Anxiety is when a person experiences a subjective sense of a threat to existence. This is not necessarily a threat to life. Anything that a person considers valuable may be under threat (real or imaginary): the life of relatives, a favorite business, an important thing.
There are two approaches to understanding the phenomenon of anxiety - classical and modern. The classical approach comes from the work of Freud. Here, anxiety is understood as the fear that you have lost your object. We are always afraid of something specific: clowns, flying, losing a new iPhone. But if we take away the object of fear from the psyche and leave only fear, we will experience anxiety.
For our psyche, any incomprehensible situation is a threat.
Perhaps the object of fear was, but disappeared. This can happen through a very early traumatic experience: the child got scared, many years have passed, the situation has been forgotten, and the subjective feeling of anxiety still torments.
Situations are also possible when the object of fear exists right now, but the person is not aware of it. One client made a severe alarm request. She was a constant daily background. During our work, we discovered that it is related to the TOEFL English exam, which will have to be passed in as much as six months. It never occurred to the client that he might be worried about an event before which there is still a lot of time.
The reason also became clear: it depended on the results of the exam that the client's old dream would come true. When the true causes of anxiety are consciously recognized, a person gets options for action. In this case, the client simply doubled the number of English lessons - and the anxiety disappeared almost completely.
Kurt Goldstein showed in his research that even if you find an object of fear, anxiety often does not disappear.
The modern approach comes from the work of Kurt Goldstein. It is called modern only because it is more popular and much broader in describing the phenomenon of anxiety.
Imagine that the human psyche is a gearbox in a car. Program marks are signed with different feelings: envy, shame, joy, fear, anger, guilt, etc. The gearbox can be in several states. The first is a neutral transmission, that is, the psyche is at rest. The second - some kind of gear is on and the car is going. For example, a person is late for a very important meeting, enters the hall, where everyone has been at work for a long time - including the transmission of "shame".
And there is also a third state: the car is accelerating with might and main, but it is in neutral, there is simply no necessary mark on the panel. In this case, the car stalls in place. This state of affairs is what the modern approach calls anxiety. Kurt Goldstein showed in his research that even if you find the object of fear, anxiety often does not disappear. This means that not only fear, but also other feelings can cause anxiety. Moreover, any feeling can cause anxiety if it appears and tends to be expressed, but is not realized.
