Freud’s 3 Types of Anxiety

The term anxiety comes from the Latin anxietas, anxietatis, which means to desire, to worry. In the psychopathological view, anxiety is a perpetual state of alertness and fear.

Anxiety and anxious states

In the psychoanalytic approach, we analyze anxiety as a sensation virtually present in anyone and it works as an important warning sign, that is, all individuals have anxiety to a greater or lesser extent. Becoming pathological if it brings significant damage to the individual’s life.

For example, it is normal when an individual presents a lecture or a seminar to feel anxious a few minutes before starting, however, when anxiety presents damage in life such as: insomnia, tachycardia, chills, sweating, shortness of breath, tremors and etc. We can analyze that a psychotherapeutic (psychologist) and psychiatric (psychiatrist) intervention is necessary.

Freud’s Anxiety

Anxiety is linked to the expectation that the individual has, anxiety for something. The father of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud, classified anxiety into three types: Realistic, Neurotic and Moral🇧🇷 They are: The realistic one would be the fear of something in the external world (for example: punishment from the parents). Moral anxiety would be that which stems from the fear of being punished (I will feel guilty if I do what I want to do). And the neurotic anxiety which is unconscious fear, one does not know what the object is. The latter occurs due to the disturbing and frightening nature, whose consciousness has no structures at the moment, but when analyzed anxiety becomes realistic or moral.

In Freudian theory, the individual’s ego develops a protection against anxiety consisting of unconscious denials or distortion of reality. We call this protection of defense mechanisms, simplifying, we could say that the mechanisms make the individual have some abnormalities to preserve his ego.

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The most common disorders associated with anxiety described in the International Classification of Diseases (ICD-10) that I see in my office are:

Panic disorder, Agoraphobia (fear of crowded places because of thinking you can’t leave), Social phobia (fear of humiliation in a social context, feeling exposed to the judgment and evaluation of others), Specific phobias (simple phobias: fear of objects or situations). Generalized Anxiety Disorder (GAD) (Without specific situation), Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD) (obsessive ideas or compulsive behaviors).

Each case is treated differently, as it refers to a different type of origin of anxiety, so there is no ready recipe to cure it.

See also our Course Cognitive Psychology of Anxiety