Anxiety is an inescapable part of our life. In constantly changing guises it accompanies us from the cradle to the grave. The history of mankind illustrates our never-ending efforts to govern anxiety, to allay, to overcome or to confine it. Magic, religion and science have all attempted this. The security of belief in God, devoted love, discovering nature’s laws or world-renouncing ascetism and philosophical insight do not lift fear from us, but they can help to make the burden lighter and perhaps help us to use it fruitfully for our own development. The belief that it is possible to live without anxiety will remain one of our illusions; it is integral to our existence and is a reflection of our dependencies and the knowledge of our mortality. We can only try to cultivate counterforces against it: courage, trust, knowledge, power, hope, humility, belief and love. These can be of help to us in accepting anxiety, in our dealing with it, in repeatedly conquering it. We should regard with scepticism methods of any kind that promise us a life free of anxiety; they do not do justice to the reality of being human and give rise to illusory expectations.

Even though anxiety is an unavoidable part of our lives, this does not necessarily mean that we are always conscious of it. However, in a manner of speaking, it is omnipresent and can impinge on our consciousness at any moment when summoned by an inner or outer experience. When this happens, we often have the tendency to evade it, to circumvent it, and we have developed quite a few techniques and methods to repress or deaden it, to cover it up or to disclaim it. However, just as death does not cease to exist when we are not thinking about it, neither does anxiety.

Anxiety exists independently of the culture or level of development of a people or an individual. What are different are merely the objects of fear, those things which trigger the anxiety and, correspondingly, the means and measures we avail ourselves of in order to combat this anxiety. Today, in general, we no longer fear natural phenomena such as thunder and lightning, and solar and lunar eclipses have become an interesting natural spectacle. They elicit no anxiety as we know they do not denote a permanent disappearance of these heavenly bodies or even the end of the world. In their place we have anxieties that earlier cultures were not affected by – we are afraid, for instance, of bacteria, of new diseases, of automobile accidents, of old age and loneliness.

In contrast to this, the methods of dealing with anxiety have changed very little. Only today, in place of sacrifices and magical counterspells, we have modern, fear-suppressing pharmaceutical treatments – but anxiety is still with us. Probably the most significant new prospect for anxiety management is psychotherapy in its various forms: first it reveals the history of the origins of anxiety in the individual, then it researches the interrelationship between individual-familial and socio-cultural conditions. This makes possible the confrontation with anxiety – the goal being fruitful anxiety management through further maturation.

Obviously, one of life’s balancing acts lies herein: If, through the agency of science and technology, we are able to make progress in mastering the world and therefore eliminate or do away with certain fears, we still exchange these fears for others. The fact that anxiety is an inescapable part of life is not altered in the least. Only one new fear seems to belong to our modern life: We increasingly recognize anxieties that arise from acts and deeds of our own making which turn against us. We recognize the fear of the destructive forces within ourselves – think only of the dangers inherent in the misuse of nuclear power or of the possibilities for power arising from intervention in natural life cycles. Our hubris appears to be turning against us in the manner of a boomerang; lacking in love and humility, the will to have power over nature and over life gives rise to the fear in us that we ourselves can become manipulated beings, empty of meaning. If in former times mankind was afraid of the forces of nature, helpless and at the mercy of threatening demons and avenging gods, today we must be afraid of our very selves.

Therefore, it is an illusion to think that “progress” – which is always also a regress – will relieve us of our anxieties; certainly, it will remove some of them, but it will at the same time result in new fears.

The experiencing of anxiety is thus part of our existence. However valid this is, every human being experiences his or her own personal variation of anxiety, “the” fear, which exists as little as does “the” death, or “the” love and other abstractions. Everyone has his or her own personal, individual form of anxiety that belongs to them and their being just as everyone has their own form of love and has to die their own death. Thus, anxiety only exists when experienced and reflected by a particular person. Therefore it always has a personal imprint in spite of the collective fundamental experiencing of fear common to all. This, our personal fear, is linked to our individual life situation, to our disposition and our environment; it has its own phylogenesis which starts virtually when we are born.

If we look at anxiety for a moment “without anxiety”, we get the impression that it displays a double aspect: on the one hand it can stimulate us, on the other it can paralyse us. Anxiety is at all times a signal and a warning in the case of danger, while at the same time having the character of a challenge, namely the impulse to overcome it. The acceptance and mastering of anxiety signifies a stride in development, it allows us to mature a step further. Avoiding anxiety and the need to deal with it, on the other hand, causes us to stagnate. It hinders our further development and we remain childish in that area where the obstacle of anxiety has not been overcome.

Anxiety always arises when we find ourselves in a situation with which we cannot cope or cannot cope with yet. Every development, every step on the road to maturity is a cause of anxiety as it leads us into something new, something unknown and for which we do not yet have the coping skills. It leads us into internal or external situations that we have not experienced before and which we have not yet experienced in ourselves. Alongside the attraction of something new and the love of adventure and joy of taking risks, everything new, unknown, done-or-experienced-for-the-first-time contains anxiety. Because our lives constantly lead us into unknown territory, into what is unfamiliar and not yet experienced, anxiety is our constant companion. We generally become conscious of it at important stages in our development. Those places where old and trusted ruts must be abandoned, where new tasks are to be dealt with or changes are due to be made. Development, becoming an adult and maturation therefore appear to have a lot to do with mastering anxiety, and every age has its own appropriate rites of passage with the corresponding anxieties that must be mastered if the process is to be successful.

Therefore, there are completely normal, age- and development-appropriate anxieties that a healthy person can weather and can grow through. Coping with these is important for his or her further development. Consider for a moment the first independent steps of a small child when for the first time it has to let go of the mother’s hand and must overcome the fear of walking alone, the fear of being left alone in an open space. Or think of the great turning-points in our lives. Let us take the first day of school when the child has to leave the bosom of its family and is expected to adapt to a new and strange community and to assert itself there. Let us take the example of puberty and the first encounters with the opposite sex under the compulsion of erotic longing and sexual desire; or let us think of the commencement of a career, the founding of one’s own family, of motherhood and, ultimately, of growing old and the encounter with death. In all beginnings or before any first-time experience, there is always anxiety.

All these fears belong, in a manner of speaking, to our lives in an organic way because they are linked with bodily, emotional or social stages of development that manifest themselves with the assumption of new functions in a community or society. Such a step always signifies a crossing of borders and challenges us to let go of what is habitual and trusted and to venture into new and unfamiliar territory.

In addition to these fears, there are a plethora of individual anxieties that are not necessarily typical of the particular borderline situations mentioned above and which we often cannot understand in others as we do not have them ourselves. Thus for one person loneliness can trigger severe anxiety, while another suffers in crowded gatherings; others have panic attacks if they have to cross bridges or an empty square; some cannot stand to be in enclosed rooms; and yet others are afraid of harmless animals such as beetles, spiders or mice.

As varied as the phenomenon anxiety might seem in the case of different people – there is practically nothing that we cannot develop anxiety about – when we look more closely it is always variations of quite particular anxieties which I call for this reason “basic forms of anxiety” and which I would like to describe. All possible variations of anxiety are derivatives of these basic forms. They are either extreme and distorted variations of these forms...