ABSTRACT
Confusion has arisen in the literature regarding the question of the fundamental nature of anxiety through writers introducing innumerable consequences and elaborate constructions arising from, or accompanying, anxiety as though they revealed its fundamental nature. If anxiety is the fundamental phenomenon underlying all nervous and mental disturbances, if it is ‘the main problem of neurosis’, the fundamental nature of anxiety itself clearly has priority in its demand for investigation. L. E. Hinsie’s Psychiatric Dictionary gives the origin of ‘anxiety’ as from the Latin anxietas, meaning distressed state. Freud makes a clear distinction between reaction to external danger and reaction to internal danger; the former reaction is sometimes called objective anxiety, and the latter one neurotic anxiety. The degree of anxiety will naturally vary from imperceptible faintness when the ego is in process of successfully coping with reality and removing frustrating obstacles to instinct gratification, to heightening tension when the ego is failing and frustration persisting.
