Changes

[[Psychiatrist]]s also distinguish between generalised [[anxiety]] states, when "free-floating anxiety" is present most of the time, and "panic attacks," which are "intermittent episodes of acute anxiety."<ref>Hughes, 1981: 48-9</ref>

==Sigmund Freud==

[[Freud]] distinguishes between "[[anxiety|automatic anxiety]]," when the [[anxiety]] arises directly as a result of a [[trauma]]tic situation, and "[[anxiety|anxiety as signal]]," when the [[anxiety]] is actively reproduced by the [[ego]] as a warning of an anticipated situation of danger.

==Jacques Lacan==

This theme (with its distinctly [[Klein]]ian tone) remains an important aspect of [[Lacan]]'s account of [[anxiety]] thereafter, and marks an apparent difference between [[Lacan]] and [[Freud]]: whereas [[Freud]] posits that one of the causes of [[anxiety]] is [[separation]] from the [[mother]], [[Lacan]] argues that it is precisely a [[lack]] of such [[separation]] which induces [[anxiety]].

After 1953, [[Lacan]] comes increasingly to articulate [[anxiety]] with his concept of the [[real]], a [[trauma]]tic element which remains [[external]] to [[symbolisation], and hence which lacks any possible mediation.

This [[real]] is "the essential object which isn't an object any longer, but this something faced with which all words cease and all categories fail, the object of anxiety par excellence."<ref>{{S2}} p. 164</ref>

As well as linking [[anxiety]] with the [[real]], [[Lacan]] also locates it in the [[imaginary]] [[order]] and contrasts it with [[guilt]], which he situates in the [[symbolic]].<ref>{{L}} "[[Works of Jacques Lacan|Fetishism: The Symbolic, the Imaginary and the Real]]" (with W. Granoff), 1956. M. Balint (ed.), ''Perversions: Psychodynamics and Therapy'', New York: Random House, London: Tavistock. pp. 272-3</ref>