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PA RT
I S
,A N Rl EV I EW
modate myself to your terms) in proportion as one conquers the
problems of one's own existence. Now, this is a question of psychic
economy: of removing certain repressions for which we may have
to pay too high a price in the amount of energy needed to maintain
them, but on the other hand preserving others which play a conserv–
ing role in the total economy. In any case, one does not solve the
problem by lofty meditations on death and resoluteness.
II
F: But we have not come to grips with the question of anxiety.
H: We were there all the time: when we talked of "making
things difficult," when we talked of authenticity.
F: I am more than a little puzzled to know what you think
are the sources of anxiety. In your earlier work you speak of anxiety
felt toward death. I recognize that as a source of anxiety, I have
encountered it in my own investigations. (I fail to see, however,
that you have anywhere noticed the opposite fact: the positive long–
ing for death that may appear, consciously or unconsciously, along–
side this anxiety.) But by 1933 you have generalized the whole thing,
and there I am unable to see just what you intend as the source.
H: Exactly; I
have
generalized. I talk there of states
in
which
we are anxious at nothing in. particular. All one can say, if English
would permit it, is: "There is anxiety with me."
F: A peculiar neurotic anxiety: with the impersonalization of
parental authority, the danger becomes more indefinite, the anxiety
becomes more generalized-
H: Wait a minute: isn't it the mark of the real neurotic–
the person who is really sick, whose functioning has broken down in
one way or another-that his anxiety always tends to take on the
most definite shapes? He is afraid of horses, or he is anxious when
he walks in the streets or hears the faint ticking of a clock; and so
on. Perhaps the more neurotic the individual (more clinically neu–
rotic, that is), the more definite become his delusion and its accom–
panying anxiety, and the less capable ho is of that generalized anxiety
that I find to be of the human essence.
F:
If
you looked further, perhaps you might find that there is
a
definite
source of that anxiety too.
H: I have attempted to define it further. Not, however, by its
genesis but by its end: that is, the intellectual condition, the intellec–
tual question, which it precipitates.
