Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety

Written in 1926, this is the short book in which Freud reworks the account of anxiety he had held for three decades. He separates anxiety from repression and reverses their order: the ego produces anxiety as a signal in anticipation of a danger situation, and it is this signal that sets defence in motion. Anxiety is no longer dammed-up libido that has been converted; it is the ego's own response to threat, whether that threat comes from outside or from an instinctual demand the ego cannot meet. For the clinician the consequences run through the whole theory of symptom formation. Freud treats the symptom as the outcome of a defensive process the ego initiates, returns to Little Hans to read phobia as anxiety fastened to a danger the patient can then avoid, and ranges the typical danger situations from loss of the object through castration to the demands of the super-ego. Strachey's Standard Edition translation is the reference text.