Section Headings [ Jealousy and Narcissism] [ Guilt and Pride] [ Love and Hate]

[ Vanity and Self-Pity] [ Envy] [ Anxiety]

The previous articles in the chapter The Nature of Emotion, beginning with Feelings, dealt with general theory about emotion and unconscious ideas. In this chapter, I turn to the characteristics of a few important emotions.

Anxiety = fear + vanity.

Anxiety is a compound emotion and consists of two simpler emotions, those of fear and vanity. So anxiety can be experienced in the fear mode or the vanity mode.

Anxiety is a cerebral emotion: when it is intense it ‘fogs’ the mind, producing mental tiredness and the incapacity for intellectual work. I feel it most in my eyes as a regular ache, which generates a sensitivity to bright light. When I am writing or typing under a bright light I control the eye-ache by regularly splashing my eyes with cold water, perhaps every half hour or so. Both the mental tiredness and the ache are intensified when combined with any mode of self-pity. (There are three forms of self-pity: self-pity as a mode of jealousy, or as a mode of guilt, or just as itself.)

In social company, anxiety (in vanity mode) stimulates a compulsive need to speak (I get embarrassed by my silence) or compulsive behaviour (such as smoking, drinking alcohol, nail-biting, over-eating). When I have this fuzzy head at home I usually relax on the settee and doze. The cessation of anxiety can be quite sudden and produces an immediate clearing of the head – I ‘wake up’ from my semi-consciousness. The need for a long sleep time each night is usually due to the presence of anxiety or to a mode of self-pity.

Anxiety keeps the person focused on negative emotions ; if I am absorbed in narcissistic joy or jealous love, then if anxiety arises I usually switch out of them into self-pity modes or even hostile feelings.

The fear mode of anxiety is generated by a dictatorial conscience, or the ‘voice of authority’. This voice has two origins.
It can originate from the family setting: the parents’ commands become internalised into an oppressive conscience – ‘do as you are told’. The voice of authority also comes from one’s soul: the soul directs oneself to practise self-control (here the ‘voice’ is not a clear verbal one but more like an intuitive prompting). If I do something that my soul does not like, then I immediately feel a burst of anxiety in my eyes. However, this ‘voice’ is a subtle one and is unlikely to be noticed by a person who has not developed sufficient sensitivity.

More ideas on anxiety are described under the article What is Anxiety ?, in the chapter, A1 : The Nature of Abreaction.

The next chapter describing the methods of identifying emotions, beginning with the article Two Procedures.

Copyright @2002  Ian Heath
All Rights Reserved

The copyright is mine and the articles are free to use. They can be reproduced anywhere, so long as the source is acknowledged.