Anxiety Part One

Within each of us, anxiety exists. It lurks in the chaotic caverns of our minds, coiled in anticipation of the instant in which it will be free to strike - possibly, at the very core of our Being.

Its presence is ominously felt - constantly threatening each individual with varying degrees of uncertainty. Many of us flee from station to station in life in the attempt to avoid being in the presence of this phantom from within.

During the last 50 years, or so, the issue of anxiety has undergone a significant amount of transformation. What once was considered to be little more than a fringe nuisance that entered our lives only occasionally, has, now, become, so"mething of a central problem in the lives of many people.

"This emergence of anxiety from an implicit to an explicit problem in our society, this change from anxiety as a matter of ‘mood’ to a recognition that it is an urgent issue which we must at all costs try to define and clarify are ... the significant phenomena at the moment."¹

Freud was not he first to investigate the 'problem of 'anxiety', but he was among the first to give a psychological, rather than philosophical, explanation of the conditions in which anxiety became manifest. He attempted to delineate the fundamental conditions and processes through which anxiety was generated.

Many of Freud's views changed with time, and his thoughts on anxiety did not prove to be an exception to this general rule. At one time, for example, he agreed with Rank on the fundamental importance of the birth trauma.

During this period of his theoretical life, Freud felt that any accurate description of anxiety must place a considerable amount of emphasis upon the role which the birth trauma played in the life of each individual. Later, however, he reconsidered this position and decided that the trauma of birth was not a crucial factor in the etiology of anxiety - rather, the former was only a specific. example of a more generic principle.

While criticizing Rank's thesis, Freud said:

"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. . . . . A certain predisposition to anxiety on the part of the infant is indubitable. It is not at its maximum immediately 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..." ²

Thus, Freud by-passed the birth-trauma and looked elsewhere for what he considered to be the fundamental, prototypic psychic context in which anxiety was rooted.

While investigating the emotional contours of childhood’s inner life, however, Freud came across three types of experience which proved to be of special value to him in his attempts to define anxiety. These three kinds of experience were: a) being left in the dark; b) being left alone, and c) expecting to see, say, the mother's face and seeing, instead, the face of a stranger. Freud believed that he tentative conclusions to be drawn from each of these instances all pointed in the same general direction.

At birth, and for a considerable period of time after birth, the individual is completely helpless.' The 'mothering-one' must gratify the majority of the infant's needs, and, thus, the infant is, in virtually every sense, functionally dependent upon the mothering-one.

If anything were to endanger the vital mother-infant relationship, the infant is left without any line of support. Therefore, according to Freud, the most basic fear of the infant child is one of not having one’s wishes gratified.

Since the mothering-one is associated with past experiences of gratification (mnemic images of perceptual identity), there is a displacement of felt-danger from the fear of not being gratified to the fear of loss of the one who provides the desired satisfaction; i.e., the mothering-one. In earlier stages of development, ungratified needs, and the increase in felt tension which ensued from such unrequited wishes, represented a danger, but a time comes when the absence of the mothering-one occasions this same feeling of danger.

Under these circumstances, anxiety signifies the child's recognition (not necessarily conscious) of his or her own helplessness. It constitutes an understanding, on however primitive a level, about one’s biological and psychological inability to cope with the prevailing set of circumstances. Freud summarizes this situation in the following way:

"The memory picture of the person longed for is certainly cathected in very intense degree, probably at first in hallucinatory fashion. But this is without result and now it appears as if this longing were transformed into anxiety. It decidedly seems as if this anxiety were an expression of helplessness, as if the still very undeveloped creature did not know what else to do with his longing."³

Freud extends this 'loss of provider' theme to Rank's birth trauma and notes how both situations share a common factor; namely, a detachment from the one who gratifies needs. In other words, the intrauterine existence of the foetus can be considered as a biologically prior stage in the continuum which began at conception and extended into the individual's post-birth existence.

The main characteristic of this continuum is dependence upon the mother. The biological foetal dependency during intrauterine life is replaced by the individual's dependency upon the psychic mother-object after birth.

This fundamental fear of object-loss represented the ground upon which all other 'anxiety-veiled' fears were constructed. For Freud, whenever an individual displayed overt symptoms of anxiety, the individual’s conscious feeling were being shaped by underlying or unconscious fears with respect to threatened or actual. loss of 'need-satisfaction' from a 'significant other' - i.e., someone (or something) on whom the individual is dependent, in some sense of this word, for satisfaction of one's needs.

For Freud, the problem, now, is to understand why the infant should have reason to fear the possibility of object-loss at, all. There appears to be no a prior reason why an infant will assume that the present circumstances (whatever it may entail) will, necessarily, be characteristic of the universe in general.

For example, if there is such a concept as an 'average' infancy (one in which most needs are satisfied, yet, still marked or colored by a number of painful instances of ungratified need or instances in which needs are not immediately satisfied), there is no obvious reason why an infant should suspect that the mother will leave and not return. In fact, the child's experience should point in just the opposite direction.

Presumably, the ‘conclusions’ to be drawn from an ‘average’ infancy of the foregoing sort is that, usually, most needs are satisfied and, sooner or later, there is a reunion with the mother-one who may have been absent. In short, the 'average' period of infancy and early childhood seemingly should be inclined in the direction of a basic, underlying optimism concerning the satisfaction of needs and the presence of the mothering-one. Naturally, the degree of this optimism varies from individual to individual.

Obviously, if one considered instances in which an infant’s needs were irregularly - and, then, only partially - gratified, the infant's basic outlook might be quite different. Under these circumstances, however, although the individual still is totally helpless and dependent, there may be some reason to suspect that the infant’s relationship to the mothering-one might not be as intense as the so-called 'average' infant's attachment might be.

For example:

"Bowlby and his colleagues believe that some degree of separation anxiety during the second year indicates a close mother-child relation, for the child's anxiety signifies that he values the mother presence and sees her as a nurturant person. The child who never displays such anxiety may have . . . never experienced a continuous loving relationship or, more frequently, the relationship he has had has been disrupted so severely that he has not only reached but remained in a phase of detachment."⁴

In any event, the question remains the same. Assuming there is no a priori evidence to indicate that, in the future, the mother will act differently (e.g., to leave) than she has in the past (e.g., generally satisfying the infant's needs), what prompts the infant to anticipate object-loss?

Freud believes such fears emerge because of the infant's awareness of the presence within him or her of certain unacceptable thoughts, wishes, desires, etc.. The judgement of 'unacceptability' is a function of what the infant perceives to be acceptable and unacceptable with respect to the parents.

For example, the infant believes that if certain wishes become known to the significant other, the significant other 'might’ (there are other possibilities) withdraw invested energy which had previously been directed toward the satisfaction of the infant’s needs. The infant experiences this as a 'loss of love', and Freud maintains that such a withdrawal would be quite frightening to the infant.

According to Freud, instead of consciously acknowledging the libidinal demands that are emerging from the depths of the id, the infant's ego is often forced to inhibit the psychic advancement of such demands for consciousness attention. Anxiety, under such circumstances, represents a danger signal - a helplessness which activates repression. In this regard, Freud states:

"Anxiety is an affective state which can, of course, be experienced only by the ego. The id cannot be afraid, as the ego can; it is not n organization, and cannot estimate situations of danger. On the contrary it is of extremely frequent occurrence that processes are initiated or executed in the id which give the ego occasion to develop anxiety."⁵

There is another direction from which one might approach the exploration of a child's psychic condition. In contrast to the foregoing, however, the child’s emotional state is only indirectly concerned with any eventual loss of love from the mothering-one.

Nonetheless, the conscious concerns of the child still are focused upon a recognized danger to the child's relationship with his mother. The fear was that of being castrated. Adopting the idea from his associate and friend, Ferenczi, Freud described the nature of this fear as follows:

"The high narcissistic value attached to the penis may be referable to the fact that the possession of this organ contains a. guarantee of union 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 this has again the significant (as in the case of birth) of being delivered over helpless to the unpleasurable tension arising from the non-gratification of a need."⁶

Later, Freud extended this theme of punishment and contended that the specific fear of castration eventually underwent a transition to a more indefinite dread of one's super-ego. This is the conscience which one incorporates from the parental figures who, originally, 'threatened' castration, or, more correctly, from the parental figures who the child believed (correctly or not), threatened castration.

Aside from the fact that none of the foregoing adequately deals with the etiology of fear and anxiety in women (and Freud’s hypothesis of the Electra complex, in relation to woman, is far less compelling than is his idea of the Oedipus complex in the case of men - and the latter is not without its critics), the following points need to be emphasized. Although one may be able to trace the origins of diffuse anxiety back to a specific situation of childhood fear - and there is a range of possible candidates - for Freud, the factor most characteristic of any fear concerned some form of separation from the one who is most closely associated with gratification of the infant's needs. More-over, as Stein indicates:

"This particular situation was so painful that its memory had to be ejected from consciousness ('repressed'); the concrete fear was transformed into diffuse anxiety Thus, for Freudian psychology, anxiety is fear which has lost its object."⁷

But regardless of whether one is discussing fear, or its conscious precipitate, anxiety, one is, necessarily, deeply rooted in the infant's or child's sense of basic helplessness and dependency on others.

This brings one to an interesting theoretical juncture. Although one might agree with Freud that fear of castration is so painful that the memory of it must be repressed, one might not as readily agree to the proposition that other kinds of fear also must involve repression.

Helplessness, for instance, and the subsequent dependency which it fosters are accepted existential facts. The infant who knows little else, knows⁸ what it means to be helpless and dependent.

In a manner of speaking, factors such as helplessness or dependency are too prominent and blatant to be ejected from consciousness. For the infant or child, such themes represent the core around which one begins to slowly build one’s mental map of the world. They are the two of the most outstanding characteristics of Being.

Moreover, repression, as a defensive mechanism, seems to be accurately descriptive only of those instances which involve unacceptable (either to the child or with respect to the child's understanding of parental taboos) thoughts, wishes, desires, drives, etc. - in other words, those ideas which, if acted upon, might threaten the infant with some form of separation from the mothering-one or a permanent basis.

Helplessness and dependency, per se, do not represent such a threat.⁹ Rather, they signify the need for care from the mothering-one.

In non-Freudian terms, helplessness and dependency give expression to the child’s felt need for loving, tender care. Consequently, although the child's sense of helplessness and dependency may be painful, these feelings do not readily, if at all, fit into the type of theoretical framework Freud has established for tying together repression and anxiety.

If one accepts the foregoing contention, one can begin to develop a different approach to phenomena such as 'separation-anxiety'. More specifically, if anxiety is described as that conscious, affective precipitate of painful thoughts which have been repressed, then, the term separation-anxiety' seems to be a misnomer.

The reasons for making such a claim are easily accessible. For example, by the time 'separation-anxiety' appears as a general phenomena (between 12-18 months), the infant, according to Piaget's studies on the child's construction of the world¹⁰, already has begun to understand that objects possess a permanency, even outside of visual presence.

Although the mother represents a special value, she is still an object of sorts - albeit, an human object. When the mother leaves, therefore, it is quite reasonable to assume that the child perceives her as a valuable, permanent object for whose return he longs.

Furthermore, there does not seem to be any theoretical justification for assuming that the child is not in some way cognizant of the mother's absence, as well as, her or his feelings of helplessness in the absence of the mothering-one. The various studies on separation all tend to support this conclusion.

Thus, after giving a summary account of much of the work that has been done in this area, Mussen, Conger and Kagen stipulate the following:

"One . . . source of anxiety in the young child, which seems wholly dependent upon learning, involves an expectation of separation from sources of security and nurturance. . . . If he anticipates that he has lost, or will lose, people or situations that perform `these functions he may become anxious."¹¹

For these researchers, the term 'separation-anxiety' does not give expression to the child's 'conscious, affective preoccupation of painful thoughts which exist in conjunction with repressed material. On the contrary, the presence of anxiety is a startling remainder of the child’s sense of helplessness.

For the sake of simplicity, the Freudian overtones completely disappear from the term 'separation-anxiety' ; this ternm no longer accurately represent the child's 'conscious, of fective precipitate of painful thoughts which have been repressed'. On the contrary it represents a startling remainder of his helplessness.

Viewed from another perspective, however, there is an element of helplessness - which one might refer to as 'directionlessness' - that comes very close to a distinction Freud made in a context somewhat detached from the issue of anxiety¹². In Beyond The Pleasure-Principle, Freud differentiated among ‘fright’, ‘fear’, and ‘apprehension’ in terms of their, respective, relationships to perceived danger.

"Apprehension (Angst) denotes a certain condition as of expectation of danger and preparation for it, even though it be an unknown one; fear (Furcht) requires a definite object of which one is afraid; fright (Schneck) is the name of the condition to which one is reduced if one encounters a danger without being prepared for it, it lays stress on the element of surprise."¹³

1. Rollo May, "Centrality of the Problem of Anxiety in Our Day", in Identity And Anxiety, ed. by Maurice Stein, Arthur J. Vidich, and David Manning White; New York: The Free Press; copyright: 1963. [Back to Text]

2. Sigmund Freud, The Problem of Anxiety, New York: The Psychoanalytic Quarterly Press and W. W. Norton &.Co., Inc.; copyright: 1936; p. 75.[Back to Text]

3. Sigmund Freud, op. cit., p. 75-6.[Back to Text]

4. Paul Mussen; John Conger; Jerome Kagan, Child Development and Personality; New York: Harper & Row, Inc.; copyright: 1963; p. 213.[Back to Text]

5.Sigmund Freud, op. cit. , p. 80.[Back to Text]

6. Ibid., p. 78.[Back to Text]

7. Paul J. Stern, The Abnormal Perrson and His World; New Jersey: D. Van Nostrand Co., Inc.; copyright: 1964; p. 28.[Back to Text]

8. I am using the term "know" in a very loose sense - applicable to anyone who has suffered through such a painful experience.[Back to Text]

9. Only at a later stage of development might the theme of dependency become subject to repression - for example, when an individual wants to assert his or her independence but discovers that, in truth, one is still dependent, yet, cannot accept such a discovery and its implications for ‘self’.[Back to Text]

10. Roger Brown, Social Psychology; New York: The Free Press; copyright: 1965; pp. 195-245.[Back to Text]

11. Paul Mussen; John Conger; Jerome Kagan, op. cit., p.222.[Back to Text]

12. Although Beyond the Pleasure-Principle does not deal with, anxiety, per se, it does contain the general distinction which Freud made between fear and anxiety (Angst).[Back to Text]