The Nature of Anxiety

My choice of subject for this Memorial Lecture is one which I hope would have been approved of by the late Dr. Shorvon, who must have often applied his great therapeutic acumen to the treatment of anxious patients. I intend to present neither a compendious review of some aspect of anxiety nor a catalogue of recent research work. Rather, I shall outline some conceptual and practical problems met in investigating an emotion. Such problems have occupied medical men and also many philosophers, psychologists and theologians. I shall outline the types of anxiety, using the term loosely, and then attempt a scientific analysis ending with some speculative model-making.