ABSTRACT
This chapter discuses the term disaster anxiety as a loose marker, to make communication a little easier. S. Freud and other psychoanalysts catalogue a host of disaster anxieties: birth anxiety, separation anxiety, abandonment-intrusion anxiety, incest and castration anxiety, annihilation and death anxiety, to name the most famous. Existential psychology subsumes Freudian anxieties under death anxiety, but emphasizes that growth itself is an anxious business. There is free-floating disaster anxiety and free-floating growth anxiety. Religions offer contemplation, meditation, or prayer as antidotes to explosiveness. Religions have always been close to disaster anxiety. Goodness has to work overtime to bind the dread of disaster and violent surges. At times, goodness weakens or breaks down, and fascination with disaster runs amok. The woman started therapy nearly two decades ago, when her first husband killed himself. Therapy helped her feel she had a right to live, to do the best she could for her.
