[Reflections on the concepts of anguish and anxiety]

After a phenomenological analysis, the author demonstrates that anxiety is a bodily sensation (in the sense of lived body) as well as a state of consciousness that results from the activation of a fundamental mechanisms of which we always observe but a part. That mechanisms works immediately when the subject has to face a new situation that needs a mental reorganisation (separation or growth anxiety). The physiological variables do not allow to give the characteristics of the anxiety without the subject's speech. He reminds the distinction in french between anxiety and "angoisse", the distinction between anxiety-state and anxiety-trait and gives the way to make the difference between normal anxiety and pathological one. Having reminded the mechanisms of defense against anxiety, he makes a clinical description of the anxious personality.