ANXIETY is not a new human condition. Sigmund Freud wrote a book entitled The Problem of Anxiety at the beginning of the 20th century.
Baruch Spinoza, the 17th-century Dutch philosopher wrote about what he described as ‘dread’ in the human condition. Victorian novelists wrote extensively about characters, particularly women, who exhibited many of the symptoms of anxiety disorders, from fainting to hysteria.
The novelist Franz Kafka wrote movingly about his own experience of anxiety, describing it as a kind of paralysis, likening it to ‘the feeling of having in the middle of my body a ball of wool that quickly winds itself up, its innumerable threads pulling from the surface of my body to itself’.