Some comments on the nature, diagnosis and prognosis of neurotic anxiety.

Abstract

Anxiety is conceptualized as a specific kind of fear-response or tendency to respond with fear to anticipated situations that are perceived as threats to an individual's self-esteem. The characteristic feature of neurotic anxiety is a tendency to apparent overresponse to such threats, particularly to those posed by novel adjustive situations. But in terms of the essential or predisposing cause of neurotic anxiety, an existing state of catastrophically impaired self-esteem, the response is not disproportionate to the degree of subjectively experienced threat.