Zizly

William James (1890) made an important distinction between the 'I' (the private inner self) and the 'Me' (the self as an object of self reflexive thought), and argued that the latter had material, spiritual and social aspects. He famously argued that we have as many selves as there are people about whose opinions we care, and so the self changes from one situation to another. This view was to influence the work of Cooley (1909) who spoke of the 'Looking Glass Self' - a reflection of the imagined judgments about ourselves made by other people (cf.ac.uk). For people with social phobia / social anxiety, this reflexive view of the self becomes central and distorted. That is to say that, in social situations the person with social anxiety becomes fixated on, and exaggerates the perceptions others may have. According to William James, to understand the "me," we may begin by dividing the history of it into three parts, relating respectively to-its constitue...

History Anxiety was first recognized as a medical diagnostic entity in the late 1800s. In the early 1900s, Sigmund Freud recognized anxiety as a central component of mental diseases, and the term "anxiety neurosis" was developed to describe a variety of types of anxiety. It was not until 1980, however, that generalized anxiety disorder (GAD) was first identified as a diagnostic entity in the DSM IV, GAD was changed from a category describing individuals who do not fit other anxiety categories to a well-defined condition with sound diagnostic criteria (Roerig,  Statistics "About 4: million adult Americans suffer from [Generalized Anxiety Disorder] during the course of a year" (Web Md 2006). The disorder is twice as common in women as in men and ussually has its first onset in adolescence or childhood but can first occur in adults over twenty (Roerig, 2006) Furthermore the University of Ohio presents the following statistics regarding prevalence: ina community ...