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It is agreed by students of anxiety-- Freud, Goldstein, Horney, to mention only three--that anxiety is a diffuse apprehension, and that the central difference between fear and anxiety is that fear is a reaction to a specific danger while anxiety is unspecific, "vague," "objectless." The special characteristics of anxiety are the feelings of uncertainty and helplessness in the face of the danger. The nature of anxiety can be understood when we ask what is threatened in the experience which produces anxiety. The threat is to something in the "core or essence" of the personality. Anxiety is the apprehension cued off by a threat to some value which the individual holds essential to his existence as a personality. The threat may be to physical or psychological life (death, or loss of freedom), or it may be to some other value which the individual identifies with his existence (patriotism, the love of another person, "success," etc.). The occasions of anxiety will vary with different people as widely as the values on which they depend vary, but what will always be true in anxiety is that the threat is to a value held by that particular individual to be essential to his existence and consequently to his security as a personality.

The terms "diffuse" and "vague" do not mean that anxiety is less intense in its painfulness than other affects. Indeed, other things being equal, anxiety is regularly more painful than fear. Nor do these terms refer merely to the generalized, "over-all" psychophysical quality of anxiety. Other emotions, like fear, anger, hostility, also permeate the whole organism. Rather, the diffuse and undifferentiated quality of anxiety refers to the level in the personality on which the threat is experienced. An individual experiences various fears on the basis of a security pattern he has developed; but in anxiety it is this security pattern itself which is threatened. However uncomfortable a fear may be, it is experienced as a threat which can be located spatially and to which an adjustment can, at least in theory, be made. The relation of the organism to a given object is what is important, and if that object can be removed, either by reassurance or appropriate flight, the apprehension disappears. But since anxiety attacks the foundation (core, essence) of the personality, the individual cannot "stand outside" the threat, cannot objectify it, and thereby is powerless to take steps to meet it. In common parlance, he feels caught, or if the anxiety is severe, overwhelmed; he is afraid but uncertain of what he fears. The fact that anxiety is a threat to the essential, rather than to the peripheral, security of the person has led some authors to describe it as a "cosmic" experience.

These considerations aid in understanding why anxiety appears as a subjective, objectless experience. When Kierkegaard emphasizes that anxiety refers to an inner state and Freud holds that in anxiety the object is "ignored," it is not meant (or ought not to be meant) that the danger situation which cues off the anxiety is unimportant. Nor does the term "objectless" refer simply to the fact that the danger causing the anxiety, in the case of neurotic anxiety, has been repressed into unconsciousness. Rather anxiety is objectless because it strikes at that basis of the psychological structure on which the perception of one's self as distinct from the world of objects occurs. Sullivan has remarked that the self-dynamism is developed in order to protect the individual from anxiety; the converse is as true, that mounting anxiety reduces self-awareness. In proportion to the increase in anxiety, the awareness of one's self as a subject related to objects in the external world is confused. Awareness of one's self is simply a correlate of awareness of objects in the external world. It is precisely this differentiation between subjectivity and objectivity which breaks down in proportion to the severity of the anxiety experienced. Hence the expression that anxiety "attacks from the rear," or from all sides at once. In anxiety the individual is proportionately less able to see himself in relation to stimuli and hence less able to make adequate evaluation of the stimuli. In various languages the usual expressions, accurately enough, are "One has a fear" but "One is anxious." . . .

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