on ‘A Brief History of Anxiety’
Written on July 3, 2008
A Brief History of Anxiety…Yours and Mine by Patricia Pearson (Bloomsbury USA, 2008) is partly a memoir of the author’s experience of “generalized anxiety disorder” and partly an examination of anxiety as a social and psychological phenomenon, flavored with lots of wry humor, as evidenced by the opening sentence:
Given my druthers, I would prefer not to be afraid of the following: phone bills, ovarian cancer, black bears, climate change, walking on golf courses at night, being blundered into by winged insects; unseemly heights, running out of gas, having the mole on my back that I can feel, but not see, secretly morph into a malignant melanoma.
One of the books Pearson often refers to is Landscapes of fear by Yi-Fu Tuan (Pantheon Book, 1979)
See also Pearson’s Post (author’s website) and “Hall of Phobias”
New York Times review
interview at Enter Stage Right
Filed in: psychology.
