ABSTRACT
In the Psychological Introduction mention has been made of the prominence given to anxiety in psychopathological studies of emotions. We may recall that many hypotheses have been advanced to account for pathological fear on somatic grounds. The argument is as follows: That which distinguishes normal fear from its morbid analogue anxiety is the independence of the latter of any, or of an adequate exciting cause. If the James-Lange theory holds true, the visceral sensations constituting anxiety may be the result of bodily abnormality, not of a psychic stimulus. To supply the physical etiology there are as many anomalies assumed as there are writers. One reads, for instance, of cerebral ischaemia, of special excitability of subcortical, spinal and sympathetic centres, of excitability of vasomotor-secretory-visceral centres, of over-excitability of the vasomotor nerves of the heart, and so on.
