Concept
Anxiety
Overview
unpleasant complex combination of emotions that includes fear, apprehension and worry, and is often accompanied by physical sensations such as palpitations, nausea, chest pain and/or shortness of breath
Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).
In the original texts
Passages from public-domain books where Anxiety is discussed.
We may look far and wide without discovering a danger or an occasion which could even be exaggerated to account for it. These spontaneous attacks show therefore that the complex condition which we describe as anxiety can be split up into components. The whole attack can be represented (as a substitute) by a single intensively developed symptom—shuddering, faintness, palpitation of the heart, inability to breathe—and…
Sigmund Freud, Introductory lectures on psycho-analysis
names the idea; a chapter is titled for it; states what it is; opens on it
A large number of so called rheumatics, who are moreover demonstrable as such, really suffer from an anxiety neurosis. Besides this aggravation of the sensation of pain I have observed in a number of cases of anxiety neurosis a tendency towards hallucinations which could not be explained as hysterical. 10. Many of the so called symptoms which accompany or substitute the attack of anxiety also appear in a chronic…
Sigmund Freud, Selected papers on hysteria and other psychoneuroses
names the idea; a chapter is titled for it; states what it is; opens on it
The characteristic disturbances of walking (astasia-abasia with trembling) are protective measures against the repetition of the anxiety, therefore phobias in Freud’s sense. The cases in which these symptoms predominate are called anxiety-hysteria. Those symptoms, on the contrary, which simply express the situation at the moment of the explosion (innervation, position of the body) are conversion-hysterias in the…
Sándor Ferenczi, Psycho-Analysis and the War Neuroses
names the idea; states what it is; opens on it
The varieties of these sensations depend, firstly, on the diversity of the nerves themselves, and, secondly, of the movements that are made in each nerve. We have not, however, as many different senses as there are nerves. We can distinguish but seven principal classes of nerves, of which two belong to the internal, and the other five to the external senses.
René Descartes, Selections from the Principles of Philosophy
states what it is; author linked in the graph
In every asylum we find examples of absolutely unmotived fear, anger, melancholy, or conceit; and others of an equally unmotived apathy which persists in spite of the best of outward reasons why it should give way. In the former cases we must suppose the nervous machinery to be so 'labile' in some one emotional direction that almost every stimulus (however inappropriate) causes it to upset in that way, and to…
William James, Psychology
names the idea
Philosophers who discussed Anxiety
- Epicurus
- Walter Kaufmann (philosopher)
- Mircea Eliade
- René Descartes
- Paul Tillich
- Arthur Schopenhauer
- Georges Chapouthier
Related ideas
- Emotion
- Fear
- Guilt (emotion)
- Psychoanalytic theory
- Human condition
- Suicide
- Authority
- Viktor Frankl
- Personality
- Mental disorder
- Meaning of life
- Nihilism
- Phobia
- Grading in education
- Psychotherapy
- Søren Kierkegaard
- Spirituality
- Social alienation
- Tradition
- Theology
- Existential crisis
- Value theory
- Paul Tillich
- Unconscious mind
Opposing perspectives
Place in the tradition
Part of Absurdism.