Chapter Nine—
Pathological Anxiety:
9. Pathological Anxiety: A Crisis of Self-Esteem
The Problem of Anxiety
There is no object of fear more terrifying to man than fear itself—and no fear more terrifying than that for which he
knows no object.
Yet to live with such fear as a haunting constant of their existence is the fate of countless millions of men and
women: it has been the fate of most of the human race. I do not speak of that fear which few men today can escape:
the fear of dictatorship, of concentration camps, of war, of enslavement, of economic collapse, of arbitrary,
unpredictable violence—of all the insignia of a world such as the present, in which reason has so largely been
abandoned and open force is everywhere in the ascendency. Such fear can be natural and rational, a realistically
appropriate response to concrete and tangible dangers. The fear of which I speak occurs without the existence of
any such clearly apparent perils. Its unique characteristic is that it appears to be causeless. Its victims know only
that it has struck them; but they do not know why.
Project the kind of terror a man would feel while hanging by a frayed rope over an abyss—then omit the rope and
the abyss, and conceive of a person victimized by such an emotion, not while suspended precariously in space, but
while safely at home in his living room, or at his office, or walking down the street. This is pathological anxiety—
in its acute stage.
Pathological anxiety is a state of dread experienced in the absence of any actual or impending, objectively
perceivable threat.