ABSTRACT
In ‘Inhibitions, symptoms and anxiety’ (1925), an essay that informs all contemporary psychoanalytic thinking, Freud outlined two ways of viewing anxiety. First, he introduced a new theory, signal anxiety; second, he introduced a developmentally based hierarchical conception of anxiety which has the concept of genital anxiety at its apex. Genitality has become a watershed on the path to psychic maturity; the recognition of the differentiation between maleness and femaleness, the attainment of one’s own relative wholeness vis-à-vis the object and the tolerance for conflict are the rewards of this achievement.
