The meaning of anxiety
Rollo May published The Meaning of Anxiety in 1950, and a revised edition followed in 1977. Most of the book is a survey of philosophers, biologists, Freud and the people who argued with him, and the culture that produced the anxious modern person. Then May stops surveying and says what he thinks. That part begins with the question this page is about: what anxiety is, and how it differs from fear.
Fear knows where the danger is
May starts from what the authors he surveyed agree on. Fear is a reaction to a specific danger. Anxiety is vague, diffuse, without an object.
He does not let "vague" mean mild. Other things being equal, he writes, anxiety is more painful than fear. The vagueness is about where the threat lands. A person meets particular dangers from inside a pattern of security built up over a lifetime. A fear is a threat within that pattern. It has a place, and in principle it can be dealt with: you can get away, or be reassured. In anxiety the pattern itself is under threat.
A frightened person can look at what frightens him. An anxious one cannot, because there is nowhere to stand outside it.
"he is afraid but uncertain of what he fears."
— Rollo May, The Meaning of Anxiety (1950), chapter 6
What is under threat
May's definition turns on a value. For him, anxiety is set off by a threat to something a person holds essential to being who he is. It may be life itself, or freedom. It may also be a job, a love or a cause.
His example is a man called Tom, afraid of losing his hospital job and having to go back on government relief. Tom said that if he couldn't support his family he might as well jump off the end of the dock. May takes him at his word. For Tom, providing for his family was what made his life worth living.
Tom also gives May his clearest contrast. When Tom feared that a doctor would discover a mistake he had made, his body got ready to run. When he lay awake wondering how long his employment would last, his body did the opposite. The first danger was unpleasant. The second touched the value he lived by.
Which comes first
The usual assumption, May notes, is that fear comes first and anxiety is a later, more complicated version of it. He reverses this. The capacity to react to threat is anxiety in its original, undivided form. Only as a person matures and learns to tell one danger from another does that capacity take specific shapes, and those shapes are fears.
His image comes from the fall of France. As long as the fighting stays on the front lines, each battle is a particular danger and the capital is safe. Once the enemy is in the capital and attacks from every side, the defenders no longer know which way to face. In this picture, fear is the armor against anxiety. The "fear of fear" people talk about is, on his account, simply anxiety.
Normal and neurotic
None of this makes anxiety a disorder. May separates normal anxiety, which is proportionate to a real threat and can be faced in full awareness, from neurotic anxiety, which is out of proportion because an inner conflict has been pushed out of view.
His example of the first is a man living in Germany when Hitler came to power. Colleagues were being taken away, and he could not know whether or when his turn would come. What was threatened was not only his life but his freedom to work for what he believed. His state had every mark of anxiety, and none of it was neurotic.
May goes further. Anxiety that keeps rising blurs the line between the self and the world of objects, which is why it feels as if it comes from everywhere at once. At the philosophical level he calls it the realization that one might cease to exist as a self, and he counts the loss of meaning as one form of that, alongside death.
The question left over
If fear has an object and anxiety has none, then anxiety is not a fear that has lost track of its cause. It points to something held so close that it is hard to see apart from oneself.
When I cannot say what I am afraid of, what is it in me that feels threatened?
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This page is about a school of psychotherapy. It is not medical advice and not emergency help. If you are in danger right now, contact your local emergency number, or find a helpline in your country at findahelpline.com.