Abstract
INTRODUCTION:|Historians of the future may well take their cue from W. H. Auden and refer to the first six decades of the Twentieth Century as the "Age of Anxiety". In these sixty years the world has seldom, if ever, known a time that could be considered as one completely devoid of fears and anxieties. For the most part the years have provided a succession of alarming crises and apprehensive situations. The world has faced and survived, among its other stringent tests, two great global conflicts, a shattering economic depression, and the discovery of an awesome power for possible self-destruction. Perhaps the true keynote of this century was struck by Franklin Delano Roosevelt in his inaugural address in 1933 with his pronouncement "that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself." These words did more than catch the emotional state of man in the depths of the Great Depression; they trumpeted forth the warning that anxiety, the fear of fear, had become a force to be reckoned with in the modern world. A generation of men had grown up in the climate of war and had attained maturity in the artificial atmosphere of the "Roaring Twenties." The man of this generation, taken either singularly or collectively, has weathered his traumatic experiences, driven always by that force which Kierkegaard called Angst. He was, as Jean Wahl observes in his presentation of the Kierkegaardian figure, "essentially anxious and infinitely interested in respect to his existence." In the opinion of Basil King, the man of the Twentieth Century "was born into fear in that he was born into a world of which most of the energies were set against him."But what is fear? And what is anxiety? Can the two be equated with each other and with fright? If one is to reach any degree of understanding regarding the potency of these instrumental forces, he must seek definitions of greater range than those supplied by the average dictionary.