Anxiety forms part of every human life. The subject has been associated with psychoanalysis since the very beginnings of the discipline, in its efforts to explain the profound depths of human existence. This volume illustrates the way in which the development of psychoanalysis can largely be read as a history of its conceptions of anxiety. The book pays tribute to selected milestones in this development in the contributions made by Freud and ego psychology, object relationship theory, and self psychology to the subject of anxiety. It closes with by examining the prospects for a clinical systematics of anxiety disorders from today=s viewpoint.

Michael Ermann is Emeritus Professor of Psychosomatics and Psychotherapy at Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich and is now mainly active as an author and educational psychoanalyst in Berlin.