Sisyphus,' is an interpretation of the unavoidable limits to which everyone who is human is condemned. The constructive way of dealing with anxiety in this sense consists of learning to live with it, accepting it as a 'teacher,' to borrow Kirkegaard's phrase, to school us in confronting our human destiny.

But attempts to evade anxiety are not only doomed to failure. In running from anxiety you lose your most precious opportunities for the emergence of yourself, and for your education as s human being.

what is significant about rejection, as a source of neurotic anxiety, is how it is interpreted by the child. In impact upon the child, there is radical difference between rejection as an objective experience (which does not necessarily result in subjective conflict for the child), and rejection as a subjective experience. The important question psychologically is whether the child felt himself or herself rejected.

One of the few blessings of living in an age of anxiety is that we are forced to become aware of ourselves.

Self-inflation and conceit are generally the external signs of inner emptiness and self-doubt; a show of pride is one of the most common covers for anxiety.

The weight placed upon the value of competitive succes is so great in our culture and the anxiety occasioned by the possibility of failure to achieve this goal is so prevalent that there is reason for assuming that individual competitive succes is both the dominant goal in our culture and the most pervasive ocassion for anxiety.

But in neurotic anxiety, two conditions are necessary: (1) the threat must be to a vital value; and (2) the threat must be present in juxtaposition with another threat so that the individual cannot avoid one threat without being confronted by another. In patterns of neurotic anxiety, the values held essential to the individual's existence as a personality are in contradiction with each other.

The line between 'normal' and 'neurotic' begins to appear when any activity becomes compulsive - that is, when the person feels pushed to perform the act because it habitually allays his anxiety rather than because of any intrinsic wish to perform the act.

A fear is a reaction to a specific danger, to which the individual can make a specific adjustment. But what characterizes anxiety is the feeling of diffuseness and uncertainty and the experience of helplessness toward the threat.