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Reflective Processes and Anxiety

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 January 2018

Stephan P. Spitzer
Stephan P. Spitzer*
Affiliation:
Department of Sociology, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, Minnesota 55455, USA
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Summary

Three hypotheses are abstracted from Laing's writings on the interrelationships between self-consciousness, anxiety, and self-evaluation. Indicators of self-consciousness are obtained from an open-ended instrument which requires the respondent to provide twenty answers to the question (asked of himself): ‘Who am I ?’ Statements indicative of self-consciousness are those on which the respondent inserts a self-reference into the statement made about himself and are distinguished from statements in which no explicit self-reference is found. The data indicate that the mark of the self-conscious person is anxiety and that anxiety is largely restricted to those statements devoid of self-consciousness. The structure of a system likely to produce this configuration is considered by drawing upon Kierkegaard's conjectures on the joint emergence of consciousness and anxiety. Equating self-consciousness with ‘reflection’, it is suggested that while reflection brings about anxiety in a system as a whole, the act of reflection deters the emergence of anxiety at the particular points within the system upon which it is deployed. Thus the function of reflection is two-fold, creating anxiety at the same time (but not at the same place) as anxiety is reduced.

Type
Research Article
Information
The British Journal of Psychiatry , Volume 130 , Issue 4 , April 1977 , pp. 386 - 391
Copyright
Copyright © Royal College of Psychiatrists, 1977 

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