ABSTRACT
In 1905, Freud had already established a direct link between the appearance of anxiety in the child and the painful feeling of the absence of a loved person. He saw this exemplified in phobic neurotics who have a dominant fear of animals, or in obsessional neurotics for whom the fear of punishment from the superego is dominant. In 1924, to account for the separation-anxiety that he observed regularly in his patients, Otto Rank published The Trauma of Birth. Stimulated by Rank's book, Freud published Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety in which he describes the origin of separation-anxiety as we encounter it in clinical practice. One of the aim of psychoanalytic work consists in helping the analysand to elaborate the early separation-anxieties that are characteristic of the pregenital level so that he can gradually cope with elaborating the anxieties linked to the oedipal situation, which are characteristic of the genital level.
