Ideas In Psychoanalysis: Anxiety

'Ideas In Psychoanalysis' is a series of essays which explain psychoanalytical concepts, their relevance to everyday life and their ability to illuminate the nature of human society and culture.

Ricky Emanuel traces how anxiety has been conceived by psychoanalytic thinkers from Freud to the present day. Following Freud's original conceptions, Melanie Klein differentiated two major distinctions in the quality of anxiety: that involving threats to the self, and anxiety involving threats to loved ones.

Since then, Wilfred Bion's ideas about containment of mental pain have come to occupy a central role in current psychoanalytic thinking, and are linked to work arising from attachment theory and neuroscience, placing emotional regulation at the heart of human development.