The British Journal of Psychiatry 130: 386-391 (1977)
© 1977 The Royal College of Psychiatrists

Reflective processes and anxiety

SP Spitzer

Three hypotheses are abstracted from Laing's writings on the inter- relationships between self-consciousness, anxiety, and self-evaluation. Indicators of self-consciousness are obtained from an open-ended instrument which requires the respondent to provide twenty answers to the question (asked of himself): "Who am I?" Statements indicative of self-consciousness are those on which the respondent inserts a self- reference into the statement made about himself and are distinguished from statements in which no explicit self-reference is found. The data indicate that the mark of the self-conscious person is anxiety and that anxiety is largely restricted to those statements devoid of self- consciousness. The structure of a system likely to produce this configuration is considered by drawing upon Kierkegaard's conjectures on the joint emergence of consciousness and anxiety. Equating self- consciousness with "reflection", it is suggested that while reflection brings about anxiety in a system as a whole, the act of reflection deters the emergence of anxiety at the particular points within the system upon which it is deployed. Thus the function of reflection is two-fold, creating anxiety at the same time (but not at the same place) as anxiety is reduced.