[On anxiety and anguish (author's transl)]

Psychopharmacology has confirmed psychiatry as a medical science; methodological rigor of the exact sciences is essential to psychopharmacological research. It does not however question speculative thought which remains one of the strong sources of psychiatry. The identification of new drugs with their elective properties and their unexpected action on psychopathology imposes a reappraisal of psychiatric concepts. This is true for some narrow concepts such as anxiety and anguish, which only exist in the French. The French psychiatry also determined its clinical limits at the beginning of this century, and it seems to lose it from time to time. Like any emotion, the anxious matrix is one non distinguishable from the unity of the existence. A phenomenological approach permits to confirm the intuition of language in showing that the living experience of anguish is different from the one of anxiety.