ABSTRACT
The most salient and controversial issues are those related to psychopathology, especially issues of diagnosis and classification. Competing ideas require further investigation, and controversy is likely to continue until one paradigm or another emerges dominant. A new paradigm emphasizing discontinuity emerged, which proposed that panic disorders and agoraphobia were related to each other, but separate from normal fear, anxiety, and anxiety neurosis. Sigmund Freud’s influential psychoanalytic theories were applied to psychoneurosis. In 1894, he proposed separating anxiety neurosis from neurasthenia. Family and twin studies indicate that anxiety and depression aggregate in the same families, and that the presence of phobic avoidance is often associated with childhood episodes of separation anxiety. All forms of anxiety disorders share some similarities, particularly the symptoms of anxiety, dread, and foreboding. Theories of Thomas Kuhn on the nature of change and progress in science are especially relevant and applicable to changes in this focus of anxiety research.
