In the Age of Anxiety

I sought the Lord, and he heard me, and delivered me from all my fears.

--Psalms 34: 4

If King David knew what he was talking about, then Freud was off base. From many of the Psalms, it is plain that Psalmist David understood the meaning of anxiety. Psychologist Orval Hobart Mowrer, associate professor of education at Harvard University, assured the top U.S. scientists convening last week at Chicago (see SCIENCE) that David, for all his poetic language, was on solid psychiatric ground.

Modern psychiatrists, Mowrer said, have been a long while catching up. Freud's emphasis on repressed sexual energy helped put them on the wrong track. Human anxiety, reported Mowrer, is the result of dammed-up moral force, rather than dammed-up libido; as this force seeps out into a man's consciousness, he experiences it not as guilt about a real fault or sin, but as anxiety.

Anxiety, Mowrer said, is not the result of too little self-indulgence, but of too much; not of over-restraint and inhibition, but of irresponsibility, guilt and immaturity. "Above all," Mowrer concluded, ". . . the ethical accomplishment of untold past generations, as imbedded in the conscience of modern men & women, is not a stupid, malevolent archaic incubus, but a challenge and guide for the individual in his quest for self-fulfillment and harmonious integration." (For a psychologist, it was almost a psalm.)

Freud regarded anxiety as foreign, unfriendly and destructive. But Mowrer believes that conscience and the anxiety it produces can be man's good companions. Under proper treatment, anxiety can be transformed into guilt and moral fear, to which unhappy man can make some realistic readjustment. Mowrer's prescription: a changed attitude toward social authority and its "internal representative," anxiety. If man's attitude is not changed, he will continue to seek relief from anxiety in such futile devices as tobacco, alcohol, gambling, "sexual monomania," gluttony.

Other medical highlights from Chicago:

P: Food is often used to relieve anxiety, reported Dr. Charlotte G. Babcock, lecturer in psychiatry at the University of Chicago. Example: a mother, because she identifies herself with her child, is anxious until he is satisfied and feels more comfortable after giving a crying baby a bottle. On the other hand, some people may refuse food because a feeling of guilt follows the pleasure they get from satisfying hunger.

P: The drinking refrain "nobody knows how dry I am" shows real insight into what makes an alcoholic drink, according to Dr. Roger J. Williams of the University of Texas. The alcoholic's craving for alcohol has a physiological or biochemical basis that is not generally understood; his reaction to a given quantity of alcohol is violently different from that of the normal individual: "As long as we deal with the average man we will fail to encounter an alcoholic addict because the average man doesn't become addicted." This physiological basis seems to be inherited: investigators report that alcoholism is 74 times as common a cause of psychoses among men of Irish descent as among those of Jewish descent.

P: Dr. Anton J. Carlson, dean of U.S. physiologists and president of the Research Council on Problems of Alcohol, was suspicious of white bread. Dr. Carlson pointed an accusing finger at nitrogen trichloride, a bleaching agent used in 90% of all white flour milled in the U.S. The bleaching agent makes wheat protein act like a nerve poison; dogs given large amounts of the bleached flour developed running fits. It may make people nervous, too, reported Dr. Carlson--and may even make it easier for them to become alcoholics. Said he: "Maybe we should provide, without delay, more iron in the education of our children, and less nerve poison in their bread."

P: Girls react more violently to stresses & strains than boys, but they relax and recover more quickly. This difference probably explains why men are more likely to have stomach ulcers than women, declared Dr. L. W. Sontag, of the Fels Research Institute at Yellow Springs, Ohio.

P: Treatment of asthma, hay fever and other allergy diseases has become too easy with new and powerful anti-histaminic drugs, warned Dr. Charles P. Huttrer of Manhattan's Warner Institute for Therapeutic Research. The danger is that doctors are inclined to ignore possible secondary effects of the drugs. Such "histaminoid accidents" cause allergic reactions elsewhere in the body, may make the cure worse than the disease.

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