anxiety

Unpleasant, distressing emotion usually to be distinguished from fear. Fear is aroused by the perception of actual or threatened danger; anxiety arises when the danger is imagined or cannot be identified or clearly perceived. It is a normal response in stressful situations, but is frequently experienced in many mental disorders.

Anxiety is experienced as a feeling of suspense, helplessness, or alternating hope and despair together with excessive alertness and characteristic bodily changes such as tightness in the throat, disturbances in breathing and heartbeat, sweating, and diarrhoea.

In psychiatry, an anxiety state is a type of neurosis in which the anxiety either seems to arise for no reason or else is out of proportion to what may have caused it. ‘Phobic anxiety’ refers to the irrational fear that characterizes phobia.

Sigmund Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis, identified two forms of anxiety: signal anxiety, which alerts the ego to impending threats that might unbalance it, and primary anxiety, which occurs when its equilibrium is upset, as for example in trauma or a nightmare. He maintained that anxiety was the result of unsatisfied libido and repression, and that the most primitive form of anxiety originated in the individual's birth experience.