at existence as such—as thought implying that to be, is to be in mortal danger.
The anxious person feels, as an intrinsic component of the anxiety experience, a profound sense of helplessness, of
impotence. He feels a sense of shapeless but impending disaster. And—often—he feels a unique, nameless sense of
guilt. The guilt, too, has a metaphysical quality: he feels wrong, wrong as a person, wrong in some fundamental
way that is wider than any particular fault or defect he can identify. (Sometimes, the guilt is in the forefront of his
consciousness; sometimes, it is unidentified, undiscriminated, in effect, subconscious.)
When a person suffers from this metaphysical kind of dread, the cause does not lie in the external world; it lies
within himself. It is not something that reality has done to him; it is something he has done to himself. He carries
the threat and danger within his own consciousness.
Confidence in oneself, as a basic attitude, is confidence in the efficacy of one's consciousness. Pathological anxiety
is the antipode of this state. It is nature's alarm signal, warning a man that he is in an improper psychological
condition, that his relationship to reality is wrong; it is his mind's cry of inefficacy and loss of control. It is a crisis
of self-esteem.
If self-esteem is the conviction that one's mind is competent to grasp and judge the facts of reality, and that one's
person is worthy of happiness—pathological anxiety is the torment of a person who is crippled or devastated in this
realm, who feels cut off from reality, alienated, powerless.
Behind a fear which is experienced as metaphysical lies a disaster which is psycho-epistemological—a failure or
default in the proper functioning of a man's consciousness.
Whenever a man feels fear, any kind of fear, his response reflects an estimate of some danger to him, i.e., some
threat to his values. What is the value being threatened in the case of pathological anxiety? It is the sufferer's ego.
A man's ego is his mind, his faculty of awareness, his ability to think—the faculty that perceives reality, preserves
the inner continuity of his own existence, and generates his sense of personal identity. "Ego" and "mind" denote the
same act of reality, the same attribute of man; the difference in the use of these terms pertains