ABSTRACT
Anxiety is something that everyone has experienced at some time or other. Most nervous people complain of it and describe it as their most terrible burden. Motor innervations, i.e. processes of discharge, play a part in the general phenomenon of anxiety. This chapter picks out three points which characterize states of anxiety: a specific quality of unpleasure, acts of discharge, and perceptions of these acts. The second and third points mark at once a difference between anxiety and such similar conditions as grief and pain. If a small child is spoilt the unfortunate result is that the danger of losing the object which is a protection against situations of helplessness grows to a disproportionate importance compared with every other danger. Anxiety is thus both an expectation of a trauma and a repetition of it in a modified and more manageable form.
