Anxiety, tension, anguish: these are words, but they are also states of the self. They have always been used by humans in distress and by those seeking to understand them, and have been taken up by psychopathology, where they have become somewhat obscure concepts, and have become so sovereign, and so banal, that their “reality” seems to go without question. This recent state of affairs has a history. Reconstructing the original foundations of these words allows us to recover their older, reflective situation within a shared nature which, for a long time, were used both by laymen and doctors to discuss chance events. The untimely point of view we propose here takes in a large span of history and makes it possible to reconstruct, within the psychosomatic, the ambiguities of a modern concept which was initially physiological before it became a part of psychiatric nosology. This also allows us to take a certain distance from the medicalization of affects which, whatever we may think of them, arise naturally from our human condition.