Anxious States of Mind Induced by Stress

This chapter provides with a perspective on how traumatic life events may play a role in causing anxious states of mind. It examines unconscious thinking as an intervening variable that may contribute to the formation of anxiety symptoms. Anxiety symptoms include conceptualized threats such as expectant dread of suddenly dying, of finding oneself alone and fatally vulnerable, of crazily acting out of control in the company of others. A traumatic event remains recorded in an active memory storage, active because it tends toward repeated representation. Traumatic events may end, yet be followed by anxious states of mind. These states contain expectations of repetitions of the personal effects of the trauma. From a psychoanalytic point of view there is, with one exception, no argument with prevailing theories that see the causation of anxious states of mind as the possible result of neural dispositions, current neural or metabolic aberrations, conditioned associations, or social shaping of response patterns.