The freudian delineation of anxiety neurosis

legacy and rupture with Beard

Abstract

This article examines the place of anxiety in the constitution of psychoanalysis, focusing on the transition from George Miller Beard’s neurasthenia to Freud’s delineation of anxiety neurosis. Its objective is to identify the continuities and ruptures between the two models. Through a theoretical-historical analysis of Beard’s texts and Freudian writings produced between 1892 and 1917, the article investigates symptom description, sexual etiology, and the mechanisms of excitation accumulation and discharge. The results show that Freud retains Beard’s attention to physical and psychological symptoms but narrows the category of neurasthenia, assigns sexuality a specific etiological value, and distinguishes sexual exhaustion from the damming up of somatic excitation without psychical elaboration. It concludes that anxiety neurosis occupies a liminal position in the formation of psychoanalysis: it remains linked to the economic and physiological language of nineteenth-century medicine while shifting clinical practice from symptom description to the investigation of the mechanisms underlying symptom formation.