The Social Function of Anxiety in a Primitive Society

Abstract

N HIS discussion of anxiety, Freud emphasizes the fact that it essentially an affective reaction to danger.' The relationship of anxiety to danger anticipatory, the affect a signal: feels anxiety lest something occur.2 Anxiety not confined to the human species. Freud states that it is a reaction characteristic of probably all organisms, certainly of all of the higher ones.3 He further suggests that since it has an indispensable biological function, anxiety may have developed differently in different organisms.4 Freud does not elaborate the point, but I think it follows from the biological role he assigns to anxiety that it must be conceived as a function of the particular danger situations that the organism faces. These vary from species to species. What dangerous for one species of animal would not necessarily be equivalent for another species, and danger situations in the human species may differ again from those faced by infrahuman animals. For the human species itself, Freud stresses another variable. Danger situations vary ontogenetically5 and the birth process the prototype of anxiety in man.6 What Freud does not explicitly recognize that the occurrence of anxiety in the human species further complicated by another variable that I shall call cultural. However, his assumption that anxiety reactions in man are based on experience and are in that sense learned,7 leaves the door open for an evaluation of such variables within the framework of psychoanalytic principles. These cultural variables operate through the socialization process that all human beings undergo and result in the definition of situations as dangerous in one society which, in another, may be viewed as less dangerous or not dangerous at all. This means that individuals may manifest anxiety reactions that are appropriate in a particular culture but not in another. Such cultural variables are of importance with respect to two problems: