survival. Anxiety signals a potential threat, which requires an adaptive response. As Freud pointed out, normal anxiety contributes to the mastery of difficult situations and thus to personal growth. Normal anxiety exists in two major forms: instinctive anxiety (instinctive or innate fear), which is built into the organism and is under more rigid genetic control, and learned anxiety (learned fear), to which an organism may be genetically predisposed but which is basically acquired through experience. As we have seen, instinctive anxiety can easily become associated through learning with a
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