The Meaning of Anxiety

Why did anxiety not emerge as a specific problem until the middle of the nineteenth century? And why was anxiety not dealt with as a problem in the various schools of psychology (excepting psychoanalysis) until the latter 1930’s, despite the fact that during the previous half-century the study of fears had been prominent in psychology?

For Kierkegaard, in contrast, confidence is not the removal of doubt (and anxiety) but rather the attitude that we can move ahead despite doubt and anxiety.

Spinoza’s guidance on how to overcome fear is consistent with the general rational emphasis of the time, in which emotion is not repressed but rather made amenable to reason.

He defines fear in juxtaposition to hope: they are both characteristic of the person in doubt.

he uses “passion” to mean an emotional complex, not as Kierkegaard uses it to mean commitment

Spinoza’s writings are replete with acute psychological insights which are remarkably close to contemporary scientific psychological theories, such as his statement that mental and physical phenomena are two aspects of the same process.

I shall demonstrate in the writings of Spinoza that the confidence that fear could be overcome by reason did serve to a considerable extent to obviate the problem of anxiety.

The suppression of the nonmechanical and “irrational” aspects of experience went hand in hand, both as cause and effect, with the needs of the new industrialism following the Renaissance. What could be calculated and measured had practical utility in the industrial, workaday world, and what was “irrational” did not.

Descartes gave impetus to this development by his sharp distinction between mind and the processes of thought (intension) on one hand and physical nature (extension) on the other.

could arrive at autonomy in his intellectual, social, religious, and emotional life.