Anxiety is the dark side of the culture of high performance. Failure is directed towards the individual as the fruit of his/her insufficiency, as a symptom of mental or psychological incapacity, whereas it is also (especially?) the consequence of increasing social demands and constraints. Hence a questioning of the reciprocity of the influences between the social and the psychic, for example in the development of the bipolar disorders characteristic of hypermodern societies, or in the feeling of harassment, a symptom experienced in large companies that put their staff under pressure and confront them with continual paradoxical injunctions. It is society as a whole that seems to be paradoxical. Between adaptation and resistance, individuals try to protect themselves by setting up defensive reactions and release mechanisms.