ABSTRACT
In 1932, the aged father of psychoanalysis wrote his New Introductory Lectures in Psychoanalysis. Too old and infirm to speak in public, he wrote in his conversations with posterity the following encouragement to those of us struggling in the field:
In the development of affect theory (Shapiro and Emde, 1991), anxiety has been clinically and theoretically central, both as an affect and as a signal. An inescapable life experience, anxiety can painfully dominate and impoverish life. Yet as a signal of danger, rooted in our evolved psychobiology, anxiety gains deeply influential and adaptive, real and imagined, and conscious and unconscious meanings throughout our individual experience.
