Fear-Peace-Fear & 3 Forms of Anxiety

>Fear -Peace -Fear: When I placed candles in the background I didn't even think about any significance they may have, but after reading what you wrote (Allan) especially the idea of 'peace' I could not stop thinking about my days as a small boy. Usually during my primary school holidays, my parents used to take me to my grandmother's farm and during some evenings the old lady would ask me to go and collect some firewood in a shed outside of her kitchen. Because of my fear of the dark, I would insist that she lights a candle for me to carry to the firewood barn. And for as long as I carried the candle all my fears were gone and I had my peace too. Now, one night she told me that if you move with a candle in the dark then people are going to see you from afar and they may attack you before you know it. As soon as I had that knowledge, my fear of the dark changed to a new fear of being seen from afar by some dangerous people. What used to signify peace and safety (a candle) for me changed into something that would make me vulnerable or attract enemies. This interests me a lot and I would look at it as from 'Fear to Peace and to Fear again'.

On a different note, in my readings I stumbled upon C. G. Boeree's (2011, Jan 03) writings about Sigmund Freud's philosophy on: http://webspace.ship.edu/cgboer/freud.html

C.G. Boeree wrote that Freud once said, "Life is not easy." And: -- if you -- feel threatened, feel overwhelmed, feel as if it were about to collapse under the weight of it all. This feeling is called , and it serves as a signal to the ego ... and without it the survival of the whole organism, is in jeopardy.Freud mentions three different kinds of anxieties: The first one is realistic anxiety, which you and I would call fear. Actually Freud did, too, in German. But his translators thought "fear" too mundane! Nevertheless, if I throw you into a pit of poisonous snakes, you might experience realistic anxiety. The second is moral anxiety. This is what we feel when the threat comes not from the outer, physical world, but from the internalized social world of the superego. It is, in fact, just another word for feelings like shame and guilt and the fear of punishment. The last is neurotic anxiety.This is the fear of being overwhelmed by impulses from the id. He said, if you have ever felt like you were about to "lose it," lose control, your temper, your rationality, or even your mind, you have felt neurotic anxiety.He further pointed out that, neurotic is actually the Latin word for nervous, so this is nervous anxiety. It is this kind of anxiety that intrigued Freud most, and we usually just call it anxiety, plain and simple.

Now the definition of anxiety as well as the three distinctions he makes, are things I had not taken my time to think about before. It is very easy to lump all the three forms of anxieties under one umbrella and sometimes try to address them like they are the same yet they have different sources and different effects. I find the neurotic anxiety as pointing directly to the discipline of Psychology and probably Freud's psychoanalysis. Just to digress a little bit I always remember having to debate one of Freud's classical definitions of religion as "an infantile neurosis" in my studies in Philosophy of Religion.In this he argues that religion has much to do with a people's mindset and the nostalgic effects of their childhood and they do not want to grow up but they would rather remain as kids whereby they look up to some adults or father figures in their lives, and so on.

Anywhere, I had not come across a writing that discusses the three categories of anxiety by highlighting on what fear does to the nervous system sometimes. I do not know what others think about such three distinctions of anxieties brought out in this article?