ABSTRACT
Chapter 10 begins with a summary of various views of anxiety from biomedical, cognitive behavioural, psychodynamic and experiential/existential perspectives. The chapter focuses on the author’s work with one client suffering from anxiety. Virginie Boury explores his initial presentation in the light of the three categories of role, somatic, social and psychodramatic, and builds up a role analytic formulation of his way of being in the world. She takes us through the stages of this short-term piece of work, initially working to identify the client’s characteristic role response to various contexts, and then focusing on developing an understanding of the origin of this role response in the early attachment relationship with his mother. Reparation begins in this work with the development of an as yet undeveloped role in the client, that of the initiator, through which he begins to access his joie de vivre.
