The dynamics of anxiety and hysteria

This book is the fifth in a series of monographs in which the author has reported experimental studies and theoretical work carried out by members of the Psychological Department of the Institute of Psychiatry, which is a school of the University of London, a constituent part of the Post-Graduate Medical Federation, and associated with the Maudsley and the Bethlehem Royal Hospitals. In the first two volumes, Dimensions of Personality and The Scientific Study of Personality, the concern was in the main with the dimensional analysis of personality, with psychiatric nosology, and with taxonomic methods and studies generally. The Psychology of Politics carried this work forward by making certain deductions from the general theory on to the field of attitudes and sentiments, and by showing the interconnections between personality and political activities. The Structure of Human Personality served to review the literature, in so far as it could be said to be of an experimental or at least empirical nature , and thus put the work previously reported into its proper setting. In this book an attempt has been made to go beyond classification to a study of dynamics; to pass from nosology to aetiology, from description to causation. As the title will indicate, however the efforts have been restricted to a rather narrow field; no attempt has been made to deal with psychotic disorders, for instance. This task is reserved for a later publication.