The Anxieties That Keep Us Awake

When we think of babies, we usually picture adorable, innocent, and loving creatures. Yet, the darker aspects of human nature begin to emerge as early as infancy.

Many of the psychological struggles we face as adults—anxiety, guilt, and depression—are deeply rooted in our earliest relationship: the one we formed with our mother. Thinkers like Freud and Klein, in their attempts to understand the architecture of our inner world, have explored how our mind takes shape during the first months of life and how these formative experiences continue to shape us in adulthood.

But here, things become complicated. Because the mind we are discussing is one that does not yet have language. Babies cannot verbalize their experiences, and yet their emotions and fears are just as intense as those of an adult—perhaps even more so.

Therefore, when we discuss this early stage of life, we must distinguish between concepts that genuinely describe a baby’s experience and those that are merely projections of adult psychology onto an infant’s mind.

The Challenges of Understanding the Infant Mind

There are three fundamental difficulties in discussing early infancy:

1. In infancy, physical and mental states are deeply intertwined.

When we talk about anxiety as adults, we think of it as a psychological state. But for a baby, anxiety is inseparable from physical sensations—hunger, stomach cramps, or exhaustion. Anxiety is not a thought but a direct bodily experience.

2. Psychoanalytic terms can have different meanings.

Melanie Klein’s concept of the “depressive position” is not the same as what we commonly understand as depression. Instead, it describes the moment when a baby realizes that they can harm the person they love (the mother) and feel the urge to repair that damage. This type of guilt is constructive—it leads to acts of reparation.

3. The source of emotions is not always the external world.

Freud believed that our inner world consists of desires and fears directed toward external objects. Klein, however, argued that much of our mental life is governed by internal objects—mental representations of our mother and father, distinct from the actual people. Many of our anxieties do not originate from real external threats but from these internalized parental figures.

With these complexities in mind, we must ask:

• How do anxiety, guilt, and depression first emerge?

• How does an infant experience their relationship with their mother?

• And most importantly, what can we, as adults, learn from these early emotional experiences?

The Birth of Anxiety in Infancy

To understand anxiety’s origins, we must try to imagine how a baby perceives the world.

For an infant, the world is their mother.

In the earliest months, the infant’s mind cannot yet distinguish between itself and the external world. The mother’s absence is not simply a lonely moment—it is a full-blown existential crisis.

To a baby, the mother is everything: food, warmth, comfort, security.

When the mother is present, the world is safe. But when she is gone?

The infant lacks the cognitive ability to think, “She will return soon.”

For them, her absence feels absolute and eternal.

At this moment, the infant experiences anxiety for the first time.

This is where Klein’s concept of persecutory anxiety comes into play. If a baby perceives the mother’s absence as threatening, this anxiety is projected outward: the world itself becomes hostile. The infant’s mind fills with an undefined but overwhelming sense of dread.

This anxiety, born in infancy, echoes throughout adult life.

As adults, we often feel anxiety as if it is caused by external dangers.

Yet, in reality, much of our anxiety stems from fears we internalized long ago—fears that originated in our earliest relationship.

The Emergence of Guilt and the Desire for Repair

Following anxiety, another powerful emotion takes hold: guilt.

As the infant grows, they begin to experience contradictory emotions toward their mother.

One moment, they feel gratitude for being fed and comforted. The next moment, they feel rage at being left alone.

This is the experience of ambivalence—the capacity to feel both love and anger toward the same person.

At this stage, Klein’s “depressive position” emerges.

The infant realizes that they can feel hostility toward their mother, and this realization creates guilt:

“What if I have harmed her?”

This is what Klein called depressive guilt—but unlike pathological guilt, it is a productive feeling. It leads to a desire to repair the relationship.

We can see echoes of this in our adult relationships.

Whenever we hurt someone we love, we feel the need to make amends.

If we are psychologically healthy, we act on this need.

However, not all guilt is constructive.

Some people experience what Klein called persecutory guilt:

• Instead of believing they have caused harm and wanting to fix it, they feel as if they are being punished by an external force.

• They do not feel responsible for the guilt; they believe they are being made to feel guilty by someone else.

• The guilt is accompanied by a sense of injustice—a belief that they are being unfairly blamed.

Often, persecutory guilt originates from early infancy, when a baby develops an internalized, punishing mother figure. This figure remains in the adult’s psyche, constantly making them feel at fault, even when no wrongdoing has occurred.

At this point, guilt and depression become linked.

If an individual does not believe they can repair the damage they have caused, guilt can evolve into depression.

The Roots of Depression in Infancy

To understand depression, we must grasp a fundamental truth about the human psyche: depression is not just about sadness or fatigue. In psychoanalytic terms, depression is a response to loss—more specifically, the belief that a loss is irreparable.

For an infant, the most critical loss is that of their mother’s presence and love. If a baby feels that their bond with their mother has been permanently damaged—and that they lack the ability to restore it—guilt deepens into something more severe: despair.

This brings us to a crucial distinction:

• Depressive anxiety occurs when an individual recognizes they have hurt someone they love and feels the need to repair the damage.

• Depression emerges when the individual believes the damage is beyond repair.

In other words, depression is not just about sadness; it is about losing faith in the possibility of restoration.

From Infancy to Adulthood: How Depression Evolves

Psychoanalytic theory suggests that certain early-life experiences predispose individuals to depression later in life.

A baby’s inner world is delicate. If the infant feels capable of repairing their bond with their mother, guilt and anxiety can be processed in a healthy way. But if the infant feels that their connection with their mother is permanently broken, a sense of helplessness and hopelessness takes root.

Some childhood events can plant the early seeds of depression, such as:

• Early separations (e.g., if the mother is sick, returns to work too soon, or is emotionally distant)

• The birth of a sibling and the resulting shift in maternal attention

• A mother who is depressed or emotionally unavailable

• An early experience of loss that the child is unable to process or repair

These experiences do not necessarily cause depression, but they create a psychological blueprint for how the individual will respond to loss and guilt later in life.

Depression and the Inner World of the Mind

Klein’s theory offers a profound insight into the nature of depression: it is not simply a feeling but a state of the inner world.

To simplify, we can think of it this way:

• A healthy psyche contains internalized figures that are loving, supportive, and repairable.

• A depressive psyche contains internalized figures that feel damaged, unreachable, or lost.

In adulthood, this translates into how a person manages relationships. A depressive person does not just feel that real-life people are unavailable—they feel that their internal world is filled with lost and broken figures.

This is why depression is often accompanied by a sense of isolation, even when surrounded by loved ones.

The depressive person is not just mourning external relationships; they are mourning the unhealed relationships inside their own mind.

Escaping Depression: The Power of Repair

The most important realization about depression is this:

Depression is the belief that a loss is irreparable. But this belief is not always true.

Psychoanalytic therapy and self-awareness offer a way forward by helping individuals recognize that repair is still possible.

Klein’s concept of the depressive position offers a beacon of hope:

If we can believe that what has been damaged can be restored, depression can begin to lift.

For a person struggling with depression, one of the most powerful questions they can ask is:

“Is what I have lost truly lost? Or is there still a way to repair it?”

More often than not, the answer is more hopeful than we assume.

Many things in life feel irrevocably broken, but in reality, they are not as lost as they seem.

Conclusion: The Emotional Legacy of Infancy

Anxiety, guilt, and depression are not simply emotions that arise in response to adulthood’s challenges. Psychoanalysis suggests that they have deep roots in our earliest relationships—particularly with our mother.

• The anxieties we struggle with today may be echoes of the first moments we experienced the terror of separation.

• The guilt that eats away at us may have first emerged in infancy, when we realized we could both love and hurt the same person.

• The depression we fall into may be the result of an early belief that what is broken cannot be repaired.

Understanding these origins does not mean we are prisoners of our past.

On the contrary, it empowers us to see where our fears come from and how we can move forward.

If we recognize that many of our deepest struggles were formed before we even had words to name them, we gain the ability to step outside of them.

We stop seeing our emotions as absolute truths and begin to view them as patterns—ones that can be understood, challenged, and transformed.

And in doing so, we reclaim the ability to shape our own lives—not as helpless infants, but as conscious, self-aware adults.