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Freudian psychoanalysis offers yet another account. As Mr. Chopra’s summary has it: “Anxiety is a signal to us that we harbor repressed emotions, desires, and sexuality.”

Finally, there is the idea of “materialist alienation,” advocated by both Karl Marx and Herbert Marcuse. This theory identifies the sources of anxiety in the material and economic conditions of society rather than in the individual psyche:

Although Mr. Chopra, a philosophy professor emeritus at Brooklyn College, notes many overlaps and commonalities in the four approaches, their differences make them inconsistent as a set. It isn’t clear that they are centrally concerned with anxiety at all.

ukkha in Buddhism isn’t usually understood to refer to anxiety but rather to a state of discontent.

Mr. Chopra acknowledges that one of his key existentialist figures, Nietzsche, never uses the term. Alluding to Marx’s alienated labor, Mr. Chopra asks: “What does such alienation feel like?” His answer: “Like anxiety, for it is anxiety.

Mr. Chopra interprets everything through the lens of anxiety and as a result either magnifies its significance or sees it where it is not. He says, for example, that from his own experience he has concluded that being “indecisive, distracted, insecure, or anxious . . . amounted to the same thing.” But for many people those conditions are very different.

Mr. Chopra is a serial user of the “presumptive we”: using the first-person plural to speak for all of us when he is really speaking for some or sometimes only himself.

At times Mr. Chopra writes of anxiety as though it were a key to self-definition, saying, at one point “thus does anxiety inform me of who I am.” Tell me your anxieties and I’ll tell you who you are may sound profound, but replace “anxieties” with “dreams,” “loves,” “hopes” or “values” and it is just as true.

Even philosophy in Mr. Chopra’s view springs not from wonder, as Aristotle and Plato claimed, but from anxiety. However, neither those giants of thought nor others who followed them for centuries had much to say about it

That “anxiety is a basic human affect and signature of human consciousness” is made somewhat problematic, he concedes, by the fact that it only emerged as “an explicitly named and identified problem in the nineteenth century.”

Still, Mr. Chopra is right to want to normalize the anxiety that people really do feel, saying that it is wrong to think that mental health consists in being anxiety-free. His basic therapeutic advice—not to push anxiety away but “to see what it ‘points to’ ”—is also spot-on

his book is a good primer on the major philosophers of anxiety, or at least its close relations.