ABSTRACT
Few terms in psychopathology and clinical psychiatry give rise to more ambiguity of interpretation than the terms “anxiety,” “phobia,” and “panic,” although the symptoms and conditions which these words denote are neither rarities nor phenomena too refractory to clinical analysis. The conceptualization of anxiety as an imminent feature of the human condition was a distinctive theme of that stream in European philosophy that became popularly known as “existentialism” and that transposed into the 20th century some of the principal ideas of Soren Kierkegaard. The lack of good agreement on the delimitation and nature of the anxiety and phobic syndromes in the different schools and traditions of European psychiatry is reflected in uncertainties and divergent views on how to classify anxiety disorders among the other psychiatric syndromes and diseases with which they often appear in association. The credit for the description of anxiety neurosis as a clinical entity and for its separation from the ubiquitous “neurasthenia” belongs to Sigmund Freud.
