy to see that in this continuum there is no room
for an abreacting of the birth trauma, and that any other
function of anxiety than that of a signal for avoiding
a situation of danger is not discoverable. Object loss as
the precondition of anxiety now has some further im-
plications. For the next transformation of anxiety, the
castration anxiety which makes its appearance in the
phallic phase, is a separation anxiety also, and is similarly
conditioned. The danger here is separation from the
genital. A seemingly entirely legitimate line of thought
of Ferenczi’s enables us to recognize clearly here the
point of connection with the earlier content of the danger
situation. The high narcissistic value attaching to the
penis may be referable to the fact that the possession of
this organ contains a guaranty of reunion with the mother
(or mother substitute) in the act of coitus. Deprivation
of this member is tantamount to a second separation from
the mother, and thus has again the significance (as in the
case of birth) of being delivered over helpless to the un-
pleasurable tension arising from the non-gratification of
a need. This need, of which the increase is feared, is now,
however, a specialized one; a need of the genital libido,
and no longer an undifferentiated one, as in infancy. I
would add here that the fantasy of returning to the uterus
is the substitute for coitus which we find in impotent
men (those inhibited by the threat of castration). In the

79

spirit of Ferenezi’s formulation one may say that the in-
dividual who wished to have his genital organ act as a
proxy in his return to the uterus in fact regressively sub-
stitutes for this organ his whole body.

The various steps in the development of the child, its
increased independence, the sharper differentiation of
its mental apparatus into various agencies, the appear-
ance of its new needs–all these cannot remain without
their effect upon the content of the danger situation. We
have followed the change in the content of the latter
from loss of the maternal object to castration, and we
now see the next step therein as caused by the power of
the superego. With the impersonalization of the parental
authority at whose hands castration was feared, the danger
becomes more indefinite. Fear of castration develops into
dread of conscience, into social anxiety. It is now no
longer easy to state what it is that there is fear of. The
formula, “separation, exclusion from the horde,” applies
only to that more lately developed portion of the super-
ego which was patterned after social models, not to the
nucleus thereof which corresponds to the introjected
parental authority. Expressed in more general terms, it is
the anger, the punishment, of the superego, the loss of
its love, which the ego apprehends as a danger and to
which it responds with the signal of anxiety. The final
transformation undergone by this fear of the superego
has appeared to me to consist of death- (life-) anxiety, fear
felt for the projection of the superego upon the powers
of destiny.

Formerly I attached a certain value to the proposition
that the cathexis withdrawn in repression finds employ-
ment as a discharge in the form of anxiety. This seems to

80

me today of very little interest. The difference consists
in the fact that formerly I believed anxiety to originate
in every instance automatically through an economic
process, whereas the present conception of anxiety as a
signal intended by the ego for the purpose of influenc-
ing the pleasure-pain mechanism renders us independent
of this economic restriction. It does not contradict this
supposition, of course, that for the arousing of affect the
ego employs precisely the energy set free by the with-
drawal of cathexis in repression, but it has become unim-
portant to distinguish with which moiety of energy this
is accomplished.

Another assertion I once made now demands reëxami-
nation in the light of our new conception. I refer to the
statement that the ego is the real seat of anxiety; I think
that this statement will prove to be correct. That is to
say, we have no reason to ascribe any expression of anxiety
to the superego. But when it is a matter of an “anxiety
of the id,” one does not have so much to contradict this
as to amend an infelicitous expression. Anxiety is an af-
fective state which can of course be experienced only by
the ego. The id cannot be afraid, as the ego can; it is
not an organization, and cannot estimate situations of
danger. On the contrary, it is of extremely frequent oc-
currence that processes are initiated or executed in the
id which give the ego occasion to develop anxiety; as a
matter of fact, the repressions which are probably the
earliest are motivated, like the majority of all later ones,
by such fear on the part of the ego of this or that process
in the id. We have good grounds here for once again
distinguishing the two cases: that in which something
happens in the id which activates one of the danger situa-

81

tions to which the ego is sensitive, causing the latter to
give the anxiety signal for inhibition; and that in which
there develops in the id a situation analogous to the birth
trauma, which automatically brings about a reaction of
anxiety. The two cases are brought into closer approxima-
tion to each other if it is emphasized that the second cor-
responds to the initial and original situation of danger,
whereas the first corresponds to one of the anxiety-oc-
casioning situations subsequently derived from it. Or, to
relate the matter to actually existing disorders: the sec-
ond case is that which is operative in the ætiology of the
“actual” neuroses, the first is characteristic of the psy-
choneuroses.

We now see that we need not dismiss earlier formula-
tions as without value but have merely to bring them into
line with our newer understanding. It is undeniable that
in abstinence, in perverted interference with the normal
discharge of sexual excitation, or in the diverting of the
latter from its psychic elaboration, anxiety arises directly
out of libido; that is to say, there is brought about that
state of helplessness of the ego in the face of excessive
tension arising from ungratified need which results, as
in birth, in the development of anxiety, so that there is
again a possibility, which although obvious is of no great
consequence, that it is precisely the excess of unutilized
libido that finds its discharge in the form of anxiety. We
know that psychoneuroses develop with particular readi-
ness on the basis of these “actual” neuroses; and this may
mean that the ego makes attempts to minimize and to fix
by means of symptoms the anxiety which it has learned
to hold temporarily in suspension. Probably analysis of
the traumatic war neuroses (although this term includes

82

a wide variety of disorders, certainly) would have shown
that a certain proportion of them share the characteristics
of “actual” neuroses.

When we represented the various danger situations as
developing out of the original prototype of birth, we were
far from maintaining that every later anxiety-
occasioning situation simply renders inoperative those which were
earlier effective in giving rise to anxiety. The progressive
development of the ego contributes, it is true, to depriv-
ing of value and relegating to unimportance the earlier
danger situation, so that it may be said that to a given
period of development is assigned the anxiety-
occasioning situation which is, so to speak, appropriate to it. Psychic
helplessness is the danger which is consonant with the
period of immaturity of the ego, as object loss is the
danger appertaining to the state of dependence of early
childhood, the danger of castration to the phallic phase,
and dread of the superego to the latency period. And yet
all these danger situations and anxiety determinants may
persist alongside one another and cause the ego to react
with anxiety at a later period also than the appropriate
one; or several of them may become operative simul-
taneously. Possibly there also exists a close relationship
between the danger situation which is effective in the
given case and the form of the neurosis which develops in
consequence.¹

¹Since the differentiation between the ego and the id was made, our
interest in the problems of repression has necessarily undergone a re-
vival. Until then we were satisfied to dwell upon those of its elements
which are referable to the ego—namely, the keeping of the repressed
material out of consciousness and its withholding from motor discharge,
and the creating of substitute (symptom) formations; of the repressed
instinctual impulse itself we assumed that it persisted unchanged for

83

When in an earlier chapter of this inquiry we en-
countered the significance of the danger of castration in
more than one neurotic disorder, we warned ourselves
against overestimating this factor, since it assuredly could
not be the crucial one in the female sex, the sex certainly
more predisposed to neurosis. We see now that we are
in no danger of taking castration anxiety to be the sole
motive force behind the defense processes resulting in
neurosis. I have explained elsewhere how the develop-
ment of the little girl is guided to tender object-cathexis
through the castration complex. It is precisely in the
female that object loss seems to remain the most effective
situation of danger. As to that which gives rise to her

an indefinite period in the unconscious. Now our interest shifts to
the fate of the repressed, and we begin to feel that this persistence,
unchanged and unchanging, is not a matter of course, is perhaps not
even the rule. The original impulse has in any case been inhibited and
deflected from its aim. But has its root persisted in the unconscious,
having proved resistant to the modifying and depreciatory influence
of life? Do there therefore still exist the old desires, of the earlier exist-
ence of which analysis informs us? The answer appears obvious and
certain: The old repressed desires must still persist in the unconscious,
since we find their lineal descendants, the symptoms, still active. But
this answer is inadequate; it does not make it possible to distinguish
between the two possibilities that, on the one hand, the old desire now
operates only through its descendants, to which it has transferred all
its cathectic energy, or, on the other hand, that the desire itself per-
sists in addition. If it was its destiny to be expended in the cathexis
of its descendants, there remains the third possibility that in the course-
of the neurosis the wish was reactivated through regression, so out of
accord with the present may it be. One need not regard these considera-
tions as otiose; there is much in the phenomena of both the morbid
and the normal life of the psyche which seems to demand the raising
of such questions. In my study of the breakdown of the œdipus com-
plex I became mindful of the distinction between the mere repression
and the true disappearance of an old desire or impulse.

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anxiety, we may introduce the slight modification that
it is no longer a matter of feeling the absence, or of the
loss in reality, of the object, but rather of the loss of the
object’s love. Since it is certainly true that hysteria has a
greater affinity with femininity, just as compulsion neu-
rosis has with masculinity, the idea suggests itself that, as
a determinant of anxiety, loss of love plays a rôle in
hysteria similar to that of the threat of castration in the
phobias and of dread of the superego in compulsion neu-
rosis.