Goldstein. Concept of Anxiety

1.
What is, according to Goldstein, the relationship between catastrophic

behaviour, ordered behaviour and environment?
 Catastrophic behavior is characterized by a mismatch between the organism and the

challenges of the environment: pathologically disturbed organism is unable to find an
adequate response to the tasks he is facing. (page 48-49)
 Ordered behavior, on the contrary, is an adequate response to environment when all the
mental and physical processes of the organism are adjusted to perform the task posed by the
environment. (page 49).
 The catastrophic reaction is also characterized by the dissolution of normal subject-object

relation between the organism and environment: disturbance is experienced not only with
regards to his own person (as loss of being conscious of the self), but also with regards to
environment (the surrounding world is no longer grasped in a clear, rational, ‘objective’
way). (page 49 and page 232)
 Aftereffect: in ordered behavior the organism is capable of smoothly approaching one task
after another, in disordered he remains unreactive for a prolonged period, in a state of
shock being unable to cope even with tasks which under normal circumstances would be
perfectly manageable for him. (49)
2. How to define the relation between anxiety and fear according to Goldstein? Is
his account convincing, in your opinion?
The peculiarity of Goldstein’s account can be seen by contrasting his views to the other common
conception of the relation between fear and anxiety cited in his text. He mentions that anxiety
sometimes is regarded as the highest degree of fear – a view with which he strictly opposes.
First of all, even though he admits that feeling of danger is characteristic both of fear and anxiety,
Goldstein rejects the thesis that anxiety can be considered as the highest degree of fear. He says
that there is an essential qualitative difference between these two affects. The difference lies in
both subjective (inner experience of the affect) and objective (bodily expression and organism’s
behavior in objective reality) aspects of the mentioned phenomena. Subjectively, fear is
experienced as danger posed by a particular object or a particular objective situation in the
environment. So, in fear there is still an object which can be grasped, understood as external to the
subject – and thus in fear there is a possibility to flee or remove the object. The subjective
experience of anxiety, by contrast, is characterized by the inability to establish a relation to the
object, anxiety is experienced as if coming from no particular place, thus there is no possibility to
flee – anxiety remains with the person who experiences it. There is no object that corresponds to
the affect and thus, since in anxiety a person experiences a dissolution of the objective world
external to him, he also experiences a dissolution of the self, of his personality, that is, he loses the
consciousness of himself as a subject in relation to the objective world. That is why severe anxiety
is absolutely overwhelming.
Objectively, the organism in the state of fear manifests appropriate defense reaction. In anxiety,
however, we can observe in an organism a distorted bodily expression, inadequate to the
environmental situation that the organism is facing. This inability to adequately respond to
environment’s demands is what objectively endangers the organism in the situation of anxiety.
In terms of taxonomic relation between fear and anxiety it must be noted that Goldstein considers
anxiety as a more fundamental phenomenon, from which we can also understand fear. Fear, he
notes, is not an affect that is essentially caused by some inherent/essential features of the object.
Fear is to be found in the specific relation between a person and the object. What is this relation?
It is the realization that the objective situation experienced by the organism might lead to anxiety.
That is why Goldstein says that fear is the experience of the possibility of the onset of anxiety: a
person knows anxiety from past experiences and, observing the objective situation, judges that this
might lead to anxiety. However, fear, contrary to anxiety, allows to clearly grasp the danger and
deliberate an appropriate response to it. Thus, by fearing we try to avoid anxiety. However, anxiety
is a more basic affect, experienced by all organic life, while fear – as distancing, objectivizing – is
what only humans are capable of.
Regarding the plausibility of Goldstein’s account I am inclined to say that his discussion of the
objective aspect of anxiety is a convincing one – it seems to be indeed illegitimate to separate the
subjectively experienced aspect of anxiety from the other part of this phenomenon which manifests
itself in the objective world. Also, conception of fear as an affect which can help avoid anxiety by
making the organism to be extremely concentrated on the objective external environment also
seems to be a plausible criterion distinguishing animals and humans. Even in the account of
Heidegger fear is said to be an affect which ‘has’ an object – but ‘having’ an object also implies
comprehending yourself as a subject in relation to the object. However, even Heidegger himself
says that animals only have their immediate environment, while humans have a world, meaning
that they can have ‘objective’ reality. Thus, the affect of anxiety as Goldstein describes it seems to
me much more compatible with the immediacy of environment experienced by animals that fear
would be. That is why Goldstein seems to be right in claiming that fear, and not anxiety, is
peculiarly human phenomenon.
3. What are, according to Goldstein, the differences and similarities between the
ways that animals, children and adults experience anxiety and cope with it?
 Anxiety experienced by adults, children and animals is structurally the same in all three
cases: it lies in the impossibility to cope in an adequate way with the environment. Since
we cannot proceed in life without having to face the “opposing forces of the environment”,
Goldstein concludes that anxiety and shock are essential parts of all organic life. (page 239)
 Children, being less mature than adults, are less capable of adequately reacting to the
challenges of the environment – thus prone to experiencing anxiety more often than adults
(since children more often confront situations which menace their existence and with which
they cannot cope). (page 235 and page 238)
 It always the relation between the nature of particular organism and its environment that
determines whether the situation will cause anxiety – for example, the animal can perceive
certain environment as overwhelming while a human child can act in it in a perfectly
coherent way. (page 236)
 Humans can try to avoid state of anxiety by resorting to fear: objectifying, rationalizing the
situation which causes anxiety. Animals cannot, they hardly perceive environment as
something objective, external to them. (page 237)

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What is, according to Goldstein, the relationship between catastrophic

 Catastrophic behavior is characterized by a mismatch between the organism and the

 The catastrophic reaction is also characterized by the dissolution of normal subject-object

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