Anxiety always involves inner conflict . . Anxiety occurs at the point where some emerging potentiality or possibility faces the individual, some possibility of fulfilling his existence, but this very possibility involves the destroying of present security, which thereupon gives rise to the tendency to deny the new possibility. Here lies the truth of the symbol of the birth trauma as the prototype for all anxiety – an interpretation suggested by the etymological source of the word ANXIETY as “pain the narrows.”

---Rolo Max, The Discovery Of Being