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For anxiety, as we have come to use it to describe our characteristic state of mind, can be contrasted with the active fear of hunger, loss, violence, and death. Anxiety is the appropriate emotion when the immediate personal terror — of a volcano, an arrow, the sorcerer's spell, a stab in the back and other calamities, all directed against one's self — disappears.
因为用来描述我们特有的心态的焦虑，是与饥饿、损失、暴力和死亡带来的活生生的恐惧感相对照的。焦虑是在迫在眉睫的个人恐惧——一切直接针对人身的灾祸，如火山爆发、箭、术士的符咒、背后捅一刀——消失后才出现的一种相宜的情绪。
This is not to say that there isn't plenty to worry about in our world of today. The explosion of a bomb in the streets of a city whose name no one had ever heard before may set in motion forces which end up by ruining one's carefully planned education in law school, half a world away. But there is still not the personal, immediate, active sense of impending disaster that the savage knows. There is rather the vague anxiety, the sense that the future is unmanageable.
这并不是说在我们当今的世界上就没有诸多让人忧虑的事。一枚炸弹在一个过去从来没人听说过的城市的街道上爆炸，就可能会导致一些势力活跃起来，结果使自己精心设计的去地球另一边就读法学院的计划告吹。但是这仍然不是未开化的人所体会到的那种个人的、直接的、现实的、迫在眉睫的灾难感，而是一种相当模糊的焦虑，一种认为未来无法控制的感觉。
The kind of world that produces anxiety is actually a world of relative safety, a world inwhich no one feels that he himself is facing sudden death. Possibly sudden death may strikea certain number of unidentified other people — but not him. The anxiety exists as an uneasy state of mind, in which one has a feeling that something unspecified and undeterminable may go wrong. If the world seems to be going well, this produces anxiety — for good times may end. If the world is going badly — it may get worse. Anxiety tends to be without focus; the anxious person doesn't know whether to blame himself or other people. He isn't sure whether it is the current year or the Administration or a change in climate or the atom bomb that is to blame for this undefined sense of unease.
产生焦虑的世界实际上是一个相对安全的世界，一个没有人感到他自己面临着突然死亡的世界。也许突然死亡会落到一定数量的身份不明的其他人身上——但不是他自己。焦虑是一种不安的思想状态，处在这种思想状态的人会感到某种说不清、确不定的事情可能会出差错。如果这个世界的情况显得不错，这会产生焦虑——因为好日子可能会结束。如果世道不好——那还可能变得更糟。焦虑常常没有中心；焦虑的人不知道是该责怪自己还是责怪他人。他吃不准到底是什么引起这种无可名状的不安心情，是今年的运道还是政府，是气候变化还是因为原子弹。
