The third form of neurotic anxiety confronts us with a mystery; We completely lose sight of the link between fear and imminent danger. This fear occurs in hysteria, for example, as a side effect of hysterical symptoms or in certain conditions of excitement, where we would expect an emotional manifestation, but even less fear or without reference to a known circumstance that is incomprehensible to us and the patient. Neither far nor near, we cannot discover a danger or cause that could have been exaggerated to such a meaning. Now we come to neurotic fear, what are its manifestations and conditions? There is much to describe. First of all, we find a general state of fear, a state of floating fear, so to speak, ready to engage in any appropriate idea, to influence judgment, to raise expectations, in fact to seize every opportunity to make oneself felt. We call this state “fear of waiting” or “anxious waiting.” People who suffer from this kind of fear always prophesy the most terrible of all possibilities, interpret every coincidence as a bad omen, and attribute a terrible meaning to every uncertainty. Many people who cannot be called sick show this tendency to anticipate disasters. We accuse them of being too anxious or pessimistic. A striking amount of anxiety waiting is characteristic of a nervous disorder that I have called “anxiety neurosis,” which I group together with real neuroses.

Two questions arise: can we attribute neurotic fear, in which danger plays such a weak or no role, to real fear, which is always a reaction to danger? And what can we understand as the basis of neurotic anxiety? For now, we want to hold on to our expectations: where there is fear, there must be a reason for it. Have no basis; groundless; vain; idle; as unfounded expectations. A second form of anxiety, as opposed to the one we have just described, is more psychologically limited and associated with certain objects or situations. It is the fear of multiple and often very particular phobias: darkness, open air, open squares, cats, spiders, caterpillars, snakes, mice, thunderstorms, sharp peaks, blood, enclosed spaces, crowds, loneliness, crossing a bridge, traveling by land and water, etc. Most of us, for example, experience a sense of revulsion in the presence of a snake. It can be said that snake phobia is common to all people, and Charles Darwin described very impressively how he could not control his fear of a snake pointing at him, even though he knew he was separated from it by thick glass. You can talk about anxiety for a long time without even touching nervousness. We think we know the early impression that the emotion of fear is repeated. We think that it is the birth itself that combines this complex of painful feelings, a discharge of impulses, bodily sensations, which has become the prototype of the effect of mortal danger and then repeats itself in us as a state of fear.

The huge increase in irritability due to the interruption of blood circulation (internal breathing) was the cause of the experience of anxiety at that time; So the first fear was toxic. The name fear – angustative – pulling, underlines the characteristic tightening of breathing, which at that time was the consequence of a real situation and is now repeated almost regularly in emotion. We will also realize how important it is that this first state of anxiety occurred during the separation from the mother. Of course, we are convinced that the tendency to repeat the first state of fear over countless generations is so deeply rooted in the organism that no individual can escape the emotion of fear; not even the mythical Macduff, who was “cut off from his mother`s womb” and therefore did not experience the birth himself. We do not know the prototype of the state of fear in other mammals, and therefore we do not know the complex of emotions that in them is the equivalent of our fear. You will understand me without further delay if I call this fear a real fear as opposed to neurotic fear. Real fear seems to us quite rational and understandable. We can testify that this is a reaction to the perception of external dangers, that is, expected and anticipated damage. It is related to the flight reflex and can be seen as an expression of the self-preservation instinct. And so opportunities, that is, objects and situations that arouse fear, will depend largely on our knowledge and sense of power over the outside world.

We take it for granted that the savage fears a cannon or a solar eclipse, while the white man who can manipulate the instrument and prophesy the phenomenon does not fear these things. At other times, a higher knowledge spreads fear because it recognizes danger earlier. The savage, for example, will avoid a footprint in the forest that makes no sense to the uneducated, revealing to him the proximity of a predator; The experienced sailor will notice with horror a small cloud announcing a hurricane to come, while it seems insignificant to the passenger. After careful consideration, we must tell ourselves that the judgment of real fear, whether rational or intentional, must be thoroughly revised. Because the only deliberate behavior in the face of imminent danger would be the cold assessment of one`s own strength in relation to the extent of the imminent danger, and then deciding what would herald a happier ending: escaping, defending oneself, or perhaps even attacking. In such a procedure, fear has absolutely no place; Everything that happens would be just as good and better completed without the development of fear. They know that if the fear is too strong, it turns out to be absolutely useless and paralyzes any action, even escape. In general, the reaction to danger consists of a mixture of fear and resistance. The frightened animal is frightened and runs away. But the determining factor in such a case is not fear, but flight. The two forms of fear described, floating fear and fear associated with phobias, are independent of each other.

One is by no means a higher development of the other; Only in exceptional cases, almost accidentally, do they occur at the same time. The strongest state of general anxiety does not have to manifest as phobias; And people whose entire lives are constrained by agoraphobia can be completely freed from pessimistic and expected fear. This remains a third group of phobias, which is completely incomprehensible to us. If a strong adult man is afraid to cross a street or square in his own hometown, if a healthy and well-developed woman becomes almost useless in fear because a cat has brushed the hem of her dress or a mouse rushed into the room – how are we supposed to establish the relationship with the danger that obviously exists under the phobia? With these animal phobias, it cannot be the increase in frequent human antipathies.