12/11/2006

Anxiety: fear of loosing our pleasure

Anxiety is the first reaction following learned helplessness and its consequent inhibition. We feel anxious when faced with a situation where our well being is threatened. It can be defined as any real or imaginary fear of losing what gives us pleasure or of suffering or simply of being denied pleasure.
How a man feels when his job is threatened is an example, or how a woman might feel worrying about an aggressive husband, or a student thinking he might fail his exams or a woman always afraid that her partner might have an affair. In each of these examples, anxiety stems from anticipating pain of some sort or from the frustration of having the pleasure reduced. The anxious person feels tense because he is preoccupied with the pain, because of his desire to escape the situation - and especially - because he refuses to abandon his quest for potential pleasure.