Mostafa Malekian: A Typology of the Human from Freud's Perspective: Three Types of Anxiety

Freud said that anxiety and apprehension (or, in my terms, restlessness and unease) are widespread among human beings and almost no human is free of them. Freud divided anxiety into three categories, and the psychology of every human being gives one of these three predominance over the other two. In other words, one way of classifying human beings in terms of psychological structure is to see which anxiety predominates in them (we speak of predominance because, according to Freud, all human beings are subject to all three anxieties) and thus produces a different personality and character. Anxiety refers to a state in which a person cannot come to terms with something and accept it.

Freud said that human beings have anxiety about three things:

1- One is about realities. There are people whom realities make restless, such as those who cannot come to terms with the reality of aging, illness, poverty, low IQ, and so on. Freud called anxiety about reality fear.

2- The second type is social anxiety, meaning a person cannot get along with other human beings and is always worried about what others think of them, lest they become upset with them; in short, the presence of the other is unsettling for them. In Sartre's terms, the presence of the other is hell. Freud called this anxiety shame.

3- The third type relates to when a person is troubled by themselves and cannot get along with themselves, and in the words of that poet, they have become a problem to themselves. In other words, the person's inner critic is overly awake and has become a hammer upon their head, and despite the fact that the other party has forgiven them, they do not forgive themselves. Freud called this anxiety guilt (of course, guilt here does not only have a religious meaning and refers to any kind of wrongdoing). A very vast and fascinating literature has formed around this view of Freud and his commentators, which there is no opportunity to address here.

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Audio file of Mostafa Malekian's talk on the typology of the human from Freud's perspective

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A Typology of the Human from Freud's Perspective

Source: Session 34 of Moral Psychology (Porsesh Institute)

Excerpted by Professor Mostafa Malekian's Channel

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