Fear, Anxiety and Their Meaning for Our Life from Psychodynamic Point of View. Modern Psychoanalytical Approaches to Anxiety Disorders

Anxiety as an affect is experienced on a psychological level and is associated with other affects such as despair, anger, hopelessness and other negative feelings. Moreover, fear is accompanied by physical reactions: increase in heart rate and blood pressure, muscle tension, dizziness, change in voice and facial expression and shock-like paralysis. Fear is therefore a psycho-socio-somatic phenomenon (Ermann 2019). In this sense, fear is (a) a basic feeling of human existence and is attributed to the foreboding of death and the presentiment of the limitedness of human existence (b) also to the abysses of the human soul (the unconscious), which elude immediate access. Fear in certain situations (situational fear) serves to cope with or avoid concrete dangers. Freud (1926) called this signal anxiety (Rudolf and Heningsen 2017). It is an alarm signal and serves to protect against real threats by evoking appropriate reactions (see more below). Fear has shaped in a very deep way the cultures of our world over the millennia. In religion, in philosophy and in art, this fundamental affect has a lasting impact. Psychoanalysis, with its more than 100 years of tradition, has contributed significantly to research into pathological anxiety, as has behavioural therapy. It arises from the psychodynamics of conflicts or crises (see more below).