ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the problems of carrying out research on anxiety and anxiety disorders in psychoanalysis, and conclude by making some proposals for dealing with the problems. It emphasizes the proposals that are based on the importance for psychoanalysis of conceptual and methodological developments in single-subject research. Psychoanalysis distinguishes anxiety from fear, by locating the source of danger in the intrapersonal realm. Anxiety then, according to psychoanalysis, is always bound up with an ideational content. The activation of a subcortical physiological system or of a behavioral system may or may not occur following anxiety. The experience of anxiety, or the manifestations of physiological arousal in preparation for fight or flight, may themselves come to be linked by primary process operations to unconscious fantasies and interpreted as a particular kind of substitute gratification, or as a particular kind of danger.
