an obvious external source. Neurotic anxiety is experienced when unaccept-
able id impulses are dangerously close to breaking into consciousness. It ’s
the type of anxiety that leads the ego to use defense mechanisms. Moral
anxiety is brought about by the superego in response to id impulses that
violate the superego ’s strict moral code. Generally, this is experienced as
guilt.
Many neo-Freudian theorists adopted and adapted Freud ’s ideas about
anxiety in their writings. For example, the neurotic coping styles described
by Horney are said to develop in an effort to reduce and avoid anxiety. Even-
tually, Adler, Anna Freud, and other neo-Freudians expanded the notion of
defenses to include the conscious and deliberate methods people use to dealwith their anxiety (Snyder, 1988). As if to acknowledge the Freudian legacy,
these theorists often retained the names of the unconscious defense mechan-
isms when describing conscious efforts to cope with anxiety. Thus today wespeak of someone being “in denial ”even when that person is fully aware of
the problem and intentionally trying to ignore it.
Coping with Anxiety
What do you do when faced with a potentially stressful situation, such as
waiting for your dentist to start drilling or getting ready for a job interview?
If you are like most people, you don ’t just accept the distress and fear as an
unavoidable part of life. Rather, most often we respond to stress-provoking
situations with calculated efforts to reduce our anxiety (Lazarus, 1968,
1974). Participants in one study were shown a rather grisly film on industrialsafety (Koriat, Melkman, Averill, & Lazarus, 1972). The film depicted sev-
eral serious accidents, including a scene in which a saw drives a board
through the abdomen of a workman who dies writhing and bleeding on thefloor. How did participants react to the film? As you might expect, each of
them tried a number of tactics to reduce their discomfort. The most common
strategy was to remind themselves that what they were seeing was only afilm, not a real accident. Another common tactic was to watch the film in an
emotionally detached manner, focusing on the technical aspects of the pro-
duction rather than the gruesome content. Interestingly, these two ap-
proaches sound similar to two Freudian defense mechanisms: denial and
intellectualization.
Psychologists refer to these efforts to cope with anxiety in the face of a
perceived threat as coping strategies. The number of strategies people use
when faced with a threatening situation is almost endless. People take long
walks, talk to friends with similar problems, meet with professional counse-
lors, drink alcohol, attack the source of the problem, ignore the source of the
problem, exercise, avoid people, find a silver lining, and pray. Women report
using more coping strategies than men (Tamres, Janicki, & Helgeson, 2002),
but researchers don’ t know if this difference is real or perhaps reflects a dif-
ference in recall or the degree to which men and women find various pro-
blems stressful.
Investigators also find that not everyone uses the same coping strategies to
reduce anxiety. After a lifetime of facing various threatening situations, each of
us develops an arsenal of strategies that we believe work for us. Consequently,126 CHAPTER 6 The Neo-Freudian Theories