ABSTRACT
This chapter examines how the patterning of symptoms is an expression of protective and defensive functions that are normally adaptive. It explores how specific patterns of symptoms may be analyzed as specific strategies for dealing with danger. The developmental and psychodynamic perspectives will concentrate on data from childhood and observe the progressions of early patterns into the clinical anxiety appearing later in life. The phenomenon of anxiety represents but one of many separate automatic “strategies” for dealing with threat and thus can be best conceptualized within the total framework of the organism’s responses to danger. The anxiety disorders may be viewed as being on the same continuum as “normal” cognitive-affect-behavioral responses to life situations. Anxiety disorders are characterized by a generalized and intensified sense of vulnerability and a consequent automatic mobilization for self-defense or escape. The blockage of concentration and memory retrieval is an active process found notably in test anxiety and panic disorder.
