• Anxiety disorders are a universal phenomenon: exaggerations of evolutionarily hard-wired reactions to dangers to the body or to the psyche.
• Physicians in earlier times focused on the somatic (“objective”) manifestations of anxiety, such as palpitations, shortness of breath, and the like.
• Treatment in earlier times was directed primarily to these somatic manifesta- tions.
• Even as recently as the late nineteenth century, the various disorders we subsume under the heading of anxiety were described and considered as separate enti- ties, not yet unified as elements of a particular class of disorders.
• The psychoanalytic pioneers drew attention to the subjective element in anxiety disorders. Professionals associated with general psychiatry began to concep- tualize anxiety as the common thread running through a particular group of conditions such as panic disorder, obsessive-compulsive disorder, agoraphobia, and social anxiety. Therapeutic strategies were reshaped so as to take into con- sideration both the objective and the subjective counterparts to the various anxiety-related disorders.
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