[Anxiety--historical and clinical aspects of the problem]

Working on the principle that anxiety is interpreted as a sorrowful and uncanny experience of being fundamentally imperiled, the clinical phenomena of anxiety are examined taking into account the historical aspects of the problem of anxiety. As a nosological term anxiety implies the establishment of anxiety diseases such as anxiety neuroses and the manifold phobiae. Anxiety can generally be understood as the dynamic basis of neurotic diseases. In the assessment of the range of this problem in a scientific way, the development of psychoanalytical theories plays an important role. There is also a level of symptomatology where the importance of anxiety in the pattern of symptoms belonging to various mental illnesses must be given consideration. This is where the phenomenon of anxiety as part of a psychosis becomes a crucial psychopathological problem which, in its complexity, is taken care of rather insufficiently in current psychiatric discussions. The possibilities offered by a phenomenological and hermeneutic approach are pointed out, leading to the fundamental importance of anxiety that structures human experience in psychosis. The clinical empiricism of the phenomena of anxiety gives rise to first attempts to formulate a theory and a concept of anxiety: Side by side with the somatological constructions and psychoanalytical theorems, there is the approach of a psychiatry drawing from the fields of philosophical anthropology aiming at understanding. The attention paid to anxiety by psychiatry during the Romantic era before Griesinger, as well as the reasons for the differentiation between anxiety and fear, owing to the history of thought and concept, are dealt with separately. Looking at the history of the problem of anxiety, where psychiatric science always maintains its links with prevalent concepts of its era, we can recognize the continuity of the ever identical transhistorical problem structures of anxiety in their relevance for the questions formulated by today's psychiatry. Since it enables us to differentiate between what can be scientifically elucidated and what evades the grasp of science, it is quite evident that psychiatric thinking guided by philosophic interpretation remains a necessity even today--not least with regard to the attitude towards the patient suffering from anxiety.