ABSTRACT
In this discussion on different types of anxiety and their handling, my approach will be primarily clinical. I want to start by looking at the way in which patients use us-analysts-to help them with anxiety. After all, the reason which brings patients into analysis is fundamentally that they cannot manage anxiety, though it does not, of course, mean that the patient is consciously aware of this. Following Freud’s structural approach and his work, Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety (Freud 1926) we would now give the notion of anxiety a central position in our psychoanalytic understanding and the search to discover it and to understand its nature, a central role in our day-to-day work. I think that technically we listen to what our patients are telling us in the sessions in terms not of ‘what does this mean?’ but ‘what is the main immediate anxiety here?’ And we start from there in the belief that the immediacy of the transference situation will keep us in contact with the most important anxieties and that we can learn about their nature in this way.
