Pathological anxiety differs, not only from those rationally warranted fears afflicting the world at large, but from
the ordinary fears of everyday life: ordinary fear is a proportionate and localized reaction to a concrete, external,
and immediate danger, such as fear of standing in the path of an oncoming car. It differs, also, from objective or
normal anxiety: normal anxiety is a feeling of apprehension and helplessness directed, like fear, toward a specific
source, but the danger is less immediate than in the case of fear and the emotion is more anticipatory, such as the
feeling that might overcome a person confronted with signs of some serious illness, or might strike parents whose
child is in the hands of kidnappers. Fear and objective anxiety vanish when the danger is removed; they are not, in
effect, a personality attribute of their possessor. But pathological anxiety is.
Pathological or subjective anxiety does not always appear in an intense or violent form. Many of its victims know
it, not as an acute attack of panic or as a chronic sense of dread, but only as an occasional uneasiness, a diffuse
sense of nervousness and apprehension, coming and going unpredictably, pursuing some incomprehensible pattern
of its own. It can exist on a continuum from faint discomfort to an experience of such agony that many who have
known it have sworn they would sooner die than undergo it a second time.
The common denominators linking the mildest form of this anxiety to the most extreme, are: the sufferer can give
no identity to that which he fears, he feels afraid of nothing in particular and of everything in general; if he tries to
offer some rationalized explanation for his feeling, if he grasps at some sign in the external world to prove he is in
danger, his explanations are transparently illogical; and he acts as though that which he fears is not any specific
concrete, but reality as such.
One of the most graphic descriptions of the onset of an anxiety attack is given in an autobiographical passage by
Henry James, Sr., the father of philosopher-psychologist William James. The elder James describes his traumatic
experience as follows:
One day... towards the close of May, having eaten a comfortable dinner, I remained sitting at the table after the family had
dispersed, idly gazing at the embers in the grate, thinking of nothing,