title: Understanding anxiety disorders: the psychology and the psychopathology of defence mechanisms against threats.
abstract: The mental defense system plays a central role in ensuring individual and species survival from dangers. The cost of its activation is a decrease in freedom in favour of an increase in safety. Anxiety, fear and panic are the organizing principles of this system: anxiety arising in response to the anticipation of a threat, fear arising in response to external environmental threats and panic arising in response to internal somatic homeostatic threats. beyond the correct identification of the above-mentioned organizing principles, making correct therapeutic choices is linked to the ability to discriminate among physiological, pathological and pathophysiological anxiety phenomena. The intensity of the defense reaction is inadequate in determining that its pathological nature is related to the subjective evaluation of a disproportional reaction between individual resources and the potential threat. Very often, the anxious defensive reaction, which to an external observer seems disproportional, is coherent and adequate relative to the personal experience of the patient, and thus, it is not pathological.
authors: Department of Clinical Neuroscience, Villa San Benedetto Menni, Hermanas Hospitalarias, Albese con Cassano, Como, Italy. pernagp@tin.it
authors: Giampaolo
authors: G
authors: Perna
mesh_terms: D001008:Anxiety Disorders / Q000523:psychology*; D003674:Defense Mechanisms; D005239:Fear; D006801:Humans; D010200:Panic