ABSTRACT
It has now been 50 years since Freud published his classic work on anxiety, Hemmung, Symptom und Angst (1926). Since that time the topic of anxiety has been a central one, perhaps the central one, in theoretical psychology. If this statement sounds extreme, consider that the concept of anxiety is prominent in such widely disparate fields of psychology as motivation, learning, personality, psychopathology, and clinical practice. Further, anxiety is a key construct in the conceptualizations of theorists as otherwise diverse as Spence, Sullivan, Rogers, and Heidegger. Of what other concept can these statements be made? From a theoretical point of view anxiety exists not only as a fact of psychological life, in the sense of something to be explained, but also as an important integrative construct, widely employed in attempting to tie together and explain a vast range of phenomena.
