if the person did not have anxiety, he or she would also not have freedom. Anxiety demonstrates that values, no matter how beclouded, do exist in the person. Without values there would be only barren despair.

In our advance to a greater life, we confront an initial obstacle. Unless we remove or overcome this obstacle, we can rise no further. We spend our time in a daze of diminished existence, neither awake nor asleep. We resign ourselves to compromise and routine, seeing the world through the categories of the prevailing culture or the methods of established ways of thinking. We reconcile ourselves to the mutilation of our experience that we begin to accept when we entered on a particular course of life. We allow ourselves to be subdued by the carapace of diminished experience that formed around is, as we grew older. For the vast majority of men and women, overwhelming economic necessity and drudgery overwhelm and disguise a stupefaction that would otherwise be apparent. For the increasing number of people who, with the material progress of society, are released from grinding material constraint, there is no disguise. In this way, we cease to live as embodied spirit: as the context-bound but context-resisting agents that we really are. That which is most precious—life itself—we give away in return for nothing. We belittle ourselves, wrongly mistaking our belittlement for a fate as inescapable as our mortality, our groundlessness, and our insatiability.

What is more, the whole apparatus of life has become so complex and the processes of production, distribution, and consumption have become so specialized and subdivided, that the individual person loses confidence in his own unaided capacities: he is increasingly subject to commands he does not understand, at the mercy of forces over which he exercises no effective control, moving to a destination he has not chosen. Unlike the taboo-ridden savage, who is often childishly over-confident in the powers of his shaman or magician to control formidable natural forces, however inimical, the machine-conditioned individual feels lost and helpless as day by day he metaphorically punches his time-card, takes his place on the assembly line, and at the end draws a pay check that proves worthless for obtaining any of the genuine goods of life.

This lack of close personal involvement in the daily routine brings a general loss of contact with reality: instead of continuous interplay between the inner and the outer world, with constant feedback or readjustment and with stimulus to fresh creativity, only the outer world-and mainly the collectively organized outer world of the power system-exercises authority: even private dreams must be channeled through television, film, and disc, in order to become acceptable.

With this feeling of alienation goes the typical psychological problem of our time, characterized in classic terms by Erik Erikson as the 'Identity Crisis.' In a world of transitory family nurture, transitory human contacts, transitory jobs and places of residence, transitory sexual and family relations, the basic conditions for maintaining continuity and establishing personal equilibrium disappear. The individual suddenly awakens, as Tolstoi did in a famous crisis in his own life at Arzamas, to find himself in a strange, dark room, far from home, threatened by obscure hostile forces, unable to discover where he is or who he is, appalled by the prospect of a meaningless dea

Anxiety (loneliness or “abandonment anxiety” being its most painful form) overcomes the person to the extent that he loses orientation in the objective world. To lose the world is to lose one's self, and vice versa; self and world are correlates. The function of anxiety is to destroy the self-world relationship, i.e., to disorient the victim in space and time and, so long as this disorientation lasts, the person remains in the state of anxiety. Anxiety overwhelms the person precisely because of the preservation of this disorientation. Now if the person can reorient himself — as happens, one hopes, in psychotherapy — and again relate himself to the world directly, experientially, with his senses alive, he overcomes the anxiety. My slightly anthropomorphic terminology comes out of my work as a therapist and is not out of place here. Though the patient and I are entirely aware of the symbolic nature of this (anxiety doesn’t do anything, just as libido or sex drives don’t), it is often helpful for the patient to see himself as struggling against an “adversary.” For then, instead of waiting forever for the therapy to analyze away the anxiety, he can help in his own treatment by taking practical steps when he experiences anxiety such as stopping and asking just what it was that occurred in reality or in his fantasies that preceded the disorientation which cued off the anxiety. He is not only opening the doors of his closet where the ghosts hide, but he often can also then take steps to reorient himself in his practical life by making new human relationships and finding new work which interests him.

Anxiety can be replaced only by the freedom whose harsh requirements are its cause. Being free requires us to release the brakes that anxiety represents in order to accept and appropriate our proper spiritual fulfillment or perhaps even to recognize, if that is what we in the end believe, that no such prospect is in store.

A most curious phenomenon of the personality, [...] is that in which the individual seems to be the vehicle of a personality that is not his own. Someone else's personality seems to 'possess' him and to be finding expression through his words and actions, whereas the individual's own personality is temporarily 'lost' or 'gone'. This phenomenon is one of the most important in occasioning disruption in the sense of one's own identity when it occurs unwanted and compulsively. [...] The way in which the individual's self and personality is profoundly modified even to the point of threatened loss of his or her own identity and sense of reality by engulfment by such an alien sub-identity [Ontological insecurity].

Life is impoverished, it loses in interest, when the highest stake in the game of living, life itself, may not be risked. It becomes as shallow and empty as, let us say, an American flirtation.

هذا الفقدان للذاتية لا يزال يزيد من طابع الارغام على التطابق, انه يعني ان الانسان لا يستطيع ان يتأكد من نفسه الا اذا عاش حسبما يتوقع الآخرون. واذا لم نعش حسب هذه الصورة فاننا لا نخاطر فحسب بالاستهجان والعزلة المتزايدة, بل نخاطر بفقد ذاتية شخصيتنا التي تعني تعرض سلامتنا العقلية للخطر.

if you have had to force yourself to do something, you are less willing or less able to exert self-control when the next challenge comes around. The phenomenon has been named ego depletion.

The impoverishment of economics related to its distancing from ethics affects both welfare economics (narrowing its reach and relevance) and predictive economics (weakening its behavioural foundations).

However, the disappearance of domination does not entail freedom. Instead, it makes freedom and constraint coincide. Thus, the achievement-subject gives itself over to compulsive freedom--that is, to the free constraint of maximizing achievement. Excess work and performance escalate into auto-exploitation.

The worker is becoming impoverished absolutely, i.e., he is actually becoming poorer than before; he is compelled to live worse, to eat worse, to suffer hunger more, and to live in basements and attics.

If a man is free - not in prison, the Army, a monastery, hospital, spaceship, submarine - and living a normal life with the usual multiplicity of social relations with individuals of both sexes, it may be that he is incapable of experiencing the total impact of another individual upon himself. The competing influences and conflicting forces of other personalities may dilute one's psychic and emotional perception, to the extent that one does not and cannot receive all that the other person is capable of sending.

1. Where in your life or your work are you currently pursuing comfort, when what's called for is a little discomfort? Pursuing the life projects that matter to you the most will almost always entail not feeling fully in control of your time, immune to the painful assaults of reality, or confident about the future. It means embarking on ventures that might fail, perhaps because you'll find you lacked sufficient talent; it means risking embarrassment, holding difficult conversations, disappointing others, and getting so deep into relationships that additional suffering — when bad things happen to those you care about — is all but guaranteed. And so we naturally tend to make decisions about our daily use of time that prioritize anxiety-avoidance instead. Procrastination, distraction, commitment-phobia, clearing the decks, and taking on too many projects at once are all ways of trying to maintain the illusion that you're in charge of things. In a subtler way, so too is compulsive worrying, which offers its own gloomy but comforting sense that you're doing something constructive to try to stay in control. James Hollis recommends asking of every significant decision in life: "Does this choice diminish me, or enlarge me?" The question circumvents the urge to make decisions in the service of alleviating anxiety and instead helps you make contact with your deeper intentions for your time. If you're trying to decide whether to leave a given job or relationship, say, or to redouble your commitment to it, asking what would make you happiest is likely to lure you toward the most comfortable option, or else leave you paralyzed by indecision. But you usually know, intuitively, whether remaining in a relationship or job would present the kind of challenges that will help you grow as a person (enlargement) or the kind that will cause your soul to shrivel with every passing week (diminishment). Choose uncomfortable enlargement over comfortable diminishment whenever you can.