A Study of Anxiety from the Psychoanalytic Perspective of Freud

This paper tries to explicate the vicissitude of Freudian theory of anxiety throughout almost his entire career. In the early period of his career, Freud has regarded anxiety as arising from an amount of excitation of instinctual impulses when they cannot be discharged properly through mental procedure. In this case, the unconscious of id plays a key role in the generation of anxiety. Ego feels helpless against the onset of the excess of instinctual impulses and responds to them with anxiety. But since the middle period of his career, Freud has accounted for the origin of anxiety in ego which recalls the affect of anxiety to anticipate the situation of danger in the present analogous to that in the past. In this new case, ego is the site for the generation of anxiety. Ego tries to take advantage of the affect of anxiety to signal the possibility of the repetition of the situation of danger which happened in the past. This later analysis of anxiety of Freud gives ego some positive role to avoid impending danger by anxiety. Taking into account the shift of Freud's view of anxiety over the years, Freud has seemed to work hard to elucidate more clearly the mechanism of anxiety, the structure and operation of psychical apparatuses and the significance of anxiety. In conjunction with his other research of crucial psychoanalytic topics, Freud's long-standing investigation of anxiety emphasizes that the issue how the subject retrieves the lost love of the object can be a determining factor for the expectation or the successful removal of a danger-situation and anxiety as well.