Reviews
An enlightening tour of anxiety, set at a sensible pace, with an exceptional scholar and writer leading the way.
What is fascinating about this book is less the facts it presents than its ambiguities: anxiety will always force us to question the lines between the normal and the disordered, nervousness and depression, fears and pathologies.
Horwitz gives us some history and some insights to allay our fears about anxiety. And in helping us to understand anxiety, he opens new doors to coping with it as a chronic condition.
Horwitz provides and ambitious book about anxiety with impressive breadth and depth in a very readable 161 pages... As a sociologist, I would incorporate Anxiety: A Short History into undergraduate or graduate courses on health and illness, mental health, or emotion. This book would also be quite valuable in a wide range of psychology, history, and other social science courses. And, as it is a very accessible yet intellectual book, a savvy reader with an interest in anxiety would enjoy it tremendously.
Horwitz... provides a historical account of the universal phenomenon of anxiety in this extremely interesting book... In this expansive treatment (for such a small book), Horwitz reminds readers of the importance of distinguishing between normal and pathological anxiety.
Horwitz's touch is light and ironical and his scholarship impeccable, and the book is thoroughly to be recommended as a disease biography that gives the whole trajectory and leaves little of importance out. It is a book to be savored by disease buffs.
Any new students or practitioners to mental health would benefit from this book.
... the definitive overview of the history of anxiety.
Allan V. Horwitz's Anxiety: A Short History is a lucid, erudite and brisk intellectual history driven by a clear and persuasive central argument.
This short book achieves its aims, neatly narrating the chronology of anxiety over various contexts. It also offers a good introduction to those wanting to know more about the history of anxiety and should prove to be a useful addition to the sociology of mental health, especially in relation to teaching and the development of scholarship in this important area.
Anxiety is fundamental to the human condition, an important component of who we are. With us for two millennia and more, it continues with us today, sanitized, medicalized, and highly prevalent. This book does a good job of explaining how that has occurred and the continuity of anxiety over time... [Anxiety] is an excellent book, which I recommend.
A highly readable and engaging book in the style of a biography.
A wise guide through the historical path of anxiety conceptualizations.
Book Details
Foreword, by Charles E. Rosenberg
Acknowledgments
1. Afraid
2. Classical Anxiety
3. From Medicine to Religion—and Back
4. The Nineteenth Century's New Uncertainties
5. The Freudian Revolution
6. Psychology's
Foreword, by Charles E. Rosenberg
Acknowledgments
1. Afraid
2. Classical Anxiety
3. From Medicine to Religion—and Back
4. The Nineteenth Century's New Uncertainties
5. The Freudian Revolution
6. Psychology's Ascendance
7. The Age of Anxiety
8. The Future of Anxiety
Notes
Index