Chapter 1

ANXIETY IN MID-TWENTIETH CENTURY

Now there are times when a whole generation is caught . . . between two ages, two modes of life, with the consequence that it loses all power to understand itself and has no standards, no security, no simple acquiescence.

—Herman Hesse, STEPPENWOLF

EVERY ALERT CITIZEN OF OUR SOCIETY REALIZES, ON THE basis of his own experience as well as his observation of his fellow-men, that anxiety is a pervasive and profound phenomenon in the twentieth century. From 1945 and the birth of the atom bomb, anxiety shifted from a covert to an overt problem. The alert citizens were then aware not only of the more obvious anxiety-creating situations such as uncontrolled atomic warfare, radical political and economic upheaval, but also the less obvious, deeper, and more personal sources of anxiety in themselves and their fellow-men. This latter includes the inner confusion, alienation, psychological disorientation, and uncertainty with respect to values and acceptable standards of conduct. Hence to endeavor to “prove” the pervasiveness of anxiety in our day is as unnecessary as the proverbial carrying coals to Newcastle.

Since the implicit sources of anxiety in our society are generally recognized, our task in this introductory chapter is to point out how anxiety has emerged, and has to some extent been defined, as an explicit problem in many different areas in our culture. One had the impression that in the middle decade of this century the explorations and investigations in such diverse fields as science and poetry, religion and politics were converging on this central problem of anxiety. Whereas the period of two or three decades before might have been termed the “age of covert anxiety”—as I hope to demonstrate later in this chapter—the middle of our century may be called, as Auden and Camus called it, the “age of overt anxiety.” This emergence of anxiety from an implicit to an explicit problem, this change from anxiety as a matter of “mood” to a recognition that it is an urgent issue which we must at all costs try to define and clarify—these are the significant phenomena.

IN LITERATURE

If we were to inquire into anxiety as exhibited in the American literature, say, of 1920 or 1930, we would be forced to occupy ourselves with symptoms of anxiety rather than with overt anxiety itself. But though signs of open, manifest anxiety were not plentiful in that period, certainly the student could find plenty of symptomatic indications of underlying anxiety. Recall, for example, the pronounced sense of loneliness, the quality of persistent searching—frantically and compulsively pursued, but always frustrated—in the writings of a novelist like Thomas Wolfe. In the cases demonstrating anxiety in this book, it will be observed that anxiety frequently—and, in many cases, basically—hinged on the issue symbolically expressed in Wolfe’s title, You can’t go home again. We shall observe that neurotic anxiety occurred because these characters were unable to accept the psychological meaning of not going home again—namely, psychological autonomy. One could wonder (realizing that literary artists symbolically express, often with remarkable fidelity, the unconscious assumptions and conflicts of their culture) whether these symbols in Wolfe’s writing could be taken to mean that many people in the late 1920’s and early 1930’s were beginning to realize not only that one cannot go home again, but that it was impossible to depend for security on past economic, social, and ethical criteria. The upshot of this realization was the increasing emergence of overt anxiety as a conscious problem, along with a feeling of “homelessness.” If we take this as speculation about the central symbols of the home and the mother, it may usefully raise a problem that we shall be confronting, in more specific form, time and again in this study of anxiety.

In 1950, anxiety emerged into overt statement in contemporaneous literature. W. H. Auden entitled his poem with the phrase which he believed most accurately characterized that period, The Age of Anxiety.1 Though Auden’s interpretation of the inner experience of the four persons in this poem is set in the time of war—when “necessity is associated with horror and freedom with boredom”²—he makes it clear that the underlying causes of the anxiety of his characters, as well as of others of that age, must be sought on deeper levels than merely the occasion of war. The four characters in the poem, though different in temperament and in background, have in common certain characteristics of our times: loneliness, the feeling of not being of value as persons, and the experience of not being able to love and be loved despite the common need, the common effort, and the common but temporary respite provided by alcohol. The sources of the anxiety were to be found in certain basic trends in our culture, one of which, for Auden, was the pressure toward conformity which occurs in a world where commercial and mechanical values are apotheosized:

We move on

In pay and prices. . . .3

. . . this stupid world where

Gadgets are gods and we go on talking,

Many about much, but remain alone,

Alive but alone, belonging—where?—⁴

Unattached as tumbleweed.

And the possibility facing these four characters is that they too will be drawn into the mechanical routine of meaninglessness:

. . . The fears we know

Are of not knowing. Will nightfall bring us

Some awful order—Keep a hardware store

In a small town. . . . Teach science for life to

Progressive girls—? It is getting late.

Shall we ever be asked for? Are we simply

Not wanted at all?⁵

What has been lost is the capacity to experience and have faith in one’s self as a worthy and unique being. At the same time, these characters, symbolizing all of us, have lost the capacity for faith in, and meaningful communication with, other selves, their fellow human beings.⁶

In a phrase parallel to Auden’s, Albert Camus designated this age as “the century of fear,” in comparison with the seventeenth century as the age of mathematics, the eighteenth as the age of the physical sciences, and the nineteenth as that of biology. Camus realized that these characterizations were not logically parallel, that fear is not a science, but that “science must be somewhat involved, since its latest theoretical advances have brought it to the point of negating itself while its perfected technology threatens the globe itself with destruction. Moreover, although fear itself cannot be considered a science, it is certainly a technique.”7 Our period is also often called the “century of psychology.” Whether there is some necessary connection between fear and psychology, and whether fear is what requires people to examine their psyches, are questions to be kept in mind throughout this book.

Another writer who poignantly expressed the anxiety and anxiety-like states of people in this period was Franz Kafka. The remarkable surge of interest in the 1940’s and ’50’s in the writings of Kafka is important for our purposes here because of what it shows in the changing temper of the time. The fact that increasing numbers of people discovered that Kafka speaks significantly to them must indicate that he was expressing some profound aspects of the prevailing experience of many members of the society. In Kafka’s novel The Castle, the chief character devotes his life to a frantic and desperate endeavor to communicate with the authorities in the castle who control all aspects of the life of the village, and who have the power to tell him his vocation and give some meaning to his life. Kafka’s non-hero is driven “by a need for the most primitive requisites of life, the need to be rooted in a home and a calling, and to become a member of a community.”⁸ But the authorities in the castle remain inscrutable and inaccessible, and Kafka’s character is left without direction or integration in his own life and remains isolated from his fellows. What the castle specifically symbolizes could be debated at length, but it is clear that the authorities in the castle represent the epitome of bureaucratic efficiency which exercises such power that it quenches both individual autonomy and meaningful interpersonal relations. We may confidently assume that Kafka is writing of those aspects of his bourgeois culture of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries which so elevated technical efficiency that personal values were largely destroyed.

Herman Hesse, writing less in literary symbols than Kafka, was more explicit about the sources of modern man’s anxiety. The awareness of traumatic social change in the twentieth century occurred in Europe before it did in America; thus what Hesse wrote was more relevant to conscious problems in this country in the 1940’s, than in 1927, the date of Steppenwolf. He presents the story of Haller, his chief character in this novel, as a parable of our age.9 Hesse holds that Haller’s—and his contemporaries’—isolation and anxiety arose from the fact that the bourgeois culture in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries emphasized mechanical, rationalistic “balance” at the price of the suppression of the dynamic, irrational elements in experience. Haller tries to overcome his isolation and loneliness by giving free rein to his previously suppressed sensuous and irrational urges (the “wolf” in the title). But this reactive method yields only a temporary relief. Indeed, Hesse presents no thoroughgoing solution to the problem of the anxiety of contemporaneous Western man, for he believes the present period to be one of those “times when a whole generation is caught . . . between two ages.” That is to say, bourgeois standards and controls had broken down, but there are as yet no social standards to take their place. Hesse sees Haller’s record

as a document of the times, for Haller’s sickness of the soul, as I now know, is not the eccentricity of a single individual, but the sickness of the times themselves, the neurosis of that generation to which Haller belongs . . . a sickness which attacks . . . precisely those who are strongest in spirit and richest in gifts.¹⁰

IN SOCIAL STUDIES

Here, too, anxiety came to the fore. The awareness of anxiety as an overt sociological problem in an American community during the third and fourth decades of our century was shown in the comparison of the Lynds’ two studies of Middletown.¹¹ In the first study, made in the 1920’s, anxiety is not an overt problem to the people of Middletown, and the topic does not even appear in the index of the Lynds’ volume. But anyone reading this study from a psychological viewpoint would suspect that much of the behavior of the citizens of Middletown was symptomatic of covert anxiety—for example, the compulsive work (“businessmen and workingmen seem to be running for dear life” in the endeavor to make money12), the pervasive struggle to conform, the compulsive, gregariousness (the great emphasis on “joining” clubs), and the frantic endeavors of the people in the community to keep their leisure time crammed with activity (such as “motoring”), however purposeless this activity might be in itself. On a Sunday afternoon the regular practice of many people was to get in their cars, drive fifty miles, and then drive back again. One is reminded of Pascal’s description of some symptoms of covert anxiety: the constant endeavor of people to divert themselves, to escape ennui, to avoid being alone, until “agitation” becomes an end in itself. Only one citizen in this first volume—whom the Lynds describe as a “perspicacious” observer—looked below these symptoms and sensed the presence of covert apprehension. Of his fellow townsmen he observed, “These people are all afraid of something; what is it?”¹³

But the later study of the same community made in the 1930’s presented a very different picture. Conscious anxiety is now present. “One thing everybody in Middletown has in common,” the Lynds observed, “is insecurity in the face of a complicated world.”¹⁴ To be sure, the immediate, outward occasion of anxiety was the economic depression. But it would be an error to conclude that the inclusive cause of the emerging anxiety was economic insecurity. The Lynds accurately related this insecurity in Middletown to the confusion of role which the individual was then experiencing. The citizen of Middletown, they write, “is caught in a chaos of conflicting patterns, none of them wholly condemned, but no one of them clearly approved and free from confusion; or, where the group sanctions are clear in demanding a certain role of a man or woman, the individual encounters cultural requirements with no immediate means of meeting them.”¹⁵

This “chaos of conflicting patterns” in Middletown was one expression of the pervasive social changes occurring in our culture, which I will submit in a later chapter were intimately connected with the widespread anxiety of our times.¹⁶ The Lynds observed that, since “most people are incapable of tolerating change and uncertainty in all sectors of life at once,”¹⁷ the tendency in Middletown was toward a retrenchment into more rigid and conservative economic and social ideologies. This ominous development as a symptom of, and defense against, anxiety points toward the discussion of the relation between anxiety and political totalitarianism in the following section.

Robert Lifton, who may be considered a social psychiatrist, has given us many insights into the process of brainwashing,18 which has become a prominent form of social turmoil throughout the world in the decades since 1950. Without going into Lifton’s seminal research in many relevant areas, I wish only to quote one reference bearing on our topic of anxiety:

John S. Dunne, the distinguished Catholic theologian, posits as the new religion of our time “a phenomenon we might call ‘passing over.’” Dunne describes this process as “a going over to the standpoint of another culture, another way of life, another religion, . . . followed by an equal and opposite process we might call ‘coming back,’ coming back with new insight to one’s own culture, one’s own way of life, one’s own religion.”¹⁹

There is a darker side, however, to that same process. Considerable anxiety can be generated by the very multiplicity of possibilities in “passing over” and in the Protean style in general. That anxiety around diffuseness can in turn contribute to the kind of quest for certainty we now see so widely expressed in fundamentalist religious sects and various totalistic spiritual movements.²⁰

The “Protean Man” refers to Lifton’s analysis of the contemporary personality as continually changing its identity. Proteus, in the Greek myth, was able to change his shape—“from wild boar to lion to dragon to fire to flood. . . . But what he could not do, unless seized and chained, was to commit himself to a single form.” This drive to don a number of masks, to be in incessant change, to reflect continuously the environment, with no idea of “where I belonged and no idea of myself,”²¹ as one young modern protean put it, bespeaks a dizzily changing cultural situation. Whether one looks upon this with approbation or despair, it is undeniable that this condition also expresses the radical upheaval in our society.

Lifton himself speaks of the modern anxiety, as shown in fear of atomic warfare, for example, as a process of numbing. This defense is an emotional withdrawal in which people who can do nothing else dull their sensitivities, cut off their awareness of threat. The shrinking of consciousness seems to work temporarily in the warding off of anxiety. Whether one must pay later is an open question; with the survivors of the Pueblo incident, this was true. One who studied them writes, “It is possible that adjustment on a short-term basis was due to marked repression and denial and that the price must be paid later,”22 i.e., in such things as suicide or psychotic depression.

IN THE POLITICAL SCENE

The ideal relation between politics and anxiety is expressed in Spinoza’s insight into the political aspect of “freedom from fear.” He held that the purpose of the state is “so to free each man from fear that he may live and act with full security and without injury to himself or his neighbor.” But when we turn to the actual political arena, we find pronounced anxiety in both symptomatic and overt forms. Without going into the complex determinants of fascism, we need only note that it is born and gains its power in periods of widespread anxiety. Paul Tillich, who experienced in his own life in Germany the rise of Hitler, described the situation in Europe in the 1930’s out of which German fascism developed:

First of all a feeling of fear or, more exactly, of indefinite anxiety was prevailing. Not only the economic and political, but also the cultural and religious, security seemed to be lost. There was nothing on which one could build; everything was without foundation. A catastrophic breakdown was expected every moment. Consequently, a longing for security was growing in everybody. A freedom that leads to fear and anxiety has lost its value; better authority with security than freedom with fear!²³

In such periods, people grasp at political authoritarianism in their desperate need for relief from anxiety. Totalitarianism in this sense may be viewed as serving a purpose on a cultural scale parallel to that in which a neurotic symptom protects an individual from a situation of unbearable anxiety. An observer of Italian and Spanish fascism, Herbert L. Matthews, wrote: “Fascism was like a jail where the individual had a certain amount of security, shelter, and daily food.”24 With some very significant differences, communistic totalitarianism fulfills a similar function. Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., told us: “[Communism] has filled the ‘vacuum of faith’ caused by the waning of established religion; it provides a sense of purpose which heals internal agonies of anxiety and doubt.”²⁵ As I shall indicate later in this study, such forms of totalitarianism are not only economic phenomena, but are also the product of the spiritual, ethical, and psychological vacuum which characterized the breakdown of the bourgeois tradition in Western Europe. As Martin Ebon phrased it, communism is a product of “the desperate wish to find a purpose in what seems confusion and emptiness.”²⁶ In this confusion and emptiness one thing did exist, namely anxiety. Totalitarianism gains its foothold to a considerable extent because, like a symptom, it “binds” and provides some relief from this anxiety.²⁷

In addition to anxiety in the above symptomatic forms, unsystematized anxiety had been increasingly evident in the sociopolitical scene in that decade. The frequent references to Franklin D. Roosevelt’s sentence in his first inaugural, “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself,” testify to the fact that large numbers of people have become increasingly aware of “fear of fear”—or, more accurately, anxiety—in the face of the radical sociopolitical changes in our century.²⁸

The emergence of the Atomic Age brought the previously inchoate and “free-floating” anxiety of many people into sharp focus. The stark possibilities of modern man’s situation were stated in an impassioned expression of anxiety by Norman Cousins just after the first atomic bombs were dropped:

The beginning of the Atomic Age has brought less hope than fear. It is a primitive fear, the fear of the unknown, the fear of forces man can neither channel nor comprehend. This fear is not new; in its classical form it is the fear of irrational death. But overnight it has become intensified, magnified. It has burst out of the subconscious into the conscious, filling the mind with primordial apprehensions. . . . Where man can find no answer, he will find fear.29

Even if we are to escape being confronted with actual death in a shooting and atom-bomb war, the anxiety inhering in our portentous world situation would still be with us. The historian Arnold Toynbee stated his belief that overt warfare on a world scale was not probable in our lifetime, but that we would remain in a “cold” war for a generation. This means a perpetual condition of tension and worry. To live in a state of anxiety for a generation (or more, as it turned out) was, indeed, a horrendous prospect!

But the picture is not inevitably black. Toynbee held that the tension in the persistent cold war can be used constructively as our motivation for bettering our own socioeconomic standards in the West. I agree with Toynbee that our political and social survival depends both on our capacity for tolerating the anxiety inherent in the threatening world situation and on our capacity for turning this anxiety to constructive uses.

Toynbee gave an analogy which is such a vivid parable of the constructive uses of anxiety that I summarize it here. Fishermen bringing in their herring from the North Sea were faced with the problem of the fish becoming sluggish in their tanks and thus losing some of their market value for freshness. Then one fisherman conceived the idea of placing a couple of catfish in the herring tanks. Because of the threat of death in the presence of these catfish, the herring not only did not grow sluggish but became even more active and flourishing.³⁰ Of course, whether the reaction of the West to the catfish (China or Russia) would be constructive or not is another question; in other words, whether we would use the anxiety in our world situation predominantly for constructive purposes remains largely to be seen.

IN PHILOSOPHY AND THEOLOGY

Anxiety had also emerged as a central problem in contemporaneous philosophy and religion not only as a general, but also a specific, indication of the prevalence of anxiety in the culture. Anxiety had become most prominent in the thought of those theologians, like Reinhold Niebuhr, who was most intimately concerned with the economic and political issues of the day, and in those philosophers, like Paul Tillich and Martin Heidegger, who had experienced in their own lives the cultural crises and upheavals of Western society in the past three decades.

In the light of Nietszche’s idea that the philosopher is a “physician of culture,” the thinking of these philosophers and theologians is to be regarded not as the product of ivory-tower speculation, but as a diagnosis of the condition of our culture.

Tillich described anxiety as man’s reaction to the threat of nonbeing. Man is the creature who is self-consciously aware of his being, but he is also aware that at any moment he might cease to be. This concept of Tillich’s was, of course, formulated before the emergence of the atomic age, but that is undoubtedly a vivid symbol by which many more people are able to comprehend the immediate threat of nonbeing. In philosophical terms, anxiety arises as the individual is aware of being as over against the ever-present possibility of non-existence. This, we will see, is parallel to Kierkegaard’s description of anxiety as the “fear of nothingness.” “Nonbeing” does not mean simply the threat of physical death—though probably death is the most common form and symbol of this anxiety. The threat of nonbeing lies in the psychological and spiritual realms as well—namely, in the threat of meaninglessness in one’s existence. Generally the threat of meaninglessness is experienced negatively as a threat to the existence of the self (the experience of the “dissolution of the self” in Goldstein’s term). But when this form of anxiety is confronted affirmatively—when the individual both realizes the threat of meaninglessness and takes a stand against the threat—the result is a strengthening of the individual’s experience of selfhood. This is also a strengthening of his perception of himself as a being who is distinct from the world of nonbeing or objects.

Niebuhr made anxiety central in his theological doctrine of man. To Niebuhr every act of man, creative or destructive, involves some element of anxiety. Anxiety has its source in the fact that man is, on one hand, finite, involved like the animals in the contingencies and necessities of nature. But, on the other hand, man has freedom. Unlike “the animals he sees this situation [of contingency] and anticipates its perils,” and to this extent man transcends his finiteness. “In short, man, being both bound and free, both limited and limitless, is anxious. Anxiety is the inevitable concomitant of the paradox of freedom and finiteness in which man is involved.”31 Much will be said later in the present study about anxiety as the precondition of neurosis; but here it is significant that Niebuhr, in parallel theological terms, makes anxiety “the internal precondition of sin. . . . Anxiety is the internal description of the state of temptation.”³²

IN PSYCHOLOGY

“Anxiety is the most prominent mental characteristic of Occidental civilization,” the social psychologist R. R. Willoughby asserted. He then presented statistical evidence for this assertion in the form of the rising incidences in three fields of social pathology which he believes may reasonably be understood as reactions to anxiety, namely suicide, the functional forms of mental disorder, and divorce.³³ Suicide rates for the last 75 to 100 years showed a steady increase in the majority of the countries of continental Europe. With regard to the functional forms of mental illness, Willoughby held, “it seems probable . . . that there is a real rise in incidence of mental disease even when the greatest reasonable allowance is made for increasing facilities for hospitalization and insight in diagnosis.”34 The divorce rates for every country except Japan have shown a steady upward trend in the twentieth century. Willoughby believes that the incidence of divorce is a measure of the inability of the members of the culture to tolerate the additional stress of the critical marital adjustment, and the higher incidence must presuppose a considerable load of anxiety in the culture. An important fact in America is that divorces for “cruelty” were “solely responsible for the increase, all other causes steadily declining.” Willoughby interpreted “cruelty” as a matter of increase of anxiety—“if the conduct of the spouse is such as to exacerbate anxiety, it is ‘cruel.’”

Willoughby’s purpose in introducing these statistics to substantiate the “commonsense proposition that there is in our civilization a large and increasing incidence of anxiety,” cannot be questioned. But there might rightly be considerable question as to whether the relation between these statistical evidences and anxiety is as direct as he holds. The rising incidence of divorce would seem to be due to changing social attitudes toward divorce as well as to the prevalence of anxiety. It seems more logical to regard rising divorce, suicide, and mental disease rates as symptoms and products of the traumatic transition of our culture, and to regard anxiety also as a symptom and product of that transitional state.

To trace one of these, divorce, down to the present day, we note that “three or four times as large a proportion of first marriages are ending in divorce among Americans now in their late twenties as among those of similar age 45 years ago,” according to statistics published in 1976.³⁵ The divorce rate has more than doubled in the last twelve years. However we look upon these statistics, they are surely indicative of a culture in radical upheaval, and hence a culture open to widespread anxiety.

Since in subsequent chapters we shall be concerned in detail with the study of anxiety in the various fields of psychology, we shall here only cite, in line with our introductory purpose, that anxiety has gradually come to be seen as a central problem in learning theory, in dynamic psychology, and specifically in psychoanalysis and other forms of psychotherapy. While it long has been recognized that apprehensions and fears, particularly those related to approval or punishment from parents and teachers, exerted much power over the child in school, not until recently have there been scientific recognitions of the innumerable subtle expressions and influences of anxiety permeating the child’s educational and classroom experience. For this appreciation of anxiety as a focal problem in learning theory, and the scientific formulation thereof, we are early on indebted to such learning psychologists as Mowrer, Miller, Dollard, and a host of others following them.36

More than three decades ago, Freud singled out anxiety as the crucial problem of emotional and behavioral disorders. Further development of psychoanalysis has only substantiated his proposition, until it is now recognized on all sides that anxiety is the “fundamental phenomenon of neurosis,” or, in Horney’s term, the “dynamic center of neuroses.” But not only in psychopathology is this true. In the actions of “normal” people as well as the “abnormal” it is now recognized that anxiety is much more prevalent than was suspected several decades ago. Whether we are concerned with “normal” or pathological behavior, Freud was correct in saying that the solution to the “riddle” of anxiety must cast “a flood of light upon our whole mental existence.”³⁷

PURPOSE OF THIS BOOK

Despite the fact that anxiety has become a central problem in so many diverse areas in our culture, the attack on the problem has been handicapped by the fact that the various theories and studies of anxiety have, to date, been uncoordinated. In spite of the industrious work by skilled psychologists, this is as true in 1977 as it was in 1950. As is evident to anyone reading the papers from various symposia on anxiety, we do not even use the same language. Freud’s description of the state of the problem in the opening paragraph of his chapter on anxiety published in 1933 is still largely accurate: “You will not be surprised to hear that I have a great deal of new information to give you about our hypotheses on the subject of anxiety . . . and also that none of this information claims to provide a final solution of these doubtful problems.” What is necessary at the present stage of the understanding of anxiety is “the introduction of the right abstract ideas, and of their application to the raw material of observation so as to bring order and lucidity into it.”38

The purpose of the present study is to bring, so far as we are able, some “order and lucidity” into the presently uncoordinated field of anxiety theory. I propose to bring together the various theories of anxiety and to view them in their cultural and historical as well as their biological and psychological aspects. I shall then seek the basic common denominators in these theories, assess the points of disagreement, and, so far as possible, synthesize the various viewpoints into a comprehensive theory of anxiety. The case studies in this book are presented for the purpose of observing anxiety theory clinically—that is, for illustrating and demonstrating, or questioning, various aspects of a comprehensive, contemporary theory of anxiety.