ABSTRACT
When one first reads “Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety” (1926a), one notices that it seems to wander over various seemingly unrelated concepts and thoughts. On rereading and closer study, however, one finds a remarkable inner consistency in the work. In this essay Freud took the further significant step of freeing himself from the previous, more mechanistic concept that anxiety is a transformation of libido. At the end of chapter 4, he was able to pose the problem of anxiety in a new way, though still with the acknowledgment that more work would be needed to solve the problem.
